Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Quiet Day Before the Rain

Thanks to an exceedingly hot and steamy day, I kept my errands light. Started around 11:30 with a quick stop at the Oaklyn Library. It was really quiet there. The only people around were the librarian and the older woman she was chatting with. I mostly organized DVDs and looked over the board books. I wasn't around even a half-hour.

My next stop was the laundromat. It was a hot, sticky walk. I was surprised there was anyone out and about. I did see a bunch of men in jeans and tank tops at a house a few doors down loading landscaping equipment into the back of a truck. They were all complaining about having to do lawn work in the heat. Not that I could blame them! I was dripping when I got to the laundromat. No wonder they were dead. There were only a few people there when I arrived...and by the time my small load was in the drier and I was listening to The View, the place was empty.

When I got in, I watched Hanna-Barbara cartoons while reading in the back room and putting my laundry away. We finally got away from Quick Draw with a Flinstones episode. It must have been a really early one - the opening was different, with no lyrics on the theme song. Fred's upset when he finds a stone tablet with romantic poetry to Wilma. He thinks his wife is cheating on him. Of course, this being an animated sitcom, what Wilma's doing is quite different from what he expects.

Top Cat was my favorite of the remaining funny animal characters. TC and his boys were basically the Bowery Cats - a group of street-wise New York alley felines who come up with schemes to get a meal and avoid the local cop. Here, they take another standard sitcom plot line - adopting an abandoned baby - and give it a rather sweet spin. The cats find the baby dumped on the doorstep of a condemned building. They take the child to their alley and do take care of it...but listen to reason when their cop friend reminds them that they don't have the money or home for raising children.

The last cartoon on the first disc was an episode of Hanna Barbara's other well-remembered animated sitcom, The Jetsons. I was glad to see this one, as it answered a long-time question I had - how the Jetsons got my favorite character from the show, their sassy robot maid Rosie. I always wondered how a guy who pushed buttons all day for a miser could afford a maid. They can't - Rosie's a rental. She tells George's boss Spacely off after he starts in on George, but when Spacely admits that Rosie was right about his big mouth, George has to retrieve Rosie, before she returns to the rental company.

It was 2:30 when I finally headed out for a really quick lunch. Thick, heavy black clouds were grumbling behind West Clinton Avenue, even as I ducked into Phillies Phatties for lunch. They have tasty pizza, and the cheapest deal around - $3.50 for a slice of mushroom, a slice of cheese, and a can of Diet Pepsi. I watched American Restoration on the History Channel with a couple of teen boys and a trio of adults who came in later.

I didn't like those clouds building up behind West Clinton at all. I spent the rest of the day at home. Thankfully, the rain waited until I was in the shower around 4:30-5 PM to burst. I was in the bath by then, listening to vocalists sing Rodgers and Hart tunes on one of my jazz CDs and reading one of the guides to Philadelphia and the surrounding areas. The storm was huge, with noisy thunder and lots of rain. It's since subsided. I think it's just wet out there right now.

I switched back to the human Bowery Boys while making a chicken salad for dinner. Inspired by Top Cat's adventure, I ran Hold That Baby! The Boys find a baby abandoned in their laundromat. Unlike the cats' foundling, this baby is the heir to a fortune. His greedy aunts don't want him found or returned to his mother. Even the Boys figure out that something's wrong when gangsters threaten them and try to keep them from revealing the whereabouts of the child. While Sach tries to romance a dummy in a store window, Slip and the others go undercover at the sanitarium where the child's mother is hidden to figure out what's going on.

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