Out of Time, Out of Mind

The day didn't begin too badly. I slept in after staying up late with Lauren last night. (She took a full two weeks off. I opted to save part of my second week off for visiting Mom and the family in Cape May County later in the summer or early fall.) After breakfast, I spent most of the morning and early afternoon dusting the bedroom and finishing Nick of Time.

Linda Young was right about Nick of Time - it is a "corking good adventure!" The "Nick" of the title is Nick McIver, a 12-year-old boy living in the English Channel Islands in 1939. When he and his sister Kate find a sea chest on the beach that doesn't look worn, they find themselves thrown into a wild adventure involving time travel, pirates, Nazis, and kidnapped children.

Forget whether you're a kid or not. If you're a fan of historical novels, time travel stories, swashbucklers, or World War II tales, you'll love this. The switching back and forth between two time periods is well-done, the action is just violent enough without being bloody (this is a book for pre-teens), and the characters are well-written. According to the back of the book, there's a second novel out about Nick's adventures in history, The Time Pirate. I'm absolutely going to have to look for that one, too.

I wish work was that much fun. It was a total pain in the rear end. It wasn't too bad when I came in, but the 4-6 rush hour brought large crowds. I had one older couple who kept arguing with each other while giving me orders about how to bag that were so confusing, I didn't really know what they wanted. Another woman who came through my line 20 minutes later threw a fit when I dared to bag her groceries in plastic. I thought the handles would help her carry them! "No plastic!" she snapped. Geez. I was just being nice.

And of course, my very last customer was a woman with a WIC Check who got the wrong bread. "Oh, my son grabbed the wrong one," she fussed. Um, her son didn't look any more than three years old, and I didn't see anyone else with her. I had to go back twice to get bread because she wanted Pepperidge Farm, not Arnold's. (If she wanted Pepperidge Farm, why didn't she get it in the first place? It's not like the labels are hard to read.)

On the other hand, there was a really funny guy around 5 who came through with reading glasses along with his other things. When I handed them to him so they wouldn't get broken, he said that's why he was buying this pair. He apparently sat on his old ones and broke them in half! The lady behind him laughed and said she and her co-workers just bought their supervisor three pairs for more-or-less the same reason. "We wanted to stop holding up papers so he could see them across the room!" she chuckled.

I went straight home after work. I had leftovers and watched Donald Duck cartoons. Even when Disney ended Mickey, Goofy, and Pluto's solo series in the early 50s, Donald continued doing shorts into the 60s. His last ones were all what today we would call "edutainment."

The best of these was the classic featurette Donald in Mathmagic Land from 1956. Donald wanders through a world of mathmatical ideas, discovering how they relate to real life. From the history of math and music to geometry in plants to the way math and sports go together, Donald learns that math really is more than numbers for "eggheads." As someone who has always been terrible at math, I enjoyed seeing how it could relate to real-world subjects like nature and music. I especially enjoyed seeing the live flower footage and how even Mother Nature employs geometric designs.

The other cartoons weren't quite as successful. The two How to Have an Accident shorts portray Donald in Goofy-suburban-father mode, which doesn't really suit him that well. Otherwise, they're still pretty funny, and At Home in particular remains relevant today regarding common household carelessness and how it can be avoided.

The Litterbug and Donald and the Wheel were some of the last theatrical shorts Donald would appear in until the 80s. Both rely heavily on live-action footage with the animation, showing off the lack of resources in the shorts department by then. The first is an environmentally-friendly warning against littering with Donald and his nephews as Exhibit A for the defense.

The second is a bit more fanciful. The Spirits of Progress try to persuade cave duck Donald to become the inventor of one of man (and duck) kind's greatest inventions - the wheel. Donald and the Wheel has some really catchy music, too. I always liked Papa and Junior Progress' "The Principal of the Thing."