Monday, March 14, 2016

Out of the Rain and Into the Booth

I awoke to a sky full of gloomy, misty showers. I put on Yogi the Easter Bear to cheer me up while eating breakfast. Yogi's not feeling smarter than the average bear when he eats all the candy Ranger Smith intended for Jellystone's Easter Jamboree. Hoping to avoid ending up in the Siberian Circus, Yogi and Boo Boo set out to find the Easter Bunny to replace the lost goodies. What they don't know is a pair of very, very strange villains are after the rabbit as well, hoping to replace his real eggs with their plastic ones. Yogi and Boo Boo have to get the Bunny back to Jellystone with as many eggs as they can carry, before the plastic-obsessed loonies catch up with them.

There's a reason I bought that can of frozen apple juice concentrate on Friday (besides it being on a really good sale). I found a cookbook at a yard sale a few years ago that substitutes fruit juice concentrate for sugar in many recipes. I tried several recipes after I bought it and loved them. Alas, fruit juice concentrate has been almost as expensive as sugar the last few years. I took the opportunity to make the Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. Oh, yummy. Soft and just sweet enough - I tossed in a little honey as well.

It was still cloudy and gray and showering lightly when I headed to work. That's probably why we were quiet for most of the afternoon. I spent most of the day in the Gift Card Mall booth. You wouldn't think just pulling cards out of their plastic and hanging them on hooks could be hazardous, but I'm sore all over now. (Including the inside of one fingernail I stabbed with the sharp end of a card backing.) I kept having to step in and out of the booth to hang the cards and make room for new ones. Had to bend over a lot towards the end to hang cards on the bottom of the booth when I started to run out of room, too. In the end, I plowed through all but one box that was filled with mostly credit gift cards. We must have overstocked those at Christmas, because we had a ton of them. That was probably more than half of what I hung up in the booth today. There was no room for most of them on the outside of the booth!

(And of course, I later discovered that the reason I couldn't find room for a lot of those cards was they were discontinued. One of the managers had me spend my last half-hour gathering and boxing a basket filled with cards that had been recalled by their companies...many of which were hanging on the inside of the booth.)

It wasn't really busy until it was time for me to go home. I dodged a lot of traffic heading back to Oaklyn. I guess they were all trying to avoid the weather. The gloomy, dark showers continued. They weren't heavy, just fine and really misty. They've continued on and off for the rest of the evening.

I was so wiped out, I was barely up for leftover tomato pie with spinach and mushrooms when I got in. I ran the first half of The Hollywood Revue of 1929 as I ate. One of the first of the revues made during the early talkie era of the late 20's and early 30's showcases the stars on the MGM lot during this era. Jack Benny is the rather puffed-up host. The adorable "Singin' In the Rain" number, with dancers splashing in raincoats while Cliff "Ukulele Ike/Jiminy Cricket" Edwards strums and scats along in the background, is probably the most famous number from this one. Other good ones include a hilarious Marie Dresser proclaiming why "I'm the Queen," Laurel and Hardy attempting a magic act, Bessie Love insisting "I Never Knew I Could Do a Thing Like That," and she, Dressler, and Polly Moran attempting a concert with faulty instruments.

Finished the night with more writing. The guys have no idea how they're going to get up to Bast Castle. It's set on top of a steep, slick black crystal mountain. It takes Ben and Luke's combined Force powers to lift the horses, carriage, and all six men and get them up the mountain and over the castle walls.

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