DVD/MTM/Signs of the Times

The upgrades to our Computer Farm have left me temporarily unable to access my blog from home, so i'm using my friend Sharon's laptop to publish this draft.  Thanks, Sharon!

So i've been watching too much old TV recently. But i did have a lot of fun with things like, i used to have a dress with a collar like that! Their dish drainer is just like ours - and 3/4 of the ones in the stores today. And - May have been different in NYC, but girls hardly ever wore pants around here in the early 60s.

We had Season 4 of The Dick VanDyke Show out from the library for six weeks. (checked out then renewed once.) Then at Christmas MyGuy was given a Best Ever collection of Dick VanDyke shows. We haven't seen those yet, but i have been comparing which episodes are on that set with the ones in Season 4.

My tastes do not match the tastes of the people who made the collection.

Now every episode of this series is cute & funny, even the waste of airtime one where Sally is embarrassed about her rich boyfriend, but dumps him - not because he's a mortician, but because he treats the help like dirt - before Rob & Buddy can tell her he's married.

But The Impractical Joke (a friend of Buddy's gets Rob to disassemble his phone, then Buddy brings all sorts of hurt on himself awaiting Rob's imagined revenge) is far more deserving of a Best Ever spot than either 4 1/2 or the inaccurately named The Allen Brady Show Goes to Jail. Those seem to have earned a place as Best Ever mainly because of guest Don Rickles.

They're good, fun shows, but not great ones.

Oh, and i would dearly love to see again the one where Rob & Laura discover that the person who married them wasn't really entitled to do marriages, so they need to get married, because they aren't, and the guy they choose to perform the ceremony doesn't want to, because he's never seen a couple who obviously so do not belong together.  That is one of my all-time favorites!!!

And then there's the third Season 4 Episode on the Best Ever collection, Don't Bathe on Saturday Night. Like the other two, it's cute, not as good as others in Season 4.  i suppose i don't mind  having it on our collection.

But we like to watch the Behind the Scenes stuff and voiceover commemtaries. i kept getting angrier and angrier as i did.

The story involves a failed attempt of Rob & Laura to take in a show and have a night in a nice hotel. But Laura gets her toe stuck in the plumbing, and she's locked in the bathroom.

The producer had promised Mary Tyler Moore a Laura episode. Even doing the voiceovers in like 2003, he didn't get why she wasn't happy with his special Laura episode.
Which had her offscreen hollering lines as in a radio show for 3/4 of the program.
While the guys in charge tried to console her with the thought that, while she was offscreen, she would be giving all the men in America a treat, allowing them to imagine her naked in the bathtub.

Am i the only one who sees a problem here?

This was 1964. Everyone blamed Mary's lousy attitude on the fact that she was quitting smoking that week. Rob Reiner yelled at her (not knowing it was in front of sponsors) for her uncooperative attitude. Later they apologized to each other and Mary even sent Rob a peace offering gift. (He said she deserved every word of it, but he should've taken her into her trailer to do it.)

Even in Mary's accompanying interviews, she blamed her temper on the smoking thing.

i say it was MTM being classy. And preserving her reputation as not a prima donna.

i told MyGuy that in 1974, she would've refused to do it.  My thought was, the climate of the times had changed.   He told me that in 1974 she had her own production company and was calling the shots.

Which actually is the best revenge anyway.

What's in a Name?

i've been using pseudonyms in this blog.

i explained about how i chose some of them in my post, Confidential or Private?

Some, like Max for our second son, short for Maximum Smile, are working well.

Some, like MyGuy, for my husband, the father of our kids, nearly so.

My friend tells me that i really should not use FB to designate our oldest as Firstborn because so many people think of FB as "Facebook."

Ok. After consultation with our son, he will now become Boom, as in short for Boomerang Kid, the college grad now living reluctantly at home again.i don't guarantee i've caught them all, but i've attempted to change all previous references to FB to Boom, for Boomerang Kid.  That fits because he's a college grad who's lived on his own, now reluctantly living at home again until he can make it independently.

And while i'm at it i think The Perfect Corgi, newly named TPC on this blog, will become Puppy. Much simpler, and it's one of the names i use for her anyway.

Puppy is about love, not age, anyway, so my 11 year old corgi is truly a puppy. (Now where have i heard 11 years old before?????)

Drawing Fruit

 This is a quick simple art project i did with the guys in our Sonshine Sunday school class yesterday.  They are teen/young adult.  The class is designated for developmentally disabled, though i prefer to think of it as a calmer alternative for those who do not wish to participate in the hectic, adrenaline driven kids service.

Beginning with real fruit, i traced the object on plain cardboard.  (Okay, actually, the orange was too far gone for that sort of contact.  i used a Bob the Tomato!)  Here you see the cardboard shapes on orange cardstock.

Next, we cut out the cardboard shapes, traced them on plain paper, and colored solidly in yellow.  Of course, you'd use whatever the lightest main color of the fruit  was.

Or this could be painted or done on construction paper the color of the fruit. eliminating a step.

But fruits are not solid color. Looking at the banana, we also saw brown, black, and purple.

So we added those colors in the places we saw them.







We did similar things with the orange and apple.

If i had realized the short attention spans of the kids, we would have used good paper at this point instead of newsprint!

Then we would have continued to doing it again on better paper.  My mistake - at least for these kids, go straight to the good paper! If we had, then then we might have cut out the fruit and glued it into a nice arrangement on colored paper.
No, our group did not make it to the finished product above!  But they did enjoy drawing the fruit.

Thanks to Laura Tesdahl of TheSketchpad Art Studio and Artistic Designs Framing Gallery for the idea.

A Boy, A Puppy, and a Crate

Puppy Pile

  On the last Sunday in September eleven years ago, Max and i drove two hours to meet the puppy i had prayed ten years for.
  Small, sturdy, sound temperament, raised with a large, happy family of children, knowing nothing but  boisterous love.
  We met The Perfect Corgi (Puppy), her mom,  and her nine surviving littermates.
  That's her, licking my face above.  (We nearly came home with her brother Bright Eyes, on the right, also.)

"We choose each other!"

  For whatever reason, only the two of us made the trip.  Since i did not want to be responsible for both Max, who was at a very difficult period of his life, and a new puppy alone, i chose to return on Thursday for the puppy.

  In between, i bought the Puppy Kit: bowls, leash, collar, grooming supplies.  The Crate.

  The Crate is a medium size dog portable crate.  Puppy still enjoys sleeping in it, and sometimes i use it so she can travel in the car.  i actually confined her in it at night until she was 5 or 6, though she really didn't need it so long.  These days, the door is off.

  But i get ahead of the story.
  The first lesson was, Max, you do not get to toss Puppy into the crate whenever you are done with her.  Puppy is alive just like you are.  You can hurt her.  Unfortunately that did happen, but Puppy was not hurt badly.  Max was not hurt at all, and one incident was all he needed.
    The next lesson came with an almost comic dilemma.  Max loved The Crate.  He wanted it for his own.  Not Puppy''s.

  So, i ask you, what should i have done?
  It is well-known in autism circles that people with autism respond well to pressure in especially stressful circumstances.  A quick Google search just now yielded 400,000 results.  Temple Grandin found pressure so helpful she developed a special  hug machine to retreat into.  Apparently Max was receiving a similar benefit from shoving his head and shoulders into The Perfect Corgi's crate and upending rocking chairs over himself.  (Hug Machine brought 5,200,000 Google results.)

  But both for the dog's comfort and the family's overall well-being that crate needed to be The Perfect Corgi's retreat.  The first two weeks we had her, she preferred to be either on me or in her crate, comfort spaces.  We could not allow Max to shut her out.

  So, what to do?  We couldn't find instructions at the time to build a Hug Machine.  The cost of one was prohibitively expensive.  We considered, and rejected, buying a larger crate, to use either doorless or with the door inside out, just for Max.

  Actually, if we had the liberty to consider only Max's best interests, i still believe that's what we should have done.  A crate of his own that Max could fit himself entirely into.
  But we couldn't consider  things just that simplistically.  i couldn't go to the pet supply store and LIE about this huge dog i don't have.  i probably would have taken him to try a crate on for size.
  Can you imagine a hastily-arranged meeting with CPS?
  Because Everyone Knows that the only reason to get a dog crate for your kid is to put him in it.
  And Everyone Knows that confining a kid in a dog crate is cruel.

   Max survived that stage without either hug machine or crate. And he learned how to behave around a puppy.  They are hardly the "boy and his dog" picture perfect image, but they are, in their own way, much attached to each other.
  And anyone want to toss in suggestions for handling this better?

A World of Acceptance

i love it when other people put things into words that i'm having trouble with.
Like Natalie.
i met her, online only, through The Arc of Indiana, as a young adult with autism successfully advocating for herself and autism.
i'd like this blog to grow up to be somewhat like hers.  (not identical twins by any means!)

MyGuy guiding Max
in the construction of the Desk to Last a Lifetime

Natalie's January 2 post contains A Challenge for all of us.  It's attainable, but something to think about and stretch to reach.
i encourage you to go visit Natalie, read and sign her challenge.
Then live it.
God bless you.

Wordless Wednesday

Playing with the Crop/Winter Dreaming

 Original shot

MyGuy at Whittington Beach Park, Big Island, HI

 Crop 1, for screensaver version

 Crop 2, for fun

Another original shot

and a crop of it.

i'm ready to go back.. . . .

But we can't go in the water there.

 The surf will take us to Australia.

Life on the Computer Farm - New Kid on the Block

  As i type on duckpond, there has been a metamorphosis behind me.  The playroom TV is no longer just a TV.
  No, we invested in a  family Wii game.  There's a whole 3 game discs, mainly, so far, played byBoom, though i have to admit it's a lot of fun to crash Flo all over Radiator Springs.
  MyGuy got it set up for us.  i don't think he's taken a turn at the gaming yet.  And the point was a family activity, especially somethng we could do with Max. 
  Max has resolutely refused to have anything to do with it.
  The Wii-world is a whole new thing to me.  Apparently there's a whole online world too, though i'm not sure how much we'll get into that. Boom can set up the Wii store account if he wants one, i guess.  We'll just see if we need one otherwise.
  And see how to get Wii into the position we meant it to be.
  Because like a lot of twenty-somethings, Boom did not need another media outlet all his own.  (Though i'm glad he can enjoy it.)