Last night on my way home from rehearsal I saw a little Jack Russell wandering on the side of the road. I'd been seeing signs posted up on the side of the roads in my area for days now, about a missing Jack Russell, so I immediately stopped my car and got out to try and catch the poor little thing, in case it was the right one. He/she was so scared, though, that he just bolted away from me into the darkness. I drove to find one of the signs about the dog and called the owner to tell them what I'd seen, and he drove straight out to the intersection. He smsed me later to say thanks, but they hadn't been able to find the dog.
I felt so sad that it hadn't worked out. I love dogs so much (all animals, really), and I just lay in bed feeling sad and missing my dog Shadow, who had died in 2006 at the age of 17, and thinking about how devastated I would have been if she'd ever disappeared and I'd never found her. And in fact, feeling sad and missing all my pets that have passed on. And I've had a lot.
I'm so weird, but I'm really upset about this poor dog and its poor owners. :-(
Little things make me happy. This morning I got into my car and saw that Mel, our landlady, had painted red flowers all over the black rubbish bins. I smiled. It kind of made my morning.
Later I was at the shop, and when I put the tub of margarine into my trolley I saw that it had a picture of some perky, smiling little insect on the lid, instead of just the usual branding. It was adorable, and I burst out laughing.
I went to photograph some tablescapes for a magazine, and my friend Eve gave me the leftover white tulips because I love them so much. I had to stop off for a lunch date on my way home, and they turned into the child of Floppy Mcfloppyson. Now I've got them in a glass of water, trying to nurse them back to perkiness. This makes me happy.
After I did my Trash the Dress recently, my wedding dress has ended up hanging over the back of a chair in our bedroom, while I get around to having it dry-cleaned. It makes me smile every time I see it.
I put in a cd I haven't listened to in a while, and I forgot that one of my favourite songs was on there. I got so excited when I heard the intro.
And bubbles. Bubbles make me happy. Don't ever lose your childlike joy. I need mine to make it through the day.
You might have noticed that I'm a leetle obsessed with movies. I'm also pretty much as obsessed with tv shows. This leaves my previous lifelong obsession of book-collecting on the shelf for the time being (ha, see what I did there?), but it's ok; they're still there looking pretty, and anyway, movies are cheaper. And tv is even cheaper. And this is an important thing in my world at the moment, cos it's slow season and Mr Ruby Slippers just pointed out that I he forgot to pay ask me to pay rent at the end of May, so I just got walloped with double rent this month. Oh, the fun.
I reckon tv shows kind of shaped my life. I'm an incredibly nostalgic person; one whiff of the theme to The Littlest Hobo and I'm pretty much finished. That show made me cry at the end of every episode, ergo I cry now when I hear the theme song, even though it's been at least twenty years since I last saw it.
Here are the end credits, because this is where I was usually crying my eyes out. He came along like Mary Poppins, helped everyone, and then left. :-(
However, despite the epic tears, I don't really remember that show very well. I didn't, for instance, record it every week and then watch every episode every single day when I came home from school, to the point where I could (and still can) recite entire episodes. The 6-year-old brain is a sponge. That honour was reserved for the best cartoon of all time:
Hell to the yes. There will never be a better cartoon than Gummi Bears; not Ducktales, Thundercats, My Little Pony, Bionic Six or even Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, all of which I used to watch and love. My childhood kicked ass. We seriously had the best cartoons in the 80s.
Speaking of the 80s, we also had this guy, the most ingenious gadget-maker and bomb-dismantler of all time. Oh yes, say hello to the mullet-sporting (but we won't hold that against him), army knife-carrying pacifist.
Famous lines from pretty much every episode: "What are you doing?" "Getting us out of here."
I think I had a crush on this guy even when I was five years old. I don't remember what night it aired (Friday, maybe?) but the whole family would gather round and watch MacGyver create some crazy thingymajig to get the baddies/stop the baddies/escape from the baddies. I could watch these credits over and over and over; they totally kick ass.
There was also a spate of sometimes funny, sometimes sappy family sitcoms. Who remembers Growing Pains, Family Ties, Full House and Who's the Boss? Always with an issue to be solved, always with a little moral at the end. And the violins start playing. And Dad has some moving, poignant lines. Awww.
Ah, yes, Kirk Cameron when he was young and cute, and not a crazy ranting lunatic trying to tell the world that atheists use big words to confuse you into believing in evolution.
Aw. look at little Alyssa Milano! And Katherine Helmond. I loved her.
OMG, Mary-Kate or Ashley! And now they run a trillion dollar empire. And damn, John Stamos was kind of cute. Pity about the hair, though.
I loved this family! And who doesn't enjoy Michael J. Fox? He was awesome in this.
In the early 90s I was a tween and young teenager, so I branched out from the family viewing and started watching my own stuff. Grownup stuff! Santa Barbara and Loving were my two earliest soap encounters. I have to give props to my parents for not forbidding me from watching this stuff when I was all of eleven years old. They made sure that I knew that what I saw on tv was *not* real, and that people didn't act like that in real life, and left me to it. I just enjoyed the scandals and family feuds and romances and kidnappings and paternity suits. If I wanted to see real life I could watch the people on the bus home from school. Yawn.
Cruz and Eden, my favourite couple of all time. She was a spoiled little rich girl, and he was a Latino policeman from the wrong side of the tracks. Soapie perfection. By the time I stopped watching Santa Barbara they still hadn't got married! Sigh.
Recently I've been getting a kick out of Beverly Hills 90210. Not the shitty remake, the real one with dreamy Brandon, rebel Dylan, nice girl Brenda (haha), spoilt Kelly and bimbo Donna. In the 90s it was really daring with it themes of sex, drugs, alcoholism. Now it's more "Oh look, an issue with a moral". Kind of lame, but still something awesome about it.
Whoa, look at those high-cut bikinis! Scary.
The mid-nineties was a great time for tv. Sitcoms were moving on from being about families to being about single people, so there was a nice mix of the two on the air at the same time. Two of my favourite sitcoms of all time came from this period. Guess what they are.
Still guessing?
Ok. Here you go:
Duh.
And:
The Nanny! This show is still hilarious. And incidentally, did you know that the youngest girl (the cute one in the black and white checkered dress) is the slutty girl from Californication who punches and fucks David Duchovny and then steals his book? Blows my mind every time.
Special shout-outs to Frasier, Will & Grace, 3rd Rock from the Sun and Cybill for being awesome 90s comedies. I think I watched pretty much every sitcom that was on tv at the time, but those stand out for me.
Still on the 90s, but only discovered later by me, a show that became an obession:
Hooo boy. If Joe Lando was any hotter my tv would have melted. I did love the quaintness of the show, and their old-fashioned lifestyle and comments on "new-fangled" inventions like trains, but I think we all watched it because we wanted to be Dr Quinn. Not to be all pioneering and fighting for feminism and saving lives; no, we just wanted to be kissed by Sully. Swoon. If he walked into my room I'd do him right now. He's on my list. Yes, THAT List.
Another show I seem to have got into years after everyone else, but that became an obsession anyway:
In fact, this was completely stupid (not the show, just my timing) because I got into the show on its 9th and final season. Yeah, talk about being late to the party. In X-Files terms I arrived at the party after everyone had pretty much packed up and left. That didn't stop me, though, and thanks to BFF Ruby Slippers I had a supply of some earlier seasons and recommendations of which others to rent. Just like Dr Quinn, I quickly became obsessed with the relationship between Mulder and Scully. When they kissed (you could count the number of times on one hand, sadly) I got butterflies. The alien stuff was only secondary. Who cares that Cigarette Smoking Man is going to destroy the world with an alien colony? Mulder and Scully shared a meaningful glance!
PS - the recent film was SHITE. If you saw it, don't judge The X-Files on it.
PPS - The X-Files has some of the best dialogue ever. In fact, the only dialogue that can match it comes from this next show, which I adore:
Joss Whedon is a genius. That is all. But Buffy, in my opinion, is his best creation to date. I thrive on well-written dialogue, humour in the face of despair, fearless plots and the fact that you don't always KNOW who is going to win. If someone important needs to die for the sake of the plot, Joss Whedon will let it happen. And that, my friends, is tension. Watch it. Seriously. This means you, sister Ruby Slippers. If only she read my blog :-)
I'm going to do the rest in a Part II, because seriously, the 2000s deserves an entire blog post of its own. That's how obsessed I am with the tv it produced. So, so good.
Lately I've kind of been obsessing over shelving. Especially bookshelves. Mostly because I have what Mr Rubyslippers would call a metric fuck ton of books. And dvds. We have nine, yes, NINE, bookcases in our bedroom and Spare Oom, and the depressing thing is that I've left hundreds of books at my parents' house because there was nowhere to put them here, and I kind of miss them. I mean, I probably wouldn't be reading them anyway, but I miss having them around. Books to me are twofold: they are awesome to read AND they look awesome on a shelf. Maybe it's the collector in me, but I just love the look of rows of books. Especially if there's a full series. MMm. This is probably why I still look out for the Nancy Drews I don't have, even though I haven't read one for years. I am a completist.
Anyway, lately I've been saving a lot of pictures of bookshelves and just shelving in general. Some practical, some not at all, but still totally awesome.
This is what I've always wanted: a full wall of shelving (except mine would go all the way up to the ceiling, because, really, that's just wasted space up there!)
Another one that's pretty awesome:
But then I see awesome things like this, and I want them, no matter how much space they waste:
Clearly I like tree-shaped things. :-)
And then I get into swirly shapes, and it just sets my heart aflutter:
And my personal favourite:
Look, another tree:
I love the idea of this, even though the book-lover in me cringes at the idea of leaving a book lying open face-down like that. It's SO bad for the spine! But look how cute, like a little birdhouse!
This is so elegant:
And this is completely crazy:
I'm so obsessed with interior decor at the moment!
Just a bit of a brain-dump for you this fine Wednesday night; or actually, early Thursday morning.
Pick 'n Pay has started making their own Jaffa Cakes. Result? One very thrilled Mr Ruby Slippers, and one "suddenly-really-liking-guzzling-Jaffa-cakes-late-at-night-oh-shit-this-is-bad" Mrs Ruby Slippers. I've already gained enough weight this year. I could barely fit into my wedding dress anymore at my TTD. It's all this sitting on my lazy ass in front of the computer all day I'm doing now. Gah.
I just watched season one of Beverly Hills 90210 (the original one; that all my friends and I were obsessed with when we were 12/13, not the shitty remake/re-imagining). It's so awesome. TOTALLY cheesy, and so dripping with moral messages that you could sink and drown in them, but I'm loving it! I'm so getting season 2 ASAP.
I just about died during the Grey's Anatomy season finale. I don't know how I'm going to wait until September to see what happens. One of the best finales EVER, I thought. Unlike Lost, which was, as I suspected, a huge letdown. I should have stopped after season one. Clearly, like Heroes, they had a fantastic premise which just couldn't last. At least I managed to stop putting myself through Heroes, but I got too invested in Lost, and the time-travel stuff in season 5 was so frikkin AWESOME.
My awesome husband is in the production of Noises Off that my theatre group is putting on, and tonight I went along to rehearsal. It's turning out soooo good! If you're in Johannesburg at the end of July/beginning of August, you have to come see it! The cast is working really hard, and it shows.
On a related note, I wish I could have seen the Noises Off production that starred Patti LuPone. Bootleg, anyone? Or of anything else with Patti? We are so out of the loop here at the arse end of Africa.
One of my friends is in the USA right now, and just saw Liza in concert on Sunday, and Promises Promises with Kristen Chenoweth and Sean Hayes today. I am completely eaten up inside with jealousy, especially because he does things like this all the time. Bloody rich people. But at least he knows how to spend his money. Dammit, someone pay for me to go to America and see shows. Seriously.
A friend of mine went to Australia for business (also jealous!) and brought me back some chocolate, some cocoa-flavoured body lotion, and chocolate kisses lip balm. I guess I'm just really obvious.
That's it for now! Sleep tight/good morning/good evening, wherever you are!
Today on my way home from an awesome photography workshop-slash-get-together, I got the following text from Mr Ruby Slippers:
"Supper plans? Because I was thinking (doesn't need to finish sentence)"
Which made me chuckle, because obviously - to me - he was referring to eating out, which we both love, and which is probably our one vice as a couple, because it tends to eat into your bank balance a lot more than cooking at home. So naturally I said yes.
Anyway, once I got home we decided on ribs from the only place near us that makes ribs worth eating, Thundergun. NOM. We then had to decide on somewhere else, because it was nearly 7pm and I made Mr RS call and make sure there was a table. Which there was...in "at least an hour". So it was back to our old faithful, Ruby's sushi, which has great sushi and is never jampacked. And I'm kind of glad we did, because we got to hear the couple at the table next to us having a fight, which totally made my evening, if only because it highlighted how much cooler we are than them. Ugh. We would never go out for sushi and then spend the evening bitching at other in lowered tones that everyone around us could hear anyway about "never listening" and "this is shit" and "I care more about you than you do about me" and other such crap.
I have to say this tiff at the table next door really aroused my curiosity, because I'm nosy like that. It took Mr RS longer to cotton onto the fact that there even was a fight, but then I think men don't eavesdrop as easily as we women do. Sorry ladies, fact. So there we were in the middle of a fab conversation about how they could possibly make a continuation series of Firefly (which would have to be a prequel so that Wash could be there, but then that would leave out River and her brother, which I was fine with because Summer Glau has always kind of annoyed me anyway, but Mr Slippers, for some reason, likes her, so he disagreed) and all the while I was straining my ears to hear what on earth was going on with this crazy couple, while still listening to Mr RS and responding intelligently. If ever you want to test your powers of concentration, do this. It's hard.
Anyway, I somehow got the feeling that the beginning of the fight sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere, soon after the arrival of their sushi (where they discussed which piece was which), because "you never talk to me and you never listen" (guess which gender said THAT). And I couldn't help but think it was because they were listening to us talking and laughing and making it look so easy to be a fun, in love couple who could happily just talk about random interesting things. Because there certainly was a pause from their table (seriously, these tables were close. I could have stretched out and taken their sushi without getting up) while we were having a conversation about alleged top movies, and why 2001: A Space Odyssey needs a rewatch to be sure it is that bad (Mr Slippers) and why Butch Cassidy was awesome, and ergo why we should watch The Sting (me). Maybe it's all in my head, but I think they envied us. So of course we endeavoured to make our conversation all the more sparkling and witty, because that's just what we do. All in unspoken agreement, of course. Afterwards, when we both admitted we'd been doing it, I fell in love with Mr Ruby Slippers just a little bit more. :-)
As for the couple, eventually the woman got up and hissed, "I don't want to argue in front of these people," and I thought "I thought you already were", and the man said, a split-second later, "I thought you already were." I almost went "SNAP!"
Then they stalked off outside, and when we left, the woman was sitting in her car alone, and the man was halfway down the block, sulking next to a streetpole. As for us, we went and got delicious icecream and said things like "I love us" a lot.
I wish people would have the decency to fight in the privacy of their own home, but since it happened that they didn't, I rather enjoyed it. I just wished I was someone like House, and could come up with some flabbergastingly brilliant remark, and actually have the guts to say it. Now that would have been awesome.
So I had to be doing something in all this time I haven't posted (aside from working, which I really HAVE been doing!). Anyway, remember my Movie Resolution list? I've since watched the following:
On The Waterfront (#19)
Eh. It was ok. I'm really not a Brando fan, but it was watchable.
Chinatown (#21)
I've come to the conclusion that I really don't like 70s movies, as a rule (despite my all-time favourite movie, What's Up, Doc?, being from the 70s). Chinatown was slow and kind of dull. And it wasn't even set in Chinatown; they just talked about it a bit. Well done, Roman Polanski, I knew I didn't like your movies.
Duck Soup (#60)
Duck Soup was AWFUL. It was painfully bad. It was one of the most unfunny things I've ever seen. Which is a shame, because I quite enjoyed A Night at the Opera, and I had great hopes for this one.
Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (#73)
This, on the other hand, was AWESOME. Full of funny lines and great adventure. I loved these guys! No wonder they made another movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford (which I'm definitely watching ASAP); they work really well together. LOVED it.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (# 36)
I loved Bridge on the River Kwai! Alec Guiness is awesome in just about everything he does (just about...see next). Great story; the ending was a bit rushed, maybe, but overall it's fantastic!
Lawrence of Arabia (#7)
What a snoozefest. Seriously one of the most boring films I've ever seen in my life. Even Alec Guinness couldn't save it. Neither could the ever-awesome Claude Rains - nor Peter O'Toole, who is always good. I think I've seen enough riding through deserts to last me a lifetime. Soooo boring.
So all I've got left to watch are: The French Connection A Streetcar Named Desire Modern Times Bonnie & Clyde MASH
