Erica Smith

Wait, what?

'Love Affair' • 1939

You probably know this better as "An Affair to Remember." It’s almost exactly the same, except this one’s in black and white, and “Sleepless in Seattle” included clips of “An Affair to Remember,” which prompted a lot of interest in that one in the ’90s. (Also, the children’s choir is less annoying.)

'Penny Serenade' • 1941

Cary Grant and a cautionary tale about print media. The ending felt a little too much.

'Dark Passage' • 1947

Bogart, Bacall and a prison break. (Plus lots of stairs.) You get to see the San Francisco trolley turn around!

Something fancy for those without necks? http://ift.tt/15sLo2F

Have you ever wished you could stack kittens on top of each other? Think of the space-saving possibilities! Based on a dream I had last night, it’s possible. (Which means it’s not really possible. Yet.)

These were special kittens. For starters, they were Himalayan cats, but not the fluffy white Himalayan cats you’ve seen on the Internetz. They were more like Siberian cats, but with shorter hair, more pronounced stripes and more angular features. (Think rectangles, not triangles.)

Their insides were somehow different, too, which made them easier to stack without accidentally smooshing a liver.

The kittens stacked kind of like Legos, one on top of the other, all four paws on the back of the kitten underneath, or one paw from an adult cat on each of four kittens. I didn’t see more than three kittens stacked together, or a one cat/four kitten combo. Otherwise, there’s probably some Jenga-like consequences.

To make the whole thing even more ridiculous, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay was really pushing this whole kitten stacking concept.

'Friends' • 1994-2004

I’m obsessed with watching “Friends” on Netflix. I can’t explain it, because I own every season of the series on DVD, I saw most of them live when they first aired, and I’ve certainly seen every episode (more than once) on late-night TV through the years.

I remember watching the Season 3 cliffhanger (“The One at the Beach”) with friends at their house my sophomore year of college. I remember watching the train wreck that was Rachel and Joey’s “relationship” (“The One Where Joey Dates Rachel”) after work, recorded on the VCR, of course. I bought the released-immediately DVD of the last episode in 2004.

Yet I’m still watching each episode on Netflix. And mentally noting the differences between the full episodes and the slightly clipped versions that are still running on TV.

I got to spend some time at a cemetery today.

This morning I had a dream that I was helping a college journalism publication get ready for the new year and new staff. I’ve done this kind of thing before, but in the dream I was better at it than I remember.

Unlike professional news organizations, people joining college newspapers, yearbooks and TV stations often don’t know exactly what they want to do. And not everyone can be a sports reporter. I was very concerned with making sure we had all of the bases covered, especially design which was part of a pyramid-style staff graphic wherein each layer was represented by light-colored chocolates. The graphic also included social media, which several students were flocking to join, but there wasn’t much interest in design.

I was working with an adviser and the paper’s editor, Dramedy, who looked a lot like Dulé Hill. (He told me his full name was Dramadeus King Jones.) To get the first staff meeting started, Dramedy was wearing a crazy hat that I somehow had a hand in creating. It was made of several layers of white knitted or crocheted yarn — imagine several pot holders bound together at one side, but none of them match up to form a uniform square on the other sides. At the end of the white pot holders were colorful card-stock triangle tags, creating points on the otherwise square “pot holder,” with short words (like “go”) or symbols (exclamation points, stars, etc.) on them.

After some sort of get-the-team-excited type routine wearing the hat, Dramedy revealed that a story was told by reading the opposite side of the hat pages by following the tabs from front to back. Students were randomly asked to read what was stitched on the opposite side as we went through the story. I wish I remember what it said. It did seem odd to make the French student read the Spanish page …

(Dramadeus King Jones is a pretty amazing name.)

I accidentally intentionally went out without my cellphone Saturday night.

I finally made it to the Apple store Saturday afternoon. (Finally in that I finally remembered to stop by.) Since updating my phone to the newest operating system, it just decides to randomly restart mid-task. That’s annoying. So I was hoping the Apple “geniuses” would be able to roll it back to the previous operating system. Not possible, they said. Restoring the phone from a backup is the way to go, they said, after running a diagnostic test and finding nothing seriously wrong with the device.

Restoring the phone sounds fine and dandy, but that meant I needed to add everything from the most recent backup back to the phone. That backup was on my computer, not in the cloud because my phone also had become a memory hog. As luck would have it, when I got home I had 30 minutes to get to a trivia event and the computer estimated that reinstalling the backup would take 38 minutes.

So I left with no phone, no map, no watch, no convenient distraction. It was a bit peculiar, but most noticeable when everyone else around the table turned to their phones during breaks.

These exist. I’m not sure why either.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream about bacon and was very disappointed to find no bacon when I woke up. Last night, I had a dream about ice cream and spies. So far, I haven’t found either of them.

I was at a summer fair of some sort. There was a lot of ice cream, and I had collected five single-dip cones, each a different flavor. I know there were no “simple” flavors, like vanilla or chocolate, but one cone was chocolaty brown, one was pink, one was green. I’m not sure what color the other two were. At least three of the cones were sugar cones, but they all had flat bottoms and stood, on their own, on a tabletop. Which is brilliant since I had five cones and only two hands. (And because I like things that can stand on their own.)

As I was eating one of the ice cream cones, a friend sat down to share the children’s book she had written either about or for her children. For a kids’ book, it had a lot of words. I read the book (or at least part of it), but I don’t remember what it was about. 

Fast-forward a bit, and I was packing a small carry-on style bag for a trip. I know this was not a U.S. trip because after I finished packing, I realized I had not grabbed my passport. I remembered seeing my passport while pulling clothes out of a dresser, but of course when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. I did find the purple with small white polka dots swimsuit that I’d forgotten to pack. (I don’t own a purple with small white dots swimsuit, but it was cute.) I finally found my passport, and realized the friend I was traveling with was a U.S. spy. It was an “of course she is” realization, not a shocking or horrifying realization.

So, anybody wanna grab some ice cream?

In a very large house, you would expect to find very large rooms. In a dream last night, that’s what I found.

One of the bedrooms (I hope it was the largest) was enormous — about the size of my apartment. The walls were red, but not a scary red. The trim was white. It was pretty, and much less peppermint-stick than one might imagine on first read. There were big floor-to-ceiling style windows on at least two walls. The furniture was a dark wood, although I’m not sure what pieces were there. And there were no closets.

When I woke up this morning, I remembered something else peculiar about the room. Now, I don’t know what it was. I just remember finding a lovely large red room.

It looks like a typewriter. It (mostly) types like a typewriter. But the tag says you can have this vintage purse for just $10.

I had another dream about working in a restaurant.

In the last one, my brother was the dishwasher, but he refused to wash the utensils. Refused to the point  that he was hiding them. He was doing all of this while wearing a powder-blue, double-breasted suit jacket, by the way. And the man who cut up meat for different dishes did so based on the music he was listening to. 

In this one, I was working with a woman named Jill, with whom I’d gone to college. I did not really go to college with Jill. Jill was a reporter, but was working out of the restaurant’s kitchen.

Every day before he left, the restaurant owner moved a table in or near the kitchen from one side of the hallway to the other. I have no idea why. It was a dark wood couch table (one of those that’s rather high) with a few knickknacks. 

The kitchen assistant/dishwasher’s name was Elliot. I’m pretty sure he’d worked as a bouncer in a previous life. (Or job.) He wasn’t a big guy, but he was a little intense. Not in a super scary way, but he was the guy you went to if something needed to get done. He was not happy that the boss was leaving early again, each night with a different woman.

I was chopping up lasagna. I have no idea why anyone would want chopped-up lasagna. For some reason the noodles were tied together with string, but the chopping-up process was not to remove the string.

'Easy A' • 2010

Cute. Perfect girls’ night movie.

Start with the chili.

Typewriters spotted during Sunday’s adventures.

Last night I had a dream about nickels. 

These are not the nickels you’re used to seeing. Instead of round coins a little smaller than a quarter and a little bigger than a penny, they were oval-shaped.

This was controversial because I had found some not-oval nickels, which were quarter-sized but with smooth edges. That probably meant they were worth more than their 5-cent face value. (Kind of like double-stamped pennies are worth hundreds of dollars.) Instead, there was great panic that people would try to use the nickels as quarters.

I woke up with impression that this was a mistake in the ovalizing process — that for some reason, the coins were still stamped as circles, then were somehow squished into ovals. But that would be a foolish process, and would make Thomas Jefferson’s head look squished. (As I remember it, it wasn’t, although as an oval there was a redesign, of course.)

I plan to spend the rest of the day looking closing at nickels (and quarter-sized coins).

'A Long Way Down' • 2014

A little predictable, but good. Plus, accents.

'A Good Day to Die Hard' • 2013

Want. (The book won’t be available until March.)

At my last employer, birthdays were obnoxious.

Someone would create 8-1/2x11 “posters” in the birthday person’s honor and tape them up throughout the office. They were supposed to be humorous or a reference to some sort of at-work joke, but usually were just obnoxious and/or demeaning.

My first birthday there, no one realized it was my birthday, so there were no posters. Hooray!

My second birthday fell on a weekend. One of the poster-makers later apologized for not making posters. I was OK with it. Hooray!

And it turns out I lived longer than that company, which closed in June, so they didn’t care about this year’s birthday. So other than that outstanding payroll check that they still owe me, I win?

'All Over the Town' • 1949

The editor of a small-town paper drops dead, and the lead reporter steps in as editor, giving the paper an editorial voice and uncovering government corruption. That’s the dream. (The end of this version of that dream is a bit contrived, though.)

'Always a Bride' • 1953

How has no one remade this film? 

'Penny Princess' • 1952

Map humor is always a good start! Plus, who doesn’t love cheese and a naive Smith with a funny laugh?

'Mary Had a Little … ' • 1961

IMDB says this was Britain’s first “sex comedy.” It’s certainly British.

'How to Steal a Million' • 1966

Audrey Hepburn! And Peter O’Toole! And a peculiar boomerang. 

In my latest week of unemployment, I decided to devote a whole dresser drawer to sports and superhero themed T-shirts. It’s working out well so far.

I have just completed a family road trip. I like to think I’m an optimistic person — maybe that’s optimistic of me. Most of my family sees things differently. Conversation topics to avoid if you want to retain sanity/not argue every 5 seconds:

• Politics and politicians.
• Government.
• Taxes.
• Food, although that’s only limited to things someone might be allergic to, like dairy, soy and gluten. So none of the good foods are left.
• Health and fitness.
• Energy, either fossil fuel-based, alternative energies or personal “I’m tired” energy.
• Work, former workplaces and potential workplaces. This extends to workplaces of others.
• Money and investment.
• Crime.
• Real estate. (Really, any sort of property.)
• Race.
• Celebrities and sports figures.
• Guns.
• Modern movies and TV shows (anything since “Perry Mason”).
• Public entities, including transportation and media.
• Weather is OK, but any acknowledgement of climate change is not.

'Funny Face' • 1957

Now I know who to blame for the continuous pink craze.

"World class." Your @KCStar front page on the #Royals reaching the World Series. pic.twitter.com/3Mx2VWZrpG

— Charles Gooch (@drgooch41) October 16, 2014

I made a scary Halloween cake! Here’s how to make your own: Buy a Halloween cake mix (and frosting!), then wait a year past its expiration date to make it. Scary!

"Sweep!" Today’s @KCStar front page. pic.twitter.com/YY4LH9tg2H

— Charles Gooch (@drgooch41) October 6, 2014

"Royal Flush." Our late edition special section cover. Design by @smorris1988. She’s awesome. pic.twitter.com/emsAQn7ChD

— Charles Gooch (@drgooch41) October 6, 2014

What happened at Friday night’s concert:

Official setlist from #PJStLouis tonight. #PJFall2014 pic.twitter.com/SbdVmIidOZ

— Pearl Jam (@PearlJam) October 4, 2014

Front page of today’s @KCStar #Royals (via @Newseum) pic.twitter.com/JkJkQ5mxDU

— MLB Public Relations (@MLB_PR) October 4, 2014

Today’s front page #Royals pic.twitter.com/FOAMLDs0Va

— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) October 1, 2014

Free bees!

The front page of today’s @KCStar pic.twitter.com/Sdx8lWd4Kq

— Erica Smith (@ericasmith) September 27, 2014

This afternoon, someone asked me if I was going to “tear it up” tonight. I laughed; that may have been rude.

What I’m really doing: babysitting a computer that’s lost its way, baking a cake, watching the last season of “Angel” (part of that a whole “Buffy” marathon that started during the Ferguson chaos) and freaking out over my soon-to-be-unemployed status.

I also ripped up some no-longer-needed paperwork from a former employer, so maybe it wasn’t such a silly question after all.

I had a strange dream about a fire last night. There was a very large fire on what I assume was I-64 in St. Louis. On the interstate. Off the interstate. Fire everywhere. The dream wasn’t really about the fire, though — it was about the aftermath. For some reason, ashes were piled up on the highway, similar to drifts from a 4-foot snowfall. Lanes were not passable, there were obstacles everywhere and all of the downtown exists from the eastbound lanes were closed. So the only way to get to downtown St. Louis from eastbound I-64 was to drive across the Mississippi River to Illinois, turn around, cross the river again and exit.

Things were bad. Traffic was a mess. People couldn’t get out, and those who did lamented they had to drive across the river. In fact, I (and several others) seemed to be living in a museum. For some reason, I was cutting corn off the cob in the museum kitchen. Several friends (and strangers) were wandering through. And then a friend stopped with very exciting news that he’d “finally lawyered up” and registered a domain for his bottle cap sales business.

Last week at a job interview I got the “where do you see yourself in 15 years?” question. And it stumped me. No, really — I had no answer. I mean, there are things I’d like to be doing in 15 years, but those are dreams I don’t share with others in case it all gets jinxed. 

Also, it’s difficult to figure out a 15-year plan when you don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 15 days.

(On the plus side, the job would be pretty incredible.)

A big crowd at the ballpark this morning to get #Postseason tickets! #beroyalkc #royals pic.twitter.com/BWArAeZKb1

— Kansas City Royals (@Royals)

September 18, 2014

When coworkers leave banana peels in the office trash all day.

The first preseason game is Sept. 25.

I had a dream last night that I found a checkbook outside of a friend’s bakery. The checkbook was full of cash, and the checks had very little information to help me find the owner. But I remember flipping through a phone book to try to find them. I’m not sure why I didn’t try the Internet.

2 seconds before it started to pour. #stlwx pic.twitter.com/8HEKXzE6y4

— Erica Smith (@ericasmith)

September 10, 2014

Cats should not wear clothes. Here’s proof that they don’t want to wear clothes either.