Erica Smith

'The Grass is Greener' • 1961

A slow start, but there are some good lines hidden in there. Amusing, but not a must-see.

When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was sure I’d remember the dream I’d just had. But I don’t. Here’s what I know: It started in at what I know is a bakery, but in the dream was more if a diner. Somewhere along the way, Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” stopped in and we were leaving to do … Something. I had a feeling it was something good, but now I don’t remember what it was.

For the record (because I’m sure there is one somewhere), it’s been a few months since I watched any “BtVS” episodes. Maybe it’s a sign I should be watching them?

"You should smile more. Turn that frown upside-down." It’s sad that anyone patronizing enough to say it, let alone say it more than once. But they exist and one keeps finding me. Dammit.

'Three Guys Named Mike' • 1951

Cute and condescending, in that 1950s sort of way. 

Friday. Finally.

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was wearing a gold dress. A shiny gold dress. Think red-carpet attire. This is odd for two reasons: I dislike wearing dresses and the color gold. Also, I’m very rarely on a red carpet. I wish I remembered the occasion for such fanciness.

'Magic Town' • 1947

A man finds an average town in an average movie. There was potential, but it just didn’t come together. This scene with James Stewart, Jane Wyman and a kitten may be the best part of the movie.

• "I haven't read your story, but ... [opinion about story]"

I made salted caramel! (Waiting for you this week at Amy’s, @ambabka.) http://ift.tt/1CczOob

'Made for Each Other' • 1939

Neither great nor horrible. Fairly realistic until the end.

Found art. http://ift.tt/1A28cD7

'It Happened One Night' • 1934

Ellie’s pre-wedding self-pitying is a bit grating, but overall a fun little story. I’m still on the fence about Clark Gable, though.

Jobs that rely on crayons are fun, but not at 6 a.m.

I had a dream last night that I had been laid off and was looking for a job. But I wanted a job not just for me, but also for the four to six others that is been working with.

In an interview with a company in downtown St. Louis (but in a location I’m not familiar with) I was asked to recreate a drawing using crayons, markers, colored pencils or a puzzle. It was a timed event. I briefly tried the puzzle, then opted for crayons.

There were some of the standard interview questions, then lunch. As everyone scattered for lunch, I ran into a former co-worker, who had left the other company before my group was laid off. She was surprised to learn that company had closed. She had copies of financial documents (which I’m now certain she shouldn’t have had) and said there was no reason the company should have closed. I don’t remember what it was, but I wrote something to that effect in dry-erase marker on the glass door if my prospective new boss.

Everyone returned from lunch and filed back into the prospective boss’ office. In the lobby, he offered me the job, but he didn’t want the rest of the team and it was up to me to break the news to them. He also said the workday was from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.

I don’t know what I told him, but I did break the news to the rest of the group. We packed up our crayons and markers and I erased the notes on the glass door before I woke up.

Most obvious whodunnit clues yet. #stlwx http://ift.tt/16v6NJj

In a very strange dream that took place at my grandmother’s house, friends who do not work in journalism were helping box up entries for a journalism contest. For some reason, that included background information on the reporters, so there were dozens of folders scattered about. Eggs also were being packed in the boxes. By the time everything that needed to be packed was ready, the box was too full. The only box we could find that would work was a long banker’s box, but the lid was missing.

A couple of the folders that were being shipped are folders that are actually on (or near) my desk at home. I wish I could remember which ones they were.

Making the doughnuts. Er, brownies. http://ift.tt/1D7Mw9t

'Houseboat' • 1958

Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, three bratty enough kids and some good one-liners.

'The Amazing Adventure' • 1936

Light-hearted fare that has been done many times, but this time with Cary Grant.

”Pimpernel’ Smith’ • 1941

That’s right, a World War II film that came out just a couple of years into the war, and before the U.S. was involved. It’s clever, with smart humor. 

'Here Comes the Bride' • 1951

Watch out for sneaky singing journalists. There are quite a few objectionable plot points here.

'Paris When it Sizzles' • 1964

Very ’60s and campy, but it does often include the clickity-clack of a typewriter.

Bakery humor is the sweetest. http://ift.tt/1BFS3zM

Sometimes cats have all the answers. 

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

Awful. Just awful. There’s no plot. It’s a collection of tributes to the original, which was brilliant.

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?