Another TV memory of my childhood. One I can’t believe was a successful show or concept taken seriously enough to make it into production…

I see this now and all I can say is “we liked it? We really, really liked it?” Okay, so maybe it was sort of cute and funny, light and fluffy when that was needed. But still.

Started reading Julie & Julia a few days ago and have been finding it about as hard to put down as anything I’ve read recently. She is entertaining, funny and compelling. Frankly, it reminds me of reading myself, which sounds terribly immodest.

Most importantly, I did see the film when it was out, which was in question, as seeing movies at the theater for me is excrutiatingly difficult to arrange. The book was bought for me as a preemptive apology for the liklihood I’d not be able to go, so I’d at least have that. To finish the thought, most importantly, the book is not at all like the movie. I’m approaching the one-third mark and there has been little in common apart from the core characters and the setup of the challenge. The screenplay was definitely adaptive, for all it got the crux of what happened and supplied a feel for the people and circumstances.

The book contains much more retrospective and background detail. It is also overt in expressing her political leanings, which I do not share, and which manage to add humor, color, and not detract.

That’s my take so far. I highly recommend the movie version of Julie & Julia if you haven’t seen it. It appears I’ll say the same of the book.

I’m sitting here doing the paperwork for my daughter’s enrollment in kindergarten, for which we have been ordered to appear by the school system at 1:30 PM tomorrow. She will be 6 in September, at the old end of the spectrum for her class.

We’d wanted to home school, but she is sooo excited about school, and can probably use the interaction and structure. If it gets too weird, we may yet do that and just figure it out. I’m attempting to make my way on part time work and writing, between the economy and peculiar circumstances I slipped into, so it might be less hard to do than otherwise.

This reminded me of a thought I had a day or two ago.

At her age, I was going out of the house myself, playing in the yard and the adjoining woods, walking back and forth up the road to my father’s business, usually alone. Now granted, it was 1966 and we lived 1/3 of a mile from the nearest house, in the proverbial middle of the woods, and I was male, but still, what a difference.

Yet… she is about the age when the boy next door was going out in his yard (and ours) alone to play. Presumably easier to keep track of than it’d be for me, being a house rather than a second floor apartment, but still. She’s getting old.

It’s the environment I described, where I was raised so hands-off, that should lead to much fodder for this blog and perhaps even fiction if I get around to it. My own Hundred Acre Wood, as it were, except more than 100 acres.

Not sure I’m ready for the whole school thing. Definitely not ready for the bureaucracy it entails.

As also noted by Leslie, Fess Parker has died. I don’t remember seeing the other two things for which he was known, though I am familiar with the Davy Crockett tune and suspect I must have seen some of them. I frequently sing the first part, changing the name to that of one of my kids, and maybe changing other lyrics situationally.

Be that as it may, I have vivid memories of watching Daniel Boone when I was little, right down to specific scenes and plots from some of the episodes. And I wasn’t fanatical about it the way I remember my older sister being. She always had what she considered an inexplicable love of westerns, and while that was not exactly a western as we think of the genre, it bordered on it.

Outside the show, I remember being fascinated by and learning about Daniel Boone, in and out of school, all out of proportion to his historical significance.

Here’s the video of the intro to the show:

Rest in peace.

Anyone else remember this obscure and mercifully short-lived series?

I’ve never forgotten it, mainly for the catchy theme song, since clearly I forgot, or didn’t notice due to my youth, just how over the top the humor and absurd some of the details were…

I was very young in 1967. Sad, as the concept has potential without putting cavemen alongside dinosaurs, and without a “bad science” explanation of how they arrived then. Like Planet of the Apes, but to a primitively peopled early past.

For many years this felt like something I remembered that hadn’t really happened, because nobody else seemed to remember it. Hooray for the Internet!

I love comments!

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My parents encouraged reading, and my mother made sure I got books to the best of our ability to afford them or borrow from the library. I got a bunch through the Weekly Reader Book Club, including ones I remember parts of vividly but can’t begin to remember the names of. Funny how you internalize what you read - or I do - as if it had been part of your own experience.

One that was a gift, and perhaps not in my usual genres, was The Thing in B3 (using this link because it has good pictures of the book). It had to do with a phantom dead body in a drawer in a morgue where the kid… worked helping out, maybe? Or happened to be for some other reason? As I recall, it was an avoidably prescient manifestation, resolved and thus avoided after the interim drama that makes the story a story rather than a couple explanatory sentences.

It was by no means my favorite book as a kid, yet it stuck with me at some level. Guess that says something about it. Or about me.

This is one of my favorite songs of all time. The first time I can remember ever hearing it as a young kid, strangely enough, was at my grandmother’s house, from the radio in the dining room. It put me into a mental state, almost a waking dream, in which I imagined as vividly as real a rabble of rebeltroops goingdown thestreet aswe coweredinside.

It’s still one of those songs that can alter my mental state to think intensively, imagine vividly or have ideas. It was one of my favorites when I drove around delivering newspapers in the wee hours. Except the part where I’d “lose” part of the time the song had been playing, being in an autopilot trance, on some other world.

Everyone knows about Where The Wild Things Are. It was a staple of my childhood. However, I was completely unaware that Maurice Sendak had written anything else.

My ex had a different perspective, being smitten with Chicken Soup With Rice when she was a kid. So she bought it for our five year old daughter.

Said daughter, and I, are just as charmed by the month to month rhymes, and I think the illustrations are cool, and so obviously Sendak’s style. She is now fascinated by the idea of trying such soup. Not sure how that will go over, since she is in a phase where food items can’t be mixed the way they are in soup of that type.

The book doubles as an aid for teaching her about the months, seasons and calendar, as I’ve been doing recently. Along with some geography. She’s crazy about maps.

It’s not chicken, but I plan to turn leftovers in turkey soup with rice. We’ll see how that goes…

About time I posted here, or for that matter used the domain, which was inspired by a cool employee of a former support client. Who needs a Flying Spaghetti Monster when you can have a Divine Hamster?

After much thought, and having been called a male Erma Bombeck (as if anyone could compare), I’ve decided this should be my place for parenting and antics of kids, domestic and slice of life blogging, and other craziness. Maybe some food blogging overflow, though most of that - assuming I get back into it as I’d like - will remain at Daddy Guy Cook and at another Blog to Be Named Later. After I can afford the matching domain. I’ve been itching to talk about favored (or less so) books for the kids, so that’ll keep me going for a few posts.

The template is adorable off the shelf, but needs a little tweaking. I am no artist, but a while back I tried my hand at drawing a winged, halo-laden hamster, which may or may not make an appearance.

So there you have it, an introductory post of sorts. All I have to do is keep it up, perhaps even earn a few readers.