Fun and Games Dept

I don’t always listen to music while I’m working. Working at home alone, I usually need some sort of noise in my home office as too much silence bothers me because when it’s too quiet all I can hear is the ringing in my ears. My number one choice for sound is ambient music of some sort; words can distract me when I’m deep in a project.  But around mid-week I might change it up a bit and have a television show playing in the background or something. After being alone in the house for a couple of days, hearing any sort of conversation going on is a good thing.

Today I dialed up YouTube on my iPad and started looking around for something to play in the background when a familiar face caught my eye. The thing that was odd about the suggestion from YouTube was that the familiar face wasn’t paired with an appropriate name. I expected to see “Maude”, “The Golden Girls” or even “The Stars Wars Holiday Special” but next to a picture of Bea Arthur was a different title, “Amanda’s By The Sea”.

The suggestion was a playlist containing 13 episodes of this series, “Amanda’s By The Sea”, or as it was shortened to, “Amanda’s”.

 
What was this?

A brief search on the Internet filled me in.  In 1983, Bea Arthur starred in the aforementioned “Amanda’s” as Amanda Cartwright, widow and the owner of a small hotel in California appropriately named “Amanda’s By The Sea”. The show was loosely based on the UK’s “Fawlty Towers”. The series lasted just half a season on ABC before cancellation; 13 episodes were filmed by only 10 made it to the air. The other three were later shown in some obscure syndication run.

I decided to watch an episode at lunch time. While not awful by any means, I can see why the show didn’t make it. The cast is a little unbalanced. Watching “Amanda’s” made me realize that while Beatrice Arthur was a magnificent actor, she needed someone strong to play off and the supporting cast didn’t quite fit the bill. Fred McCarren plays her son (and the hotel manager) Marty, his wife is played the same actress that played Stan’s second wife Chrissy on “The Golden Girls”. The cook is played by the actor that played Boss Hogg’s nephew or something on “The Dukes of Hazzard”. Another character, I think his name is Alto, played much comic relief being short and speaking with very broken English. The show is a little more slapstick than “The Golden Girls”.

And here’s where it gets a little odd. MANY of the guest stars on “Amanda’s” later appear on “The Golden Girls”. Since the series was filmed in 1983, Bea Arthur looks a lot like Dorothy on “The Golden Girls”. Some of the sight gags used on “The Golden Girls” are seen here, for example, “would you hand me that loaf of bread. No, the other one” and then Amanda proceeds to slam it over the head of the person she is annoyed with, much like Dorothy hitting Rose over the head with a newspaper. In one scene, Amanda is arguing with a customer about a restaurant bill and she argues with the exact same customer, in practically the same set, during her guest appearance on “The Golden Palace” only there her name is Dorothy.

It’s a little like watching Pert Kelton play Alice in the original version of “The Honeymooners”.

Of course, Bea is Bea. While there are some similarities between mannerisms and the like between her portrayals of Maude and Dorothy, since there was eight years between the two series, there are obvious differences, whereas, since “Amanda’s” came only two years before the premiere of “The Golden Girls”, it’s easy to spot the much closer similarities between Amanda and Dorothy. Heck, Bea is even wearing the same type of wardrobe as what was found later on “The Golden Girls” complete with the boots and the long skirts. I can’t help but think that some of the storyline ideas also made it over to “The Golden Girls”.  It’s weird watching the show because it feels familiar but out of place at the same time. Kind of like when you walk into a Kmart in a different city, it’s a Kmart, it feels like Kmart but everything is in a different place.

As I wound up my workday I played a couple more episodes while I tidied up email and such. I definitely believe that Bea can be Bea when she plays off other strong actors. Both the casts of “Maude” and “The Golden Girls” balanced Bea out brilliantly, but like “The Golden Palace” after Bea left “The Golden Girls”, when an element is missing, it can be OK, even quite good, but it feels very out of balance. And that’s the way “Amanda’s” feels, out of balance.

I’ll probably finish watching the series over the next couple of days because I have always adored Bea and it’s fun seeing her in something else that feels comfortable yet I can’t recite line by line. It’s available on YouTube if you’re interested in checking it out.

Amanda’s By The Sea (Starring Beatrice Arthur)

Taken without zoom. Someone is used to the two legged type. 

I’ve mentioned before that I love being a digital nomad. The majority of my work time is spent at home in my home office. One of the challenges of not working in a traditional work environment is the separation of work life from home life; it is quite easy to constantly work when the work computer is just a few steps away at any given moment.
Moving from one gig to another career opportunity earlier this year presented me with another unique situation in that with both jobs I work primarily out of the same office. I sit at the same desk, with the same surroundings looking at the same type of monitor even though I work for entirely different company now. Contract workers and the like probably don’t find this unusual but for me there were many similarities and I found myself falling into ruts from my old job rather quickly with my new job, which wasn’t fair to me or to the new corporation nor was it really indicative of how excited I really am about this fairly new gig.Enter my little renovation project.
I’ve been saying to Earl that I wanted to revamp my home office. It’s one of the four rooms we had built into our basement a decade or so ago and my office was originally my music and recording studio. Since giving up that hobby in 2010, the space became my office but with some of the remaining recording equipment still in place. The space wasn’t efficient as an office. I felt crammed into a corner. My desk had too many papers and too much dust. I didn’t feel productive in there, I felt like I just worked.
Earl’s suggestion was that we completely gut the room and start from scratch. I loved that idea but my patience wasn’t where it needed to be to accomplish this. And, aside from the fact that I really do love spending money, I couldn’t justify buying new furniture for my office. Sure, my existing desk has a few dings and bang ups here and there but for the most part it’s functional and it sure looked better than what I had in my last cubicle at my last gig. So on Sunday and yesterday, I loaded up some contractor bags with a lot of junk I haven’t touched in a year or two. I wiped everything down, getting rid of all the dusts and cobwebs. I took off a shelf that ran along one side of my desk, it served no purpose than to gather things and provide a hiding place for other things I didn’t really need. The studio space countertops were repurposed, the drawers and cabinets were emptied and organized. The only thing that I purchased for the space was a desk lamp; I hate overhead ceiling lighting, especially flourescent lighting, so I moved some of our LED lamps. I can now control the brightness and color of the room lighting with an iPhone app. I discarded the keyboard shelf (I never used it) and I turned my main monitor and the whole focal point of my desk onto an angle so that I had ample work room on either side of my computer.
This morning I went to work happy and excited to sit down at my revamped work area. I’m feeling a little antsy about getting out and working remotely again (I’ll be doing that next week) but for working from home, my new space is perfect.
  

The sentiment behind this sign looks quite familiar. The Main Street through my hometown is also US 11 (though not called Main St) just off I-81.  We say “Pula-sky” instead of “Pula-skee”. 

I stumbled across this video while randomly navigating around YouTube. I have always been fascinated with the checkout process at a grocery or department store, though since Y2K I have found today’s experience to be boring and populated with semi surly people. 

I can’t help notice in this video that despite the fact the cashier and packer are doing all the work, they are still smiling and they seem to be enjoying their job. I know it’s a sign of getting old, but i can’t imagine anyone working in a grocery store today being as pleasant as they folks in this video are; we are lucky to get through an order today without an eye roll if the computer can’t identify the UPC code. 

http://youtu.be/Fsh-2WQbnPc

When I first took the job in my latest step in my career, I never expected to enjoy Greenville, S.C.  Now that I’m in the middle of my third trip down here in four months, I can safely say that this is a pretty nifty city, especially the downtown area.  Earl and I will be coming down here together in October.  I’m very much looking forward to showing him what I have discovered and discovering many more things together.

If you’re every driving Interstate 85, Greenville, S.C. is definitely a worthwhile stop. The downtown area has a lot of culture, scenery and fantastic places to eat. A foodies’ dream!

A quick snap from my hotel room …

Earl and I went for a ride in the Jeep after supper tonight. Since I work from home, it’s good for me to get out of the house once in a while. We stopped at a bakery for a little dessert but even though the door was unlocked, the bakery was closed. No one was tending to the counter or cash register.

We went elsewhere.

It’s a very common theme in this area, to close up shop early in the evening. Local restaurant owners complain about the chains taking over the area, but they don’t like to stay open as late as customers want them to be. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Or something like that.

When we got home, there was a small bunny rabbit in the yard munching on grass. He or she (I couldn’t tell) was sniffing around for just the right bit of fauna from our lawn. When we got out of the Jeep, he or she jumped just a little bit out of our way. The nose was wriggling, the eyes intent, but food was to be enjoyed under the evergreen tree.