Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
This week has been full of chilly days and even a dash of snow. Where is spring already?! I’ve been very slowly working on book four in my cozy mystery series and hope to work on it even more this next week. I need to buckle down and get this story really going!
How is the weather where you are?
Your hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
A little about Amy and her blog: I’m a lifestyle blogger who writes about fashion, travel, gardening, card-making, Bible Journaling, home decor, and much, more!
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
Everyone else, Please remember that this is a link-up where you can share posts from the previous week or posts from weeks, months, or even years ago. All we ask is that they be family-friendly!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
You may add unlimited family-friendly blog post links, linked to specific blog posts.
Be sure to visit other links and leave a kind comment for each link you post (it would be too hard to visit every link, of course!)
The party opens Thursday evening and ends Wednesday.
Thank you for participating. Have fun!
*By linking to The Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot Link Up, you give permission to share your post and images on the hosts’ blogs. Proper credit with a photo and link back will be provided.
For the months of April and May, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching movies set in Paris and rambling about them on our blog.
This week we watched How to Steal A Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.
I actually think I watched this movie or part of it at some point over the last 20-some years but I couldn’t remember most of it, other than a few scenes.
The movie is about a con-man, Charles Bonnett (Hugh Griffith), who sells fake recreations of famous artist that he has painted. It isn’t something his daughter approves of so when he loans out a fake “Cellini” Venus statue to a museum in Paris she is horrified and panicked. Her father assures her that because the item is only being loaned out and not purchased, no one will inspect it and actually find out it is a fake. Unfortunately, Charles signs a loan agreement with the museum without reading it and later learns it includes an inspection clause.
On the same night the statuette goes on display, a burglar named Simon Dermott (O’Toole), breaks into their house to try to steal Charle’s recreation of a Van Gogh painting.
Terrified, Nicole sneaks downstairs and grabs a collector gun off the wall to confront whoever is in the house. After some bantering back and forth, and knowing calling the police would lead to an investigation of all her father’s paintings, Nicole agrees to let him go. When she lays the gun down, though, it fires and grazes Simon’s arm.
This leads to an entertaining exchange where he makes her drive him home using his car and then she discovers she has no way to get home. He calls her a taxi, but not before he asks her to wipe his fingerprints off the painting he tried to steal so he won’t get caught.
She asks him what else she should do for him. Did he want to kiss her goodnight?
He lets her know that he’d rather like to do that and the bold fellow kisses her passionately right there by the taxi.
Nicole is, of course, a bit enamored with him, especially after that kiss, which is clear when she later tells her father about what happened.
After she and Charles find out about the inspector who will come to look at the statuette at the museum so it can be insured for a million dollars, she worries that the inspection of the item — which her look alike grandmother posed for by the way — will lead to all of her father’s work being exposed as fakes and send him to jail. She tracks Simon down and asks him to help her steal the statuette, even though it is under very heavy security at the museum.
Much jocularity ensues.
Yes, I did just write that sentence.
But, a lot of fun does unfold at this point and the viewer already knows a bit about Simon and that he isn’t what he seems but now we want to know what else we, and Nicole, will find out. As if things couldn’t get any crazier, we also have an American dealer Davis Leland (Eli Wallach) who is trying to buy the statuette and wants to marry Nicole.
I won’t provide any other spoilers in case you haven’t seen this one and want to.
This one was a fun one for me. Lots of funny, quirky moments and beautiful views of Paris. Of course, these actors were all supposed to be in Paris but sounded British, other than Audrey.
Audrey has never been my favorite actress but I enjoyed her more in this one than I thought I would. I thought Peter O’Toole was a delight all around. He was…sigh….dreamy. Those impulsive kisses…whew!
I loved the ins and outs of the movie, the misdirection, etc.
Toward the beginning of the movie, Nicole is reading Hitchcock Magazine which made me wonder if she’d ever been in one of his films. After a quick search online, I learned that the answer is no. However, in her Oscar-winning performance as the princess in the 1953 movie Roman Holiday, Audrey is in bed reading a book about Hitchcock.
My husband says he never wanted Audrey in his movies because he liked actresses with talent. Ouch. It’s clear my husband is not an Audrey fan. He added that Hitchcock had a “type” and Audrey wasn’t it. Most of the actresses in his movies were blond. There you go.
There were rumors when the movie was made that Peter and Audrey had an affair during the filming but those were later squashed by the pair who said while that wasn’t true, it was true they became close friends after the movie.
Some trivia about the movie that I read about during my research:
After Nicole dresses up as a cleaning lady at one point in the movie, Simon Dermott says, “That does it. For one thing, it gives Givenchy a night off.” Hubert de Givenchy was Audrey Hepburn’s costume designer.
When Peter O’Toole first sets off the museum alarm, he says, “Ring out, wild bells.” This is the title of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson published in 1850, which was part of his work entitled “In Memoriam”. It was an elegy to his sister’s fiancé, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died at the age of 22.
The film was directed by William Wyler.
Have you ever seen this movie? What did you think of it? If you wrote a blog post about it or choose to do so later, you can link up below anytime from today until May.
I’ve been watching and writing about episodes from the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mystery Show from the 1970s. For the first season the show would switch back and forth between The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Last time around, I wrote about a Nancy Drew episode.
Now here we are back to a Hardy Boys episode called The Mystery of Witches Hollow. The Hardy Boys stars 70s teen heartthrobs Parker Stevenson and singer Shaun Cassidy.
We start out with the boys and Frank’s girlfriend, or their dad’s secretary, or whoever she is, Callie, and their friend Chet.
They are all driving in the dark somewhere and Joe says he sees a barn with a hex sign.
It seems like each sleuthing team — Nancy or the boys – have that one friend who is afraid of everything. In the Nancy Drew books it is Bess but in the show they eliminated Bess and gave the fear to George. As someone commented on my Instagram post about the Nancy Drew portion of the show, “They did George wrong in this show.”
I don’t know enough about Chet to know if he was done wrong but in this show the poor guy is afraid of everything and always hungry (yes, like Bess too).
So, we open with the boys driving through Witches Hollow near Salem, Mass and when Joe says he sees a hex sign on a barn roof, Chet fearfully asks what that means.
Callie explains that people in this area of the country are afraid of things that go boo in the night so they place hex signs as a way to ward off evil spirits.
Now Chet is whining that he should have gone on vacation somewhere else and wants to know why they are even going this way when they were supposed to be going camping.
In an info dump, Joe tells Chet that Callie’s Uncle Captain McGuire said there were some strange things going on up here and asked their dad to come up an investigate. As so often happens, Fenton Hardy, Frank and Joe’s dad, seems to be pushing his responsibility off onto his young sons who don’t appear to go to school or have a real job since they have so much investigation time.
When they go to look for Captain McGuire at his house (while it is thundering and lightening, of course), a rather creepy woman answers and says she doesn’t know when the Captain will be back. She’s just there to clean the house, she says.
Frank, always perceptive, sees mail piled up behind her and asks her about it, suggesting it means the captain has been gone for a while.
She says she doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.
Umm….okay. Has she not been cleaning his house everyday?
She does let them in to wait for the Captain, though, and then warns them that there are scary “goings on in these here parts” but says the Captain will never listen to her about them. She suggests the kids “get on out of here before things get worse,” but they decide to stay and wait for the captain. She leaves with a warning shake of her head, and once she leaves they immediately start snooping around. Chet is looking for food and the boys for clues. They notice the mail on the counter is dated about a week back and Callie notices her uncle’s favorite shotgun is missing.
They decide they better call their dad, who, in true Fenton (and Carson Drew for that matter) fashion, blows off their concerns.
Fenton tells them they are simply getting wrapped up in all the haunted and creepy stories of the area. None of it is real, he says, and the captain is known to wander off for days on hunting trips.
While all this is going the camera keeps taking us outside to some man staggering toward the house and no offense to this guy but it certainly has taken him a long time to get to the house. He’s been staggering around out there since the housekeeper was giving her creepy speech and left, and all while the kids were digging through the captain’s mail.
Now, though, he seems to be being stalked by a black panther. I kept help wondering what state these guys are in and if black panthers are actually native to that area.
Eventually the guy finally gets to the house after everyone is asleep and slowly lets himself in to steal some food. The scream of a panther wakes everyone up and the man takes off into the storm, quickly followed by Joe who is then followed by Frank. When Frank finds Joe, he’s fallen over the edge of a ravine and Frank has to help him up. After a heart-to-heart about Frank saving Joe and how much Joe appreciates it, the pair find a empty shotgun shell and decide it’s time to go to the town sheriff and tell him they think something happened to the captain.
The sheriff is none too happy they’ve woken him up in the middle of the night and says Captain McGuire is probably off hunting, which is why he bought the cabin in the first place.
They leave the sheriff without much information. The next day, though, they do find out from the owner of the gas station that there is a man who is also a city slicker who has bought some property near the captain. They find the man man — Donner (yes, I know – foreshadowing much?) — tells the boys he hopes to build a large condominium if a road project goes through. There are some in the area who don’t want the project to go through and many of those people are superstitious, Donner says.
They believe that area is haunted by the ghost of a woman back around the time of the Sale Witch Trials who raised cats, including one very large, black one.
The woman probably raised the large cat, probably a panther, from the time it was a baby, Donner says, but because people in the town believed she just acquired it after it was grown, they labeled her a witch. That would have meant a trial but when the towns people came to get her, she barricaded herself in her house with the cat.
“It’s not a very pretty story,” Donner says.
“It’s not a story at all, without a finish,” Frank counters.
“Well, when she wouldn’t come out, they set fire to the place,” Donner finishes.
And now locals say they hear the woman screaming in the night.
There is something a bit shifty about this Donner guy that we the viewers know already because we’ve seen him in a basement jail holding the captain hostage while a large panther guards him. Apparently, the dude built a cage into his wall for the specific purpose of kidnapping the captain. Why has he kidnapped him? It isn’t yet clear.
Flash forward and the boys finally get their man — the man who broke into the house that is. Only he isn’t a man. He’s a young, mute boy. Not deaf, it appears, but mute.
The boy tries to sign to them that he only broke into the house for food. I’m guessing he has no family who feeds him, but I don’t know.
The boys have no idea what else he is trying to say to them after they take him back to the house. Callie is no help either but in the less than 20 seconds they all discuss how they don’t know what he’s saying the kid somehow sketches a fully detailed and colored in picture of the panther. The guy can’t speak but he is apparently an art savant of some kind.
No one is sure what this drawing means but they know the kid knows something.
That night they all fall asleep and “someone” (cough..Donner…cough) jams a block into the front door of the house so it can’t be open and then lays something over the chimney so that the smoke from the fireplace comes back into the house. The smell of smoke wakes Joe who breaks a window to get fresh air. I’m really not sure what Donner thought was going to happen since even with the door locked the boys could break a window and save themselves. Joe and Frank decide whomever did it simply wanted to scare them.
By the way, most of this episode Chet is just eating and being useless. He even whines when the boys tell him to remove whatever is blocking the chimney while they go get the sheriff. The boy, Simon, is able to communicate to them that the captain was taken away, which is yet another reason they need to find the sheriff. Apparently Simon can’t write all this out because he can’t write. I can’t remember how they figured out his name was Simon.
Before they get to the sheriff, though, the boy points to the side of the road, to indicate he wants them to pull over. They do and see tracks in the dirt. That’s when the boy begins frantically pointing and they look down over the embankment and see two trucks with large speakers affixed to the top, broadcasting a screaming woman over the area.
Ah, so this is why locals think they hear a screaming woman in the woods at night.
The boys jump onto the back of one of these trucks and find cement that belongs to the contractors who were working to build the freeway. It appears someone is stealing their supplies so they can’t complete the project.
When the boys get back to the house, their dad is waiting for them and was just about to send out a “posse”. I think Fenton thinks it’s 1833 or something.
Anyhow, the boys fill their dad in by saying they think someone is trying to stop the project and that the captain found out about that and that’s why he’s missing.
Fenton says e’s going to get that sheriff to round up a posse and find the captain, but the boys will have to stay at the house, and out of trouble.
“You’re certainly good at poking holes in our balloons,” whines Joe.
“Only when there isn’t enough air in them,” Fenton scolds with a little shake of his head.
During this scene, Joe goes into the next room to “change his shirt” and starts to unbutton it. I’m sure all the teenage girls were hoping for a shirtless scene with this teenage heartthrob, but, alas, it did not help. A few seconds later it appears Joe either has another version of the same shirt or he just changed his mind about changing because he comes out tucking in the exact same shirt. On closer inspection, though, it appears the shirt is the same color but the last one was plaid and this one has stars of some kind on it.
Fenton tells Callie to come with him to get the sheriff because he’s going to need some feminine charm to convince the sheriff to send a posse out to look for her uncle.
When he leaves Simon becomes very animated and draws the boys a picture of a foot, which leads them to the nickname “flatfoot” which is what Donner called the captain when they visited with him.
“What’s that, Simon? Donner is holding the captain hostage?”
Okay, they don’t really say that, but close and Simon nods emphatically, which sends them all rushing out the door, leaving Chet to finish yet another meal while saying, “Here we go again.”
Well, here you go again what, Chet? You’re just shoveling more food in and not going anywhere.
Back we flip to Donner talking to the captain and telling him there is a bill about to pass in the state legislature to stop construction on the freeway pending a study.
First, Donner is clearly an idiot, nothing actually passes in a state legislature and if it does, it is many years after it needs to and by then the bill is completely pointless.
Second, I completely lose Donner’s reasoning at this point. Something about killing the captain and throwing his body at the construction site will delay the project even further. Why does the guy want the project delayed? He stands to get a lot of money from the construction of condominiums and other structures.
Finally it clicks when he says that other business owners will panic when it looks like the freeway is going to be scraped and will sell to him for a dirt cheap price to get out of what looks like an area that isn’t going to bring their businesses any money. Then, when the project is back on again, he’ll own all that land to mow over the little mom and pop stores and build his more expensive tourist traps.
Donner gives the captain his “final meal” before leaving the basement cage. That meal which includes a steak, but that doesn’t seem very smart of Donner because before long the boys arrive to save the captain and are able to use that steak to distract the wildcat from attacking them.
They then break into the cage and free the captain who bolts from the basement and chases after Donner. The previously useless sheriff shows up at just the right moment, though, and arrests Donner, without even hearing the entire story that the boys only learned after their dad left, I might add.
Maybe Chet told them what was said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. I have no idea.
I will say that this episode, though a bit cheesy, was much better than The Mystery Of the Diamond Triangle with Nancy Drew.
I bet you didn’t know that there is a Hardy Boys Fandom site, but there is, and here is a bit of trivia from it:
“This is the only episode in the entire run of the 1977 show to be adapted from an actual Hardy Boys book, in this case #41 The Clue of the Screeching Owl, with the opening scene at the circus and the sub-plot dealing with Bobby Thompson and Mystery the beagle & the dog-napping ring being deleted, and a few relationships being changed. An example of a changed relationship, in the book, Captain Maguire is a friend of Fenton Hardy, the boys father; in the TV episode Captain Maguire is the Uncle of Callie Shaw (Callie, while mentioned in the book, never made an actual appearance).”
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
I want to start by sharing that today is my sister-in-law Kim’s birthday so happy birthday to her. She had a heck of a 2024 and is an overcomer. Looking forward to her having a much better 2025.
I shared a bit yesterday about our week last week, which was fairly uneventful, other than a trip to a used book sale at a library near us. I picked up 19 Hard Boys Mystery books for 50 cents each. That was a fun find. These books, like Nancy Drew, are a bit dated, of course, and written for younger kids but they still have pretty good mysteries. They are also a fun escape from life.
Little Miss also picked out some cozy mysteries for me to try out. She’s picked out a couple duds over the years but also some very good ones so we will see how this bunch works out.
I wish I had something more exciting to report but I am still reading The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murders by Joanne Fluke, The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, and The Two Towers by Tolkien.
I did finish Whose Body?By Dorothy Sayers last week.
The Husband is reading Big Trouble by Dave Barry.
I’ve still been watching Great Canal Journeys every night. Not much else. The Husband has been watching Shogun.
I watched an episode of Great Canal Journeys when they visited Scotland and I was absolutely blown away by this huge device that lowered their boat from one level of the canal to the larger canal below and two huge steel statues of horse heads they visited during the episode.
I watched Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as well last week and will be watching How to Steal A Million today or tomorrow.
I’ll also be watching another Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries episode this week so I can write about it on the blog.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Today for our chat I am pulling out some tea, cocoa, lemonade, and even iced tea. What are you in the mood for?
This week’s weather isn’t really calling for lemonade since it will still be fairly cold, but I think lemonade can be good on any day.
I’m going to be having some peppermint tea with local, raw honey in it as we chat. My husband made it and oh wow. It’s so good.
*sniff* I needed this. (She said dramatically like she’s making a silly YouTube video.)
It’s gloomy and raining outside, but I don’t mind too much because I have my tea, my blanket, and a good book.
We did have some nice, warmer days this past week — nice enough that we spent a couple of afternoons and evenings outside playing and simply enjoying the warmth.
The Husband had three days off this past week so were able to spend time as a family relaxing on Thursday and then traveling to another town on Friday for a used book sale and a trip to a park.
On Thursday while we were sitting outside there was a huge flock of turkey buzzards or vultures circling the woods behind our house and then our house itself. It was really stressing me out, especially as their numbers started growing and they started lowering themselves. As far as I knew there were no dead animals around us but there were three living ones — my two cats and our dog — in the backyard.
At one point, Zooma the Wonder Dog ran into the yard and jumped up toward the birds. One of them began to lower itself and I yelled at it to go away. I then yelled at all of them.
“You get out of here! Go on! Go! You’re not taking my dog today!”
The Husband said I sounded like Fran Drescher from The Nanny while I was yelling. I didn’t take the remark as a compliment.
Either way, the birds started to move away. At one point there were close to 30 of them swarming the sky over my house. I searched online and learned that circling vultures doesn’t always mean they are looking for carrion, or dead animals, to eat.
Sometimes, if it is in the evening hours, they have probably arrived in the area that day and are preparing to roost for the night. I hope that was what has happening but later my neighbor told me the birds were circling when her dogs were out too.
Online is says buzzards/vultures can not physically lift a dog and also don’t take live dogs, but….I don’t know. This isn’t the first time this has happened when we’ve been outside.
Also, locally we call these birds “turkey buzzards”, but they are actually turkey vultures, according to information online. In the UK, buzzards are some other types of birds. Either way, these are pretty ugly and creepy birds and whatever they were doing, I didn’t like it.
Yesterday, The Husband, The Boy, and Little Miss and I traveled to a town about 45 minutes east of us to visit the library there for their bi-annual book sale. We also picked up some lunch at the local supermarket, visited a park to have a picnic, picked up our groceries (through pick up), and visited a garden store before stopping at a playground on the way home.
The most exciting find for me at the book sale was a box of The Hardy Boys Mystery books from the early 1940s. These books were actually published in the 1990s, but they are reprints of the originals, which were written in the 1930s or 40s.
The books were 50 cents each because they were in the children’s section. I double checked with the library ladies, but they insisted they were only 50 cents, so I picked up 19 of the some 28 books they had, including a book with three books in one.
They had three Nancy Drew Mystery books, but I already own those, so I didn’t get them.
Little Miss also picked out four cozy mysteries for me. She really enjoys doing that and has grabbed some great ones for me in the past. I was really excited that she grabbed another Amish Inn Mysteries for me to add to my growing collection of that series.
The Husband found The Count of Nine by Erle Stanley Gardner and said he has it on Kindle, but I said to grab the paperback. I never know when something might happen to one of our accounts, causing us to lose all of our books so I prefer to have paperbacks or hardcovers of books I know we will enjoy on our shelves. Our shelves are getting overrun, though. We are going to have to do something – like knock out a wall, build on, and create an entire room to be our library. I’m not sure the husband or our bank account will go for that but it would be very cool.
Anyhow, after the library sale we grabbed some lunch from the local supermarket and headed to a park. The kids played by the creek for a bit and then we headed to a small garden store that also sells . . . well, a lot of different stuff. It is a very relaxing place, and they carry some natural soda that I can actually drink. I can’t drink sodas anymore because of my corn allergy so it’s a treat to have some natural soda once in a while. This is also one of the local places where I can pick up some raw honey.
From there we made a stop at Walmart and Aldi (Aldi was just a pick up thankfully) and then on to another park that has a zipline, slides, and access to a creek. Little Miss usually loves to explore the creek but this time she and her brother played on the zipline instead.
I’m not sure if I have ever explained this or not but when I write the word “local” that often means something different for people in my area. Local for us can be anything from 5 minutes to an hour away. When you live in a rural area, it can take a long time to get to “civilization.” For us, it is about 30 minutes one way to pick up groceries at an Aldi and in that town, there are a couple supermarkets and smaller stores but nothing larger like a Walmart. Forty-five minutes southeast, where we went yesterday, there is an Aldi, a Walmart, and a larger supermarket that carries more natural items. About an hour south, there are larger stores like Walmart, Target, Gamestop, Barnes and Noble, etc. About 90 minutes north we can find those stores as well.
Local, in other words, clearly means different things depending on where you live – a rural or urban area. If that wasn’t obvious already.
This upcoming week we don’t have a ton going on. The last night of the church program Little Miss goes to was last week. We might attend a library event in the town where The Husband works but other than that there is nothing on the agenda until the weekend when The Husband is taking Little Miss to an Easter egg hunt he is taking photos at for the newspaper.
How about you? How was your week last week and what do you have coming up for this week?
Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
Your hosts for the link up:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
This Blonde’s Shopping Bag is a personal style blog by Kellyann Rohr. I believe every woman, regardless of age, should have the tools and opportunity to feel their best through fashion. A closet full of great basics with some fun pieces mixed in helps you avoid that dreaded feeling of having nothing to wear! It doesn’t have to break the bank either and that’s why I’ll show you how to get the most bang for your buck. Quite simply my mission is to encourage and support women to stay fashionable, fresh, and relevant!
This Blonde’s Shopping Bag was started in 2016 as a result of my love for shopping and creating outfits. I’ve always loved fashion and finding budget friendly pieces to create looks I love. So many of my friends and co-workers complimented me on my outfits and asked advice but also shared how they could “never pull off” some of my looks or that they “couldn’t afford” to dress the way they really wanted. The blog is my answer to those problems.
Since it’s inception the blog has grown and so has my reach. It’s been a dream come true to connect with a community of like minded women and partner with brands. I’ve especially enjoyed working with Chico’s, Vionics, and Jambu as well as smaller, women owned businesses.
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up! Please remember that this is a link-up where you can share posts from the previous week or posts from weeks, months, or even years ago. All we ask is that they be family friendly!
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris kicks off the Springtime in Paris movie marathon hosted by me and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
This was such a sweet movie and perfect to get me into the mood for happy, joyful spring.
The movie, based on the book of the same name by Paul Gallico, features a very talented cast, including Leslie Manville, Alba Baptista, Lucas Bravo, Jason Isaacs, Rose Williams, Isabella Hupert, and Lambert Wilson.
Released in 2022, it was directed by Anthony Fabien and takes place in 1957.
The movie tells the story of Ada Harris, a widowed and self-employed housekeeper from Battersea, England.
This is a small spoiler, but we don’t know when the movie starts that Ada is widowed and neither does she. She finds out near the beginning of the movie and this launches her into a journey to follow her dream of one day owning a beautiful dress made by Christian Dior.
She develops this dream after she sees one of the designer’s dresses in the bedroom of one of her clients.
This client is always making excuses why she can’t pay Mrs. Harris her fee, yet she can somehow afford a $500 dress from Paris.
When Mrs. Harris wins a bit of money after betting on the horse races she tells her friend and fellow house cleaner, Vi, that she’s going to save up and buy a dress from Christian Dior. Vi doesn’t understand why Mrs. Harris wants to do this and I don’t think Mrs. Harris really understands why she wants to either at that point.
Not only is Mrs. Harris going to buy a dress from Christian Dior, she’s going to take herself to Paris to get it.
There are all kinds of ups and downs on this journey but I won’t share them with you, so I don’t spoil the movie if you haven’t seen it. I will say that Mrs. Harris is much too nice of a woman and often helps out a “rising starlet” (or at least she thinks she is one) and many others who don’t show her the same regard.
Eventually, Mrs. Harris will get to Paris and meet a few lovely characters, including a young man and woman and a man her age who seems to be interested in her romantically.
She barges her way into the fashion house of Christian Dior and meets its staff and it’s creator in the early days of what is now a fashion giant.
Before she goes to Paris, Mrs. Harris tells her friend Vi, “That’s what we are, Vi. Invisible women.”
In Paris, the so-called invisible woman immediately charms everyone at the fashion house. From the models to the seamstresses, they are all completely shocked and amazed that this woman has come to their design house to order a dress and has saved up all her money to do so.
Their normal customers are rich and just toss money out to get what they want. Those customers take for granted all the hard work the men and women who make these gowns put into them. All of it fascinates Mrs. Harris, though. She’s refreshing and down to earth and doesn’t care about being fancy or “proper.”
She learns that Dior isn’t just a dress, it’s a feeling, an atmosphere — it’s all the hard work of the women who sew and alter and design and create to make each dress unique and special.
This is before the time of assembly line designing. Each dress was made for the person who would be wearing it which is what made it so special to have.
At one point Mrs. Harris says about the dress making process, “It’s not sewing. It’s making moonlight.”
As I watched Mrs. Harris being driven through the streets of Paris, I wondered how they film scenes like this in modern times. All the cars around them and parked on the streets are from the 1950s but I am certain those are not the cars being driven in Paris now. There are a lot of close-up shots of the actors as they are driving or shots that angle the camera up so that the road isn’t seen, so maybe that’s how they do it. Either way, it’s very convincing and completely immerses the viewer in the movie.
I should mention that Leslie Manville was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. Costume designer Jenny Beaven was also nominated for a number of awards for costume design, including the Academy Awards.
I enjoyed this interview with the cast about the movie, if you are interested in learning more about the making of the movie. I recommend watching it after you watch the movie because you might receive a few spoilers watching it.
While watching it, I was struck by something Leslie Manville told the interviewer.
“It feels like the kind of film we are ready for right now,” she said. “You can just go to the cinema, shut the rest of the world away, just temporarily, because we need to do that, and just escape into this beautiful, slightly fantastical world of Ada Harris and just go with her on her journey.”
Here is the rest of our schedule for our Springtime in Paris movie event:
How to Steal A Million (April 10)
Paris Blues (April 17)
Hugo (April 24)
The Intouchables (May 1)
Charade Group Zoom on May 4 – this is where you can all join us for a watch party! (writing about it May 8)
Here is where you can find the movies on streaming:
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris: Amazon, Fandango, GooglePlay, Apple TV (this one was also on Peacock when I originally chose it.)
How to Steal A Million: Amazon, YouTube, GooglePlay, Fandango and Apple.
Paris Blues: YouTube for free (just search for it), Tubi, Amazon, Google Play, PlutoTV, Fandango at Home, YouTubeTV
Hugo: Amazon, Fandango at Home, Pluto TV, AppleTV
The Intouchables (warning this is an R movie and no, I don’t know why, but I’m guessing some language. It is also French and subtitled so this is NOT the American remake.): DisneyPlus, Amazon (on Prime as I write this), Fandango, Plex, YouTubeTV, Google Play, AppleTV, and Hulu
Charade (pretty much everywhere): Crackle, Tubi, Plex, Amazon, AppleTV, GooglePlay, YouTube, YouTubeTV, The Roku Channel, Fubo.
If you watched the movie this week, or watch it later and write about it, and want to link your post you can do so at the link below. The link will be available until May.
I needed something to distract me from every day life last week so I watched That Touch of Mink with Doris Day and Cary Grant. I am very certain I’ve watched either all or part of this movie before but it has been years so I didn’t remember much about it.
This is quite a modern movie for 1962.
Cary Grant is a no nonsense, yet still kind and understanding, businessman and Doris Day is a young woman from a small town living in a big city and trying to find a job.
This movie was meant to be a comedy, so I tried not to be too uptight about how Cary Grant was essentially trying to get into Doris Day’s pants without actually committing to a relationship for the entire movie.
I have to say that I didn’t really like Cary for most of this movie and my husband said it is probably because of the fact Cary really didn’t want to make the movie, according to articles he has read about it. While I didn’t find articles online specifically saying he didn’t like the film, I did find information that Doris Day wrote in her autobiography that Cary was polite and professional on set but that there was really no “give and take” between them.
First a little summary:
This movie takes place in 1962 starts with Doris Day walking down the street and getting splashed by a car that Cary’s character (Philip Shayne) is riding in. He feels bad but he can’t stop because he is on his way to a very important meeting. We find out later that Doris’s character (Cathy Timberlake) is looking for a job and Philip is a shrewd but also generous businessman with a friend, Roger, (played by Gig Young) who is a bit of a leach. Philip does actually feel awful about splashing Cathy and tells Roger he’d love to find the woman and apologize.
Luckily they are looking out the office window not long afterward and see Cathy walking into a diner across the street.
He orders Roger to take her some money to apologize. Roger is hoping the woman will want to tell Phillip off. He’s sick of Phillip getting all the women despite his flippant attitude. Cathy does want to tell Phillip off so Roger takes her to Phillip immediately.
Unfortunately for Roger, Cathy falls for Phillip immediately. Phillip sees this as a chance to sweep another woman off her feet by taking her on trips around the world.
He starts to do just that and Cathy wants him to like her so she goes along with him — flying to Baltimore for a speech he’s giving, then to Philadelphia for a quick dinner. One night he even takes her to a New York Yankees game, into the dugout where we meet the real Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra.
Soon though, Phillip wants her to go on vacation with him to Bermuda and she’s not sure if she means he wants her to stay in the same room with him or if they will have separate rooms. He definitely wants her to stay in the room with him, which causes her to breakout in a full body rash and skuttles his plans.
She’s a good girl from Sandusky, Ohio after all. Girls from Sandusky don’t go running off with men on vacation and sleep with them unless they have a ring on their finger and have said “I do” to marriage vows.
Cathy returns home disappointed in herself because she didn’t sleep with Phillip but also fairly annoyed at him for thinking she would after they’ve known each other for only a short time.
She wants to break out of her boring girl mold, though, and decides to try again — telling Phillip she’ll go with him again to Bermuda and she will give him what he wants. She doesn’t say exactly that but the viewer gets her drift.
Sadly, things don’t work out this time either but you will have to watch the movie to find out why.
The movie is a series of miscommunications, silly tropes, and goofy interactions. One of those miscommunications is between Roger and his therapist. Roger is sharing the story about Cathy and Phillip but the therapist walks out of the room and only hears part of the story, leading him to believe that Roger is becoming involved with another man, which I thought was a very progressive (for lack of a better word) joke for the early 1960s. That joke carries on throughout the movie with Roger continually trying to update the therapist on Phillip and Cathy but the therapist instead believing that Phillip has been trying to woo Roger instead.
I found it interesting that this movie was one of the last ones where Cary was a leading man.
It was his 69th movie and he was in his 50s. An article on TCM.com states that he must have known his time for playing leading men was waning.
“He made one more picture in which he was the dashing leading man, Charade (1963), opposite Audrey Hepburn,” the article reads. “After that, he appeared as a grizzled old beachcomber in Father Goose (1964), then as a British gentleman who plays Cupid for the young romantic leads in Walk Don’t Run (1966), his last film before retiring from the screen.
The article goes on: “Doris Day’s string of box office hits continued though with somewhat diminishing returns over the next six years in ten more films. After With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), the actress retired from the big screen. Her hit TV sitcom, The Doris Day Show, ran from 1968 to 1973, changing formats and storylines almost very season.”
As for my feelings on the film, I liked it overall but didn’t like the message that women should just go sleep with men they are not married to. The end of the movie would have feminists of today growling in anger but it was most likely what made most every day movie goers happy at the time.
I couldn’t figure out while I watched it if Cary was bored during the movie or if it was how he was playing Phillip Shayne. Maybe he wanted Phillip to have no real personality beyond seeming bored and like he expected women to fall in bed with him. The man didn’t even seem excited by the prospect of sex. He just seemed to expect that it would happen, and he would move on to the next woman.
Years ago, I was reading about Cary and his use of LSD as an attempt to help him with his depression and other mental issues. Many psychiatrists at the time prescribed LSD as part of psychological therapy. It wasn’t yet a recreational drug.
Both Gig Young and Cary used the therapy and as I researched for this film I read that Gig sadly killed his 31-year-old wife and then himself in 1978 when he was 64. I wonder how much the drug affected his brain at the time and left him worse off than he had been. He was also an alcoholic, though, so that most likely played an even larger role than the LSD. Either way it is sad.
I also sometimes wonder if the drug was why Cary seemed so blasé and uninterested in his movies during this particular time period.
I don’t think this is a movie I would watch again but it was a fun escape.
I should also mention the other star of the movie: The Automat.
The Automat was an automatic-type diner where restaurant goers could go in and choose what they wanted by pushing a button on what looked like post office boxes and then could open a door and the food would be slid to them through the tiny hole. I had never seen anything like it before this movie. Cathy’s friend Connie worked at one and delivered the food. That’s where Cathy would go to talk to her. It seemed like a very busy job since Connie and only one or two other co-workers would have to slide the food into the little box for the people to retrieve.
Have you ever seen this movie? What did you think of it?
A few months ago, I wrote about the first Nancy Drew centered episode of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys show from the 1970s. For the first season of the show, the episodes switched off each week between the two mystery solvers — with one week featuring The Hardy Boys and the next week featuring Nancy Drew.
This week I will be focusing on the episode, The Mystery of the Diamond Triangle.
In season one, Nancy Drew is portrayed by Pamela Sue Martin (not to be confused with the chestier Pamela Anderson). Part way through season two she left the show because she felt that Nancy Drew was receiving less and less screen time and was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson.
For now, though, we will be discussing episodes where Pamela was portraying Nancy.
We start the episode with Nancy and George flying over scenery in a small plane and George about to throw up from air sickness. She tells Nancy that she was conned into coming up into the plan and Nancy admits she tricked her friend because she needed a witness in the plane in order for her to get her Diamond Triangle Certification (whatever that is).
All I want to know is why Nancy doesn’t have a certified trainer with her as the witness, but…okay…details schmetails. Let’s just go with it.
It also feels a little mean for her to do this to George.
“Yeah, you get a diamond triangle, and I get a nervous breakdown,” George says.
Sounds like most of her adventures with Nancy. If I was her, I’d get a new friend. Nancy is pretty bossy and likes to tell people what to do in the show. I think she likes having George be her little lacky and witness all her exploits.
George is quite whiny in this first season. She’s a mix of Bess and George from the books since there is no Bess in the show. In the books Bess is afraid of everything, and George is more adventurous like Nancy.
While they are in the air, a storm breaks out and Nancy has to find a way to get out in front of it. This takes her off course and while George is worried about them being caught in a storm, Nancy is more upset that she won’t get her Diamond Triangle Award.
While going off course, Nancy notices a car on a dirt road below them swerving around and then crashing. She has her friend Ned Nickerson, who was following them in a truck on the road, call the police for them. This gets Ned in trouble later when the police chief shows up and accuses Ned of filing a false police report. The chief says there was no accident because the road they are talking about has been barricaded for three years when the bridge was washed out.
(Ned Nickerson was Nancy’s boyfriend in the books, by the way. In the show he’s her attorney dad’s lacky and her want-to-be boyfriend.)
The bizarre thing is that Nancy’s dad, attorney Carson Drew, tells Ned he will have to go with the police for questioning, even though Nancy saw the accident and told Ned to call. The chief is all like, “Yep. Let’s go.”
Really? In this day and age, people don’t get arrested for actual crimes or if they do, they are released again but this kid is getting called in for something Nancy actually did?
She’s a serious troublemaker.
Nancy isn’t pleased that the chief has doubted her and tells George they are going out to investigate what happened on their own.
Here is another example where I really don’t like Nancy from the show. When they get to the site of the bridge that is out, she snarks at George, “Don’t worry George, you won’t have to close your eyes this time. We’re on the ground now.”
Hello? Snotty much? Your friend is always risking her life for you, and you repay her by talking down to her? Like I said above, George really needs a new friend.
I suppose the makers of the show were trying to make her tough and bold and that’s all fine and good but why do women on TV have to be snotty to show they are bold and tough?
I think the makers of the show could have made Nancy be strong and brave without making her overbearing and rude. Her outfits are cute at least.
Nancy’s investigation leads her to call the local antique car club to ask them if they know anyone who owns an antique car like the one that went off the road. They only know of two people so Nancy heads to the first name, a young man named Morgan Poole.
Morgan says his car is in the storage barn and is always parked there.
Nancy asks to see it. Of course,it isn’t there so Nancy says Morgan better get a lawyer, which her dad luckily is.
What does he need a lawyer for? I have no idea…it’s not a crime for a car to crash, but it is a crime for the car to be stolen so Morgan should have been calling the police.
He needs a lawyer, it turns out, because his insurance company says they aren’t going to pay for the car since Morgan didn’t prove he fixed up the car before it was stolen.
How did Nancy know this would happen? Who even knows, but luckily Daddy Drew was there to help.
Carson Drew tries to argue with the insurance guy that Morgan should get his money back for the stolen car and it should be paid for because Morgan upgraded the car. The insurance man says, “Nope…he never brought me in the proof of the appraisal that the car had been improved.”
The insurance guy says he might pay out but only if Morgan can prove he improved the car and that will require receipts. Morgan traded other car collectors for the part and doesn’t have receipts, which makes the insurance guy pull Mr. Drew over for a somber “side bar” during which he suggests that the young man may be trying to commit insurance fraud.
Dun-dun-dun-dun!
The car is found later that day, and it requires about 50 police officers and a few photographers to retrieve it because it has been set on fire and pushed into a ravine. There was no one inside so I’m not sure why there were so many police on scene. The budget for those extras was most likely why they didn’t have a budget for actual writers.
Carson, Nancy, George and Ned all go to look at the car in the ravine and Ned declares this means the misdemeanor charge of “crank calls” against him can be dropped. I’m sorry??? This moron chief charged the kid with crank calls when Nancy said she saw it? Guy sounds like a real Barney Fife.
But now, with the appearance of the car, Carson Drew says poor Morgan clearly committed insurance fraud by getting a higher binder on the car when he called to say it had been upgraded and then burning the car. Nancy refuses to believe Morgan would do that because he loved the car and worked so hard to refurbish it.
She grabs a rope and begins to climb into the pit where the car is while the chief and her father look on, and don’t even try to stop her. Yeah…okay…believable.
During this we hear an awkward football metaphor from Nacy that ends with an awkward come on line from Ned that Nancy can play in his backfield anytime.
WHAT? Just….no.
Anyhow, the police actually arrest this kid for felony insurance fraud. Like put him in actual jail.
Let me pause for a well drawn out facepalm.
Nancy still wants to help Morgan, so she visits him in jail like she owns the place and tells him she wants to help him. He doesn’t want her help because he knows he’s been framed but no one will believe him.
“Well, I’m going to find out anyhow,” Nancy declares. “I don’t like being made a fool of!”
And off she marches to find out what really happens.
She is in another stunner of an outfit with a shiny pink shirt and a really cute skirt in this scene, incidentally. No sarcasm on my part here. Her outfits are very nice.
Ned and Nancy take off in a plane again with Ned not wearing his glasses for some reason and Nancy pointing that out. She bosses him and scolds him in the same way she does George. “Keep it steady! Use the controls. Take some speed off! Go down! Lift up! I said keep it steady, Ned!”
She gets a bit of a taste of her own medicine when she starts to feel sick to her stomach from Ned’s flying.
She sees a man below her in the bushes and tells Ned.
“Where?” he asks.
“Never mind. Just keep your bearing!” she snaps.
Then we switch to some bad looking men reporting to each other that there is a plane flying low over them.
Back to Nancy and Ned and they are flying too low, about to crash. More yelling from Nancy who is a few seconds short of calling him a “blithering idiot” and then she takes over and has to land the plane in a nearby field.
Uht-oh…this means the bad guys have seen them, but, luckily, they end up leaving them alone because Ned and Nancy are “just a bunch of kids.”
Later Nancy wants to explore more but Ned puts his foot down and says, “Nancy, you can’t go out there alone and if you want my help you will need to do it on my terms!”
This pisses off the feminist Nancy and she tells she and George should go out there alone and find out what the real story is.
Oh my gosh…my husband had a huge crush on this actress, but she is really not a good actress. She’s always yelling or snapping but she barely has any inflection in her tone.
So, George and Nancy go snooping and find out that cars are being stolen and smuggled across the broken bridge to a warehouse. Also, while snooping they are walking through the woods and there are weird bird sounds that George says are from an an owl. Um..no. Those bird sounds are from an Amazon rainforest, which neither of these girls are in.
They discover a ‘villain lair’ but really don’t know if they are villains or what they are doing. They try to sneak off, but the men hear them walking away and go to look for them.
Back in Carson’s office, he’s got Morgan out on bail and is telling Morgan he thinks he’s guilty of the crime and the little snot better fess up. During all this I keep wondering where in the world are Morgan’s parents or family? Do they not care about their family member possibly going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit?
A member of the police department is brought into the meeting with lawyer and client and all three begin to brainstorm what might really be going on. They decide it might be a car stealing racket where someone is stealing the cars buyers are looking for, giving them a new paint job, and then passing them on to the buyers. Huh. Odd they didn’t think of this before but instead decided to rush forward to attempt to prosecute a teenager for a felony.
Anyhow, now we are back to Nancy and George who have uncovered the very plot Carson and the police offer suggested in in a warehouse somewhere out in the jungle — I mean woods in some American state. They are outside looking in at an essential chop shop when they are caught by the two scary bad guys they saw in a tiny shed earlier.
Meanwhile, Ned has somehow used a computer program to pinpoint where all the cars are being taken from and finds out they were all insured by the same insurance company.
Ned decides to go back to where the broken bridge is to see if that is where Nancy went. I found it interesting that he’s also using a CB radio to try to contact Mr. Drew to tell him what is going on. Of course Mr. Drew walks in the house just as Ned is trying to contact him.
Ned tells him where he is going and Mr. Drew, who still has the police officer with him, tells him he’ll meet him there.
Ned tries to rescue the girls before Mr. Drew arrives though and is discovered which results in all three of them being chased around the warehouse by the bad guys. When Ned hears the police sirens he opens the door to the warehouse, letting the police come in and nab the bad guys.
As for the burned out car — Ned says the bad guys did that to try to throw the police off the scent while they moved their operations elsewhere.
Unfortunately, Morgan is now out a car and all the parts he paid for ,but Nancy and George say they want to find a way to make the police give him a reward for helping them break up the car stealing ring. Ah, if only small municipal police departments had that kind of money to throw around.
Anyhow, this concludes another review/recollection of a Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode. Have you seen this crazy ride of an episode before?
If you want to listen to a podcast about this episode and all things Nancy Drew, check out the True Drew Podcast hosted by Avery: https://www.truedrewpodcast.com/
