Colors, Mad Men

As you can see, I changed the template for my blog recently. I found it online, and just tweaked it a little bit. The first version featured the dark brown background, with a light brown foreground that appeared on my laptop screen to be a taupe-like color, kind of like hot chocolate (the powdered kind). Then I looked at it on my home monitor, and wow, it was so different. More like coffee with cream. It was a tad too yellow for my tastes, so I adjusted it. Now when I look at it on my laptop, it appears almost pink! So much for being picky about how it looks. It seems everyone will get a different effect, depending on their screen. Oh well.

While I'm here, I'd love to blab on about what's up, but really, there's not much. Work is slow. It can be boring, and the day can go by soooo slooooowly (and yet somehow it seems unreal that July is almost over!!). Yet it also affords time to just sit and chat with coworkers, and I love everyone I work with. At home, things are the same. Comet is well. The house is fine. I've got grass growing now, but it's crabgrass, which is supposedly the bane of every gardener's existence. I say, at least it's green! The weather here has been super hot and muggy, until the skies decide to give it up and just rain already. Then it cools off a bit. Today isn't too bad though. I plan to start growing some herbs, so maybe I'll post some pictures here of the progress.

I've been watching this great show on AMC called Mad Men. It's been getting a lot of attention because it won Golden Globes and now it's nominated for 16 Emmys. There was a marathon on Sunday of the entire first season (Season 2 starts Sunday). I watched many that day, and have been watching the rest this week. It's fantastic. It takes place in 1960 (although I hear season 2 will open on Valentine's Day 1962) and they've created a universe which, whether or not it's realistic, is quite amusing. Doctors smoking as they examine patients, pregnant women tossing back cocktails, children playing with plastic bags on their heads, the divorcee who moves in down the block causing as much controversy as an interracial gay couple would cause in Alabama today. And oh, the womanizing! No wonder women felt the need to start a movement! The main character of the show is Don Draper, an ad man working on Madison Avenue. His colleagues have no qualms about telling the "girls" from the steno pool to shorten their skirts--and they do it! Don himself is married with two kids, but had two affairs in the first season alone. His wife has anxiety attacks (wouldn't you?) so she sees a psychiatrist, who reports on her issues to her husband as if they're dealing with a child. His boss is openly anti-Semitic, and there is nary a minority to be found in the entire office. His boss also has a heart attack, and says something along the lines of, "I always thought it would be my ulcer. I drank the cream, ate the butter, just like I was told, and now this." It's crazy how much things can change in just under 50 years. It sounds like a long time in terms of one person's life span, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to all of history. The Middle Ages lasted, depending on whom you ask, from 500-700 years, where everything stayed basically the same. The pace in modern times is pretty swift.