Little House: "At the End of the Rainbow"

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was the episode of Little House where Laura and her little buddy (who looks like a Monchichi) think they find gold in Plum Creek or whatever the creek was where they always went fishing. So it all starts when Mary drops a nickel on the ground and Willie and Monchichi get in a fight over it. Luckily, Mary is able to identify her nickel by the dent in the side (what?), so Miss Beadle gives it back to her and makes a comment about Sutter's Mill. This leads to a class lesson about Sutter's Mill, because Miss Beadle is all about the teachable moments. So then Laura and Monchichi go fishing and Monchichi hooks a fish and his line gets snagged and Laura goes into the water to help out and she's thrashing around like a bear and the fish gets away, plus she scares off all the other fish, like, good one, Laura. But then Laura notices all of these gold flakes on the bottom of the creek, like, how did they come to this creek practically every day and never notice the gold flakes before? But such is the way of Little House, so you just have to go with it. So then Laura and Monchichi decide to take all the gold out and get lots of money for their families, but they have to keep it a secret or it will be Sutter's Mill all over again. But the awesome parts were the fantasies that Laura had about her life after she got rich from the gold. In the first one, she and Mary wore all white and tiaras and rode up to school in a carriage. And Nellie and Willie were standing there in ratty clothes and dirty hair, like, I don't know why they got poor just because Laura got rich, like, apparently the wealth in Walnut Grove was a zero-sum game. And then Laura and Mary presented Miss Beadle with a box full of shiny apples, and then Nellie gave Miss Beadle an old, wormy apple and Miss Beadle just tossed it over her shoulder, which was pretty awesome. And then in Laura's second fantasy, the whole Ingalls clan was dressed all in white and the dirty Olesons were waiting on them hand and foot. And then in her third fantasy, every business in town had been renamed for the Ingalls family, including the Ingalls Mill, the Ingalls Bank, and the Ingalls Mercantile. Also, the town was renamed Ingalls Grove. So I guess Laura never heard of a little thing called humility. But then at the end, it turned out that it was fool's gold instead of real gold and Laura was all bummed out and they played the Little House theme in a minor key, but then Pa came and they had a heart-to-heart and everything was better. Which was awesome.

House Wars

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a new show on the USA Network called House Wars. It features four families, each of which moves into a new house in a development in Arizona. Each family is also teamed up with a designer, and each week, they have to decorate one room in the house. The rooms are then judged, and at the end of the season, the team with the most points wins their house. It sounds pretty basic, but the producers obviously made an effort to put each team with the designer that would cause the most conflict. This week, the teams had to work on the master bathroom, which included installing the toilets, sinks, showers, and flooring. The first team got pissed off at their super-flaky designer, and one woman called the designer a bitch about three times. Which was awesome, since the designer is so self-absorbed that she couldn't figure out why her team was pissed. The second team got a designer who clearly doesn't want to do any work, because she disappeared once the challenge was announced, and only showed up again at the very end, when she informed her team that she had just spent $600 on fabric, which put them over budget. In addition, her team only had a few hours left, and they hadn't even installed the tub at that point. The third team is all youngish women who have never done home stuff before, and so their designer ends up doing most of the work while they have paint fights. And the third team is a dad and his hottie triplet daughters. Their designer is a total diva named "Barclay" who actually slammed one triplet's arm in his car door "accidentally" when they got in a fight. So far all of the conflict has been between teams and their designers, but since each team consists of family members, I'm sure they will start arguing soon. And it will be awesome.