PHIL, YOU NUT

Busy times at the house...we're about to try something new for our semi-staycation: camping out.

Not full-blown Bear Grylls stuff, certainly not. We've got a cabin for starters, and if that works out for Noodle and Beast we'll try something more rustic in the future. Her Awesomeness has been camp-supply hunting all week, and me? I've been watching stuff like this:



It's assuring to know there are places where it's not raining.

TRANSLATION TIME

And now, radio-weather-forecast-speak translated into plain Hudson Valley English:

Scattered storms = six hours of relentless torrential downpours (see today's forecast)
Isolated storms = isolated...over you
Slight chance of storms = if you leave the umbrella in the car, the skies will open up when you're a country mile from the clubhouse and knee-deep in the rough
Sunny, clear, dry = archaic terms, no longer in use

AND THEN THERE ARE THOSE DAYS...

...where everything works wonderfully:

Congratulations, my darling Noodle.

ANOTHER THING ONLY PARENTS SAY

"Stop licking the maracas."

ADDITIONAL THINGS ONLY PARENTS SAY

"Get your monkey out of the yogurt."

"Now your fairy's all wet."

"If you kept your feet out of your mouth you wouldn't need so many antibiotics."

"NO MORE FAKE BELCHING!"

THREE EXCELLENT REGIONAL CAUSES

The first one is to help out five-year-old Frankie Flora of Wappingers, attacked by a pit bull back in April and now recovering from some heartbreaking injuries. It's going to take him one heck of a long time to come back.

That's www.frankiefund.com.

The second one is in memory of a brave and dedicated radio colleague of mine, Jen Coudrey - who died last week after seven years battling a rare form of cancer.

www.jenfund.org is where you want to go. I only worked with Jen for three years, and hadn't seen her in ages - but on any given day, even in her suffering, she continued to be one of those rare souls who spurred the people around them to try to live their lives in the best possible way.

And finally there's continued great work being done at Albany Medical Center, who saw my darling Noodle through more than two years of treatment for kidney disease (still in remission!). Here's their link, and you can check out the Vasculitis Foundation for more on Henoch-Schönlein purpura, the condition that triggered her kidney disease.

This concludes the earnest and serious segment of our blogging day.

THEY'D PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO BE

Excellent list from the Onion of the top 25 kids' TV shows probably made by people in states of mind that were pharmaceutically altered.

I would only throw in Tiny Planets to make it complete. There's even a character named Bong, so...