ONLY THING MISSING IS THE CAKE LEFT OUT...

...in the rain that's falling. My least favorite weather, this cold blatting rain. Six or seven degrees colder and we'd have a proper snowstorm with wife and children all home from school and rolling around in the snow before snarfling down some hot cocoa. But this? Bleh. And just 25 miles away as the crow flies, up on Slide Mountain in Ulster County, there's 10 inches of snow so far.

Why of course this would be the day the minivan door refuses to shut when I'm trying to get Beast out of the car at the doctor's office. The good thing about this is that while I was trying to figure out what was stuck in the door, Beast was madly stomping through puddles and getting his pants soaking wet, which would not normally be a good thing except that he had just had an accident (#1), and by The Guy Code we can consider the puddle-stomping a pre-rinse.

We shan't breathe a word of this to the lady of the manor, mmkay?

So.

Dislodge stuck toy from door, finally get Beast inside, change pants, check in with front desk, into the bloodletting chamber to show son how brave Daddy is when he gets a needle pinch, back out the door, into the car, stop at the CVS, of course the vitamin/fluoride pills the boy needs are common as dirt everywhere else in the universe but here they're on six-month backorder as they are at every other pharmacy in town, back to the car, oh NO don't fall asleep YET little guy...

The heck with it. Beast and I are both feeling vaguely coming-down-with-somethingy, and that cinches things. It's officially the kind of day to veg on the couch - and we'll be making that cocoa anyway, snowlessness be damned. Take us away, Backyardigans!

NOT ALL THE WEIRD STUFF HAPPENS AT MY HOUSE

There's these people in Accord, who found some old guy on their roof trying to steal phone service.

Responding deputies arrested Depuy after discovering that he had spliced into the victim's phone line and ran his own phone line from the residence to his camp in the woods. Dpuy lives in a makeshift camp in the woods behind the residence.

And apparently it's his property - there's just no house on it. This should come as a relief to all those locals who've been complaining that all the country properties are being bought up by soulless hedge-fund master-of-the-universe types. There's still eccentrics in them thar hills.