Gotta give credit where it's due: if I wake up at 4 a.m. in a NYC hotel room, it's very unlikely that I'll be able to find an open newsstand anymore. And the few bodegas that run 24-hours -- I don't want to drink their yecho coffee anyway.

So it's nice to know that here at Berea-Rose the WSJ hits my driveway before 5 a.m. -- today I was all set up in my back room with hot coffee and a crisp newspaper by 4:30. That's living.

The weather is finally breaking around here, with temps going into the 40s yesterday. We broke out the Nerf and hit the street to toss it around. Then I got Da Chimps' bicycles into fighting shape and they rolled around a little while longer. Might even make it to 50 degrees later this week. In the Cleveland area, that's as good as August.

Mojo told me this morning that he wanted to make a poop so large that it would poke out of someone else's toilet.

I found this quite ambitious on its own -- even without his added goal that someone be sitting on that toilet when this happened.

I told this to my co-worker and his only response was, "And this is after you cut off the cable TV?"

Makes me think I should turn the service back on -- this kid's brain is a little too active.

Right now I'm blasting some old (it's old already!) Leftfield on the stereo downstairs and for some reason it's making me think of Thanksgiving 2006 when Merle and Ree joined me in the kitchen of Berea-Rose and we suddenly fell into a spontaneous symphony of celebratory food-prep -- as if we'd been making the sausage stuffings and squash soups as a team our whole lives. Reemus and Marlo: you are the coolest cousins.

And Mojo is one messed up kid.

The jesuitical Mojo has declared a Lenten sacrifice: for 40 days he will forgo gaming on his Nintendo DS.

As with all things Mojo, the sacrifice comes with an out: all the good games are on the Wii. Giving up handheld gaming leaves a loophole large enough for Mario to drive his Kart through.

But last night brought a further Motion for Relief: Mojo wanted to play a GameBoy game, and wanted to do it without breaking his faux Lenten resolution. At first, I misunderstood his request:

"Well, it hardly seems consistent with giving up handheld gaming on the DS to then just do all your handheld gaming on the GameBoy. But since it is a different platform, I guess you'd still be within your commitment."

But I had it wrong. He wanted to plug the GameBoy game card into the DS and play it that way. (Apparently the platform is backward-compatible.) The rabbinical court of Mastandrea promptly ruled this technique out of bounds.

Got a pot full of beef shanks and meatballs simmering in the stovetop. Berea-Rose is filled with a heavenly aroma -- perfect for a sacred Sunday morning (even one that has Mojo sitting in a living room corner furiously thumbing the controls of his GameBoy).

I like to keep track of things that don't matter. It keeps my mind blissfully unburdened by thoughts and cares that might otherwise have real consequence.

And so I declare that I just now used our basement shower-stall for the second time ever. And it was a good shower. I'm not sure what I was thinking when we first moved in, but after the moving van dumped out all our belongings back in May 2006 I happily dropped into place a bar of soap and a half-empty bottle of shampoo. What, did I think I'd be washing down there several times a week? Who knows.

Even today I didn't wake up planning to shower down there. In fact, I skipped the shower altogether for the day's first trip to Giant Beagle. Unshaven and unwashed I walked the aisles, loaded up on the grocery, and frightened the locals. Got back and did a few things out in the garage -- collapsing boxes (Space Ghost says it's the responsible thing to do) and changing the rear wiper on the Subaru.

(Oh, and that too is a first -- friggin car has been scraping by on the same stripped and exhausted rear wiper since we drove it off the lot back in 2006.)

Anyway, I shaved at the tiny sink in the bathroom off the kitchen (another first!) because Alane was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. Then I went up and got ready to shower. Then Alane saw me. From behind her caustic washrag she shot me the hairy eyeball -- as if I was about to undo all her work.

"I'm taking a shower, not a colonic."

It didn't matter, so I went to the basement. And what a treat: it's a totally no-frills stall with an excellent pre-Gore showerhead and that half-full bottle of Clairol Herbal Essences clarifying shampoo (with palm oil!) that I must've first opened back in 2005. I cranked up the hot water and luxuriated. Great experience. The bare-bulb lighting created a perffect underground ambiance and the stall's industrial utilitarianism was perfect for blasting the industrial stink off my no-frills body.

And now what remains of my hair smells as it did back in 2005.

Still got a few things to do today. Been a busy week around here. I've taken a new tack in waking the boys for school each morning -- I blast the rather-strong speakers on my computer in the room across the hall and play something ridiculous. Yesterday it was this:

A ton of snow fell on Berea-Rose yesterday. Da Chimpz were still out there today playing in the tunnels they burrowed through the mighty banks.

Later, with Mojo at the mall with his grandma, Cookie and I had vicious snowball fight in the driveway. I hate to say it but I think he won -- effectively landing a giant snow-form right onto the flat of my face, where it exploded in a cloud of tiny ice crystals. I became a Bumble.

Got a nice fire going downstairs. Alane just turned the game on so maybe I'll watch some of it. Or not -- I just don't have the patience.

And what the hell are these Duraflame logs that purport to burn in "festive" colors? The flame is just sort of bluish. Until you throw in some regular wood logs, like I just did (and like you're not supposed to). Then they burn very blue. And big. Eh, better than that stack of newspapers I immolated the other night. Made the house stink like the apartment buildings on the corner of 38th Street. Glad that's over.

I've been in a mischievous mood this week, so I got out my ancient Dr. Demento audio. Now Da Chimpz are familiar with the classics -- yesterday I rousted them from bed by blasting Frank Zappa singing "watch out where the huskies go, don't you eat that yellow snow." Then we went downstairs for breakfast (not St. Alfonzo's pancakes; I did not steal the margarine).

We also found this online. And we are struck by its genius. Spatula.



Oh, and there's also this guy. Genius? You be the judge.

Last night I was watching Cops and they had a segment filmed in Palm Beach County. I was especially fascinated when the text on the screen showed that the cop was patrolling the Northlake area. I saw that and said out loud: "North cake."

I couldn't help it; it's a reflex.

Alane, who was disgusted that I'd be watching the show, was sitting next to me reading a book. I picked up the phone and said to her: "I'm going to call Steve and get him to say the words 'north cake.'"

So I dialed the phone and told Steve that I was watching a police car patrol Northlake. He said: "North cake."

This morning I got up very early and started the gravy to the lilting tunes of The Smiths. Been a while since I played that stuff. And I had to laugh as Morrissey groaned out his "...the calf that you carve with a smile, is murder..." as I was just then in the process of slicing some beef shanks to get better browning of the meat around the bone.

I'll make the meatballs when we get back from Mass. Maybe for that I'll play "Every Day Is Like Sunday."

So met a total Debbie Downer today. People like that don't deserve any macaroni.
On a much better note, I'm trying out a new skincare. I think my eczema will clear up.

We rented the nature film "Earth" this weekend -- that HD spectacular that features many of the planets most interesting and tasty animals. As we watched I was a bit concerned that the film's soft-propagandizing would have an effect on Da Chimpz, but I needn't have worried. As they showed some weird-looking cranes migrating from Mongolia to India over rugged mountains I heard Cookie singing under his breath "Holiday in Cambodia."

Quite right.

No WSJ today. Maybe they're not printing today. So my paper delivery service is either mistakenly or mockingly giving me a chance to read the Plain Dealer -- that's what was in my driveway this morning. I rarely read it because it is profoundly crappy and dishonest.

It still is -- I read a few articles just now and saw all the familiar laziness of conventional thinking. Sad, but hey, that's entertainment.

This blog has been dead all year -- we rang in 2010 without the obligatory message of high hopes! What the hell, it snowed around here for about two weeks straight earlier this month. Only in the last week did we get above freezing long enough to put some melt on.

We must ask Jenia about the snow levels in Russia and compare them to Berea. Everything these days feel so... Soviet.