I really, really, really should have spent the evening typing tonight. I have a big project that's not close enough to finished to allow me to sleep well, but sometimes ya just gotta sit on the couch and eat ice cream and watch brainless TV. Or, at least, I do.

The evening's entertainment started with Extreme Makeover: Homes I Will Never Have Edition, which is fun because I can literally sit on the couch and listen to my IQ decrease. Ty is just so precious, I want to drop a house on him and see if that slows him down at all. Didn't work out so well for the Wicked Witch of the East, but she wasn't hyperactive and corporate-sponsored. My money's on Ty.

The thing that I most love about that show is when people act surprised about things they have no business acting surprised about. Just the starting sequence, when the team rolls up in a big, loud bus in a suburban neighborhood in which bus traffic is unheard of, thereby setting off every barking dog within three miles and smearing celebrity-hungry noses against poorly cleaned windows, and then tiptoeing out of the bus in order to shout at the family with a bullhorn at what is supposedly a very early hour - that's all just funny to me. I adore the idea that, okay, this family is beaten down and hurting and pathetic and yet heart-of-gold wonderful, so let's scare 'em with loud noises early in the morning and see what happens. "The Knickerbocker family lost everything. Their mother. Their canned goods. Their toilet. Their parakeet Bud. And then their first-edition copy of the Monopoly board game. And then the shock of getting on our show left Grandpa on the hallway floor with what appears to be a heart attack. [PAUSE FOR FROWNY FACE AND SIGH] So, let's see the house before we send you all - well, all but YOU, Grandpa - off to a sunny resort while you allow strangers to turn your home into a showroom floor."

You might also notice that they all coming crowding out of their house acting all happy and excited, yet they're all dressed and coiffed and chipper. No one ever stumbles out the the house, hungover, Cheerios stuck to their shirt, hobbling with pants around the ankles because they were just in the bathroom, cranky because one more hour of sleep would have allowed the Advil-Xanax-Vodka trio to kick in and level things out a tad. No one's even just wearing ripped sweats and Hooters t-shirts. Maybe we're just the only family in the country that is not groomed and hygienic by 8:00 every morning.

It's good stuff, right there. That's quality programming at its most realistic and true-to-lie. I mean, life. True-to-life.

Then there was a brief interlude away from the television. I have an appointment later this week which curtails certain activities, so... well, as Willem said, "The home team has won the coin toss, and they have elected to receive." Apparently this is a sports thing, and he swears that it is funny. Okee-dokee.

Then it's back to TV. Have I mentioned before that I believe that DVR could cure cancer, bring peace to the Middle East, and shift children's whining to beyond human heraing range? Seriously, it's good stuff.

So in between Extreme Makeover: Raising Property Taxes County-Wide and Grey's Anatomy, I watched a documentary about skinheads, which left me all nostalgic for the days when I thought I might do something with my degree (or, HA HA HA, even finish the darn thing). I love supremicists of any color, they're just so insistently deluded. I respect anyone who can operate in the world without a string of hospitalizations and yet in defiance of anything remotely resembling reality or logic, bless their tiny little brains.

And then, Grey's Anatomy. *sigh* It's so beautifully complicated, and it all boils down to a group of Unreasonably Beautiful Doctors wearing scrubs that somehow don't hang like decades-old pup tents and sleeping with anything that moves - and some things that don't! - and yet managing not to get all Jerry Springer on me. Tawdry yet pretty.

I'm especially fond of Grey's because it roped me in with the episode after the Superbowl - the bomb one. Ever since I got my heart ripped out of my body via my frontal lobes and amygdala by the introduction of a short-lived but fantastic show called "Wonderland," set in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in NY, and its subsequent cancellation just about the time I started to rearrange major life events to watch it, I have refused to start watching a show in its first season. If it's popular enough to make it to Season Two, then I'll start watching reruns - but I will not suffer another such indignation and betrayal by the Networks That Be.

So, Grey's. I first watched it after the Superbowl, and thought, "Hmm. That's fun! Major glaring gaping cavernous plot holes and factual errors, but the people are all just so pretty!" Then the DVD of Season One came out just before I spent a week at my mother-in-law's, so I watched it in the evenings after the kids were in bed while she was away at a funeral, and now I actually have something positive to associate with my time at her house. Hooray! And now I'm sucked in to the show for real. Hooray!!

Now it's bedtime. After I make another pass around to make sure the house hasn't floated away yet. It's been raining since last Tuesday, and we literally have gotten ten inches since then. Granted, there are certain areas in which that might be brag-worthy ("Ten inches! I'm telling you, girlfriend!") but rain is not one of them. We, here, are not yet under a state of emergency, but towns all around us are. We even got a telephone call at home from the school robot informing us that Emily has no school tomorrow. Which is wicked cool, but the rain is not. Here's a shot of my backyard this afternoon, and we actually have really good drainage and minimal puddles... (that brown stuff is water, not plain old mud - and the yellow thing at the left foreground is a rake, teeth-up, barely treading water and gasping for air by this point).


Anyway. Off to type, perchance to sleep...