I need sping bake now.

There was a very funny character on "Hey Arnold!" named Olga, a saintly older sister to Helga, Arnold's erstwhile love/hate interest. There was one episode where Olga was terribly excited to be home for spring break, and she cried out in her high-pitched squeal, "I'm so happy to be home for SPING BAKE!"

Whenever I think of this, I laugh. The actress who voiced Olga was very good, very funny, and gave the character such a nasty-but-nice little twist.

This has been a head-achy weekend. Head-achey? A weekend with headaches. I don't want to go to school tomorrow. Mo-o-o-om! I don't feel good! I need you to go buy me a Hot Wheels set and some coloring books and 7-Up and some date-filled oatmeal cookies...

My mom did this once. I had various "stomach aches" in grade school, would stay home and watch the Virginia Graham show until that got cancelled, then would watch the Mike Douglas show, waiting so long for the afternoon line-up on the Chris Craft station (or was that Kris Kraft? I think it was the boat manufacturer) for "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Gilligan's Island" and blather like that. The cartoons were pretty crummy: lots of Deputy Dawg-type stuff. We had good local children's show hosts, though, namely Heck Harper and Addy Bobkins (Bopkins?). Ramblin' Rod came later, and I got to go on that show once, I think, for someone's birthday party. This was in Portland, Oregon, in the Sixties. Man, those were the days.

Oh yeah, Rusty Nails was the clown. He was the human clown mascot/dignitary for Alpenrose Dairy which wasn't too far away from my parents' house, and if you went to the dairy for the bicycle races (they had a cool velodrome there, not to mention funky little made-up dairy exhibits for kids), there was always a chance you might run into Rusty himself. Pretty exciting. He actually looked a lot like the latter-day Ronald McDonald. A latter-day saint? I think not.

Heck Harper was cool. He was a cowbow, if you couldn't figure that out. I wonder if he was related to Harper Lee? There was also a woman named Kay Lee who would play Mother Goose on the local TV and at the Portland Zoo, which had a children's theater called The Ladybug Theater (it was shaped and painted like a giant, yeah, ladybug). She was interesting but could be crabby, which seemed to fit the Mother Goose persona pretty well.

Damn, those were the days. I guess I had as many moments of depression and self-doubt as I do now, and I knew less what I thought of myself then, too. But it just seemed like it was all a whole lot simpler. Before the '70s, anyway, and Earth Day and Jimmy Carter and Watergate and that the Russians wanted to blow us to smithereens. But it's strange that it's taken this long for people to actually get worked up about global warming. I mean I remember the warnings from way back when. This is not news, people.

Portland was a cool place to grow up. I would move back there in a second if I could. Well, maybe not a second. I do have some good things going on down here, but I really miss the trees, and the water, and the greenness of it all. I miss the friendly people and the coast, Cannon Beach, Mt. Hood, Camp Namanu, Washington Park, all the bridges, OMSI, the rivers, Council Crest, my mom.

I miss Vista, Ainsworth, Patton Road, St. Thomas More, Hillsdale, Humphrey Blvd, the zoo, the Japanese Garden, the roses. I miss the rain, the fog, the overcast, the gray, the puddles, the mist, the downpours. The leaves mucking up the gutters. The clouds flinging around. The moss. The green, green moss of home.

Wow. I do need a break. The photo at the front of today's post was roughly the view out my livingroom window of the house I grew up in, at least until third grade.