Make sure you wish Grey Kitten a happy birthday by visiting his website. He is the co-creator and the artist for Intrepid Adventure, which he assures me makes more sense if you understand live-action role playing games.

In addition to being a talented artist and writer, he is one of my two bestest friends in the whole wide world. I’ve now known him for nearly half my years and it would be impossible to imagine my life without him in it.

Happy Birthday, Grey Kitten!

After a start-and-stop work week, I’m ready for two consecutive days off. I’m hopeful this weekend’s activities will include:

• Finishing the Knitting World Cup tank top before the end of the France-Italy game — and enjoying some soccer as I do
• Attending Phillip’s “I’m headed to Iraq for two months” be-back-soon party
• Making it down to the Mall for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
• Baking cherry cobbler
• Hitting the farmers’ market for more berries and for the first corn on the cob
• Watching Pirates of the Caribbean
• Fitting in a bike ride
• Visiting Politics and Prose to do some more shopping

I might try to fit in Butterstick’s birthday party at the National Zoo on Sunday as well, but I haven’t yet made up my mind. It probably depends on how many tourists I have to battle down on the Mall tomorrow.

I listen to a number of podcasts that I think could be of interest to you. This is the first of a periodic series highlighting them.

When I started my first real job after college, I was still living at home — about a 20 minute drive from work. Every morning, at 7:30, I would flip the tv over from the weather to PBS. A familiar jazz piano song would fill my ears and I would get ready to spend half an hour with an old friend, Fred Rogers. Yes, at 22, I started watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood again.

Starting a new job is stressful. All my colleagues were my parents’ age (or older) and I was the boss of kids just a few years younger than myself. I was trying to learn all sorts of new programs and figure out expectations in order to meet them. I answered the phones — and I never knew any of the answers. I helped put together a publication that came out biweekly (it was the sort of publication where the delivery pickup man was always ready before we were). And, it turns out, I had an undiagnosed case of mono. So I was struggling to keep my head above water.

But for 30 minutes a day, an old friend sat me down and explained how things worked using Picture Picture and the mini movies Mr. McFeeley brought to the house. He sang songs designed to make his watchers (preschoolers, I understand) feel safe and respected and understood. He sent me into the Land of Make-Believe to let my imagination wander. And then he packed up his stuff, changed back into his work clothes, and looked into the camera. “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” And I needed to hear that.

Mr. Rogers is gone now, but his spirit lives on in a podcaster named Sage Tyrtle. She is the host of a daily podcast called Quirky Nomads, which she records (by my understanding) in a closet in her apartment in Toronto.

Sage, like many Americans, is unhappy with the direction the U.S. is headed in. Like many of us, she and her husband swore that if things kept going that way, they’d move to Canada. Unlike most of us, though, she and Todd followed through. They moved with their son, Paul, and cats across the border.

But this isn’t where their story ends. Sage travels around the city of Toronto, super-sneaky, tiny notebook in hand, recording snippets of conversations she hears. She dramatizes them, as well as the imagined backgrounds to photographs and letters she’s found. She invites her listeners to leave her comments, to create stories, to answer questions, to record “clicks,” to take part in the show, to shape the show into something that is our own collectively. She helps us to realize that we are not alone in the greater cosmos, that there are others out there who want to find the best in the world.

This week’s shows offered a cat radio play, a story about a young girl and her bandana, and a look back at Sage and Todd’s wedding.

I like to listen to Quirky Nomads while I’m on the Metro to work. It’s good to start your day with perspective — even if you lose it for periods of time during the day — and Sage’s show offers me that. She asks me to be a better person and I am grateful to her for the reminder that I can be. Like Mr. Rogers, Sage encourages me to take a deep breath and to look around to find the greater humanity around me, to find my neighbors, and to appreciate them just for being themselves.

You can download Quirky Nomads from Sage’s website or via iTunes’ podcast directory.

D.C. is suffering from torrential rains. And, located as were are at the confluence of two rivers, flooding.

I’m delighted to say that we did not return home late last night to feet and inches of water the way some people in D.C. had yesterday. And our landlord and handyman did check on the bedroom problem (on which they’re still working).

That’s where the good news ends.

Flooding in the living room — where we put all the extra stuff we rescued from the bedroom. Somehow the phrase “when it rains it pours” has a certain bitter irony to it today, particularly when you see they’re predicting the heaviest rains of the week this afternoon.

The large braided rug that covered half the floorspace in the living room is currently draped over the railing leading down to the Burrow. The washing machine is working overtime. I’m off to buy a hairdryer to take to the books that haven’t dried yet from last week. (I have to get them dry before I can start tackling the mildew that I see forming on some of them.)

But I do have terrific parents who, when they saw the tv footage of the area’s flooding, packed up their car with towels and a wet-dry vac and headed south so they could be already on the road to help us if we came home to find things floating. We intercepted them before they hit New York City, luckily, but their kind-heartedness did help to buoy our spirits as we toiled to remove the sodden, water-logged things into other parts of the apartment.

Hopefully the sun will come out tomorrow and we can finish drying out then.

In the meantime, please send us your mental towels…

I’m on vacation, but I wanted to leave you something tasty in my absence. Here are my favorite British candies to make your mouth salivate:

1. Bounty
2. Lion Bar
3. Smarties (they’re chocolate and similar to M&Ms instead of sugar like our Smarties)
4. Crunchie
5. Aero

Our bedroom flooded last night.

This was inconvenient timing because we have a house guest through the end of the week, which means that space is at a premium in the Burrow for the moment. At least Sam is an old friend (who has seen us at our messiest) who doesn’t mind sharing the living room with all our laundry.

On the other hand, the timing could have been much worse because the Burrow will be unattended for four days while we’re out in California. How awful would it have been to come home to a flooded (and probably by that point mildewed) bedroom?!

The rug we had in the bedroom prevented the waters from seeping into the living room. Mum and I bought it before my sophomore year of college and it was nice in all the many places it ultimately lived. But it was 13 years old and it’s hard to feel devastated about an inexpensive rug biting the dust after all that time. Some books need to dry in a substantial way and our duvet will need to go to the cleaner (probably time for that anyway). The box a painting was sitting in got wet, but the painting did not. A broken laundry basket we hadn’t gotten around to throwing away (and which I’d meant to get rid of last week before Sam and Alexis arrived) prevented a lot of things from getting wet. (All the knitters reading this can rest assured that all my yarn sits in a cabinet three feet off the floor; I can’t even say that about the books!) All in all, while this was not what I wanted to come home to after work on a Monday evening, it could have been much, much worse.

My family seems to be plagued by recurrent flooding. My folks’ old house was on a slab floor (meaning it has no basement) and in addition to the minor spot flooding they’d get during nasty rainstorms and hurricanes, they also had devastational flooding twice in just over 18 months. It was bad enough that they had to replace the carpeting both times. Then they moved into their new house where they’ve had minor flooding once as well as a mildew attack in the basement. Gramma’s roof sprung a leak last winter and seeped into an unused room where it caused some mildew problems. Our living room flooded last year. The only really surprising thing is that none of us lived in New Orleans when it ended up under water last year.

There has to be a novel in all of this somewhere. Anybody got a great first line for it?