Took a moment for a Robin Thicke dance break in the diner...

Discovered that the tree we planted in March appears to still be alive (not any bigger, but alive is a good start)...

When I was a little kid, my parents' best friends lived in upstate New York (near Warwick, the town where we went apple-picking last fall and did our bed-and-breakfast trip a few months ago). They had two kids just a little older than me named Ali and Matt and one a little younger named Nicky, and one day every summer both families would head to the Orange County Fair.

Here's my first time ever at the fair, in 1983.

For any kid - but especially a city kid who didn't often see things like ponies and carousels - it was paradise. Obviously I thought Ali and Matt - 3 and 5 years older than me, respectively - were the coolest people in the entire world, so the fact that I was allowed to follow them around on short parent-free journeys to get a funnel cake or get our photo taken for a souvenir was exciting almost beyond what I could wrap my head around. Mostly what I remember was that the carnival felt big...impossibly big, like you could spend entire summers there and never explore it all. And the rides seemed so fancy and advanced, like something out of a Spielberg movie.

This is how 6:40AM sounds nearly every single day lately:

"Good morning, sweetheart!"

"DINOSAUR."