Thunder Boomers.

It's thundering out right now and it's making me think about how stoked the local weather man is going to be on tonight's forecast. And the one I have in mind is the same one Jon and I started calling "Smiley" during our first winter here. He just gets so geeked out on weather and is never not smiling. And not in that perma-grin anchor desk type of way, but in that genuinely enthusiastic "if I won the lottery I'd still keep my job!" kind of way. Sometimes I wonder if he heaves his coffee cup at an intern to get the aggression out or if he's really just that psyched on weather. Anyway, our first winter we had, like, 2 week stretches of weather where it wouldn't even get up to zero and there he'd be, smiling away, pointing out statistics like "Whoa oh boy, it's 60 DEGREES BELOW ZERO at Mt. Washington!"

Inevitably one of us would remark, "Jesus Christ, look at Smiley."

Last winter he even got a little spot on the Today show during another cold snap where he demonstrated how cold it was by fixing a bowl of cereal with milk and fruit and then turning it upside down to show how quickly the whole thing had frozen solid. He was so enthusiastic! Check it out! We're freezing our asses off up here! Yeah Katie! Yeah Matt! Fruit, milk, and cereal! Frozen! Solid! Holy! Guacamole!

We give Smiley a lot of grief but, truth be told, we are super entertained by him. He almost always refers to thunderstorms as "thunder boomers" and I told Jon last night that I bet Smiley's bummed that we've had a not-very-stormy summer because he doesn't get to break out the lingo that often. But then I added, "I bet he can't wait til Fall. 'Cause then it's time for 55 degrees to become 'double nickels'".

Rock on, Smiley.