Good Night Irene. Hello Joan and Kim and Lorna.

The P-Dunk family is in Kingston New York, the Great BZWZ is back home in Providence, The Great Sparker has been evacuated to her brother's house in Atlantic City, the Great LargePants is probably getting rained on, and Tropical Storm Irene is passing out to sea, as understood by everyone except CNN who hoped for a stall over Manhattan and 500 mile an hour winds in Rockefeller Center.

This is how columnists and reporters and weather people make their bones -- with wars and/or natural disasters. They dream of these things. The finest moment for a weather man would have to be a cyclone inside a hurricane on top of an earthquake half a mile from his camera truck.

They may get their chance -- Irene was only the first of many.

BZ reports the St. Lawrence River was beautiful and that the meteor impact crater they went to study was filled with interesting stuff for a geologist. She got one night in Quebec city, which just happens to be where her parents spent their honeymoon.

In September 1970, Plotnik and Ducknik drove from New York City up the Thruway - past where the PDs are right now - all the way to Montreal, then up through Trois Rivieres to Quebec, and then down through Maine and New Hampshire, along the mighty Kennebec River where logs floating to the sawmill were so thick that you could not see the water. Is this still true today? Or do all our trees come from China?

Speaking of trees, Plotnik bought a 4 X 8 sheet of plywood the other day at Lowe's, for Ducknik to turn into doors for BZ's new closet and attic cabinets. But Fritz the Plotmobile can't really carry a heavy piece of plywood on the roof so they had the kid cut down the sheet into exactly the sizes they would need. He made six cuts, each one precise, and presented a little piece of paper to Plotnik with a bill for his labor: $0.75.

"I only charged you for three cuts," he said. Twenty five cents a cut? Jeezo, this isn't a bargain, it's robbery.

Plotnik asked if he was allowed to accept a tip and he said no, he couldn't. So Plottie put a fiver on the saw bench and said "If something got left here do you think you'd be able to find it?" and the kid smiled and said "Yeah. Probably."