It’s another crappy and miserable winter day. It’s been sleeting and raining for about the last 24 hours and it just makes everything feel all cold and damp. If I had a real fireplace I’d build a nice warm fire. Instead, I have a useless fake fireplace. Okay, so it’s actually a gas fireplace but my feeling about these is that they’re pretty much useless. They give off less heat, don’t crackle pleasantly, and well, I don’t like that sooty, burning propane smell. So we never hooked it up. Sigh. It’s the one thing I would change in this house if I had the money.

But I don’t want to linger on that today. I’ve been thinking about the way families have their own languages that only they truly understand. Special words or phrases that have a meaning no outsider would get. The ability to communicate with my family comes down to one thing: tv. I know, rots their brains, whatever. But we keep each other greatly amused with our shared favorite lines and expressions. The flavor du jour is a toss up between “Stupid dog! You made me look bad!” and “No it is gum I smellllllllllll”. The former is from Courage The Cowardly Dog, and the latter is Chowder. We’ve been watching a lot of both those shows lately. I even overheard Neve singing Chowder’s I’m Not Your Boyfriend” song the other day. But the best is “Radda Radda”. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never seen it, but it’s the only thing Chowder’s Schnitzel can say. And it can dispel the tension in any room in a matter of seconds. Kids fighting? “Radda radda radda radda!” and suddenly it’s all giggles.

I’m not sure of this will become a permanent fixture in our language or not. It’s got a lot of competition. There’s Simpsons (It tastes like burning; This both sucks AND blows; Me so hungee; I’m old, the only thing I don’t hate is Matlock; I’m cold and there are wolves after me………………….the list goes on and on), there’s Futurama (This isn’t Yemeni, it’s Sulawesi; Tell the robot devil I’m coming; I never thought I’d die this way, but I always kind of hoped) there’s Spongebob (You’re spendin’ all me hard earned cash!) and so on.

There’s always room for new stuff, which is the best part. It’s all about us having our common interests and adding to our family “glue”. We genuinely have fun talking to each other this way, and we can share any number of memories together with the turn of a phrase which, more than likely doesn’t have anything to do with that particular memory. I wonder if they’ll remember when they’re adults why we started saying “Tiny ugly germs!” when they don’t wash their hands, or who started the Party in my tummy. But really, it won’t matter.