...which means today is Friday (at least in my hemisphere it is) and the end of the week. Tonight I have a concert to attend (Dream Theater) and a dinner to make (cheese tortellini in a butter tomato sauce) prior to attending the aforementioned concert.

But tomorrow is Saturday. For most people that means sleeping in, or getting up early and starting errands they couldn't do during the week. For some it's stitching all day, or driving long distances to take care of elderly parents. For me it means heading to Curves, and then coming right back home to shower... get dressed... and watching Saturday morning cartoons with A & B.

All that other stuff that needs doing, like laundry and housecleaning can wait until later in the day. Because there are Saturday morning cartoons to be watched.

I remember when I was B's age... 6 1/2. My internal clock, which never worked during the week, would wake me up at 6am so that I could pad downstairs in my fuzzy jammies that still had non-skid stuff on the feet and turn on the big 20 inch television. I had to be careful turning it on though, since my parents slept directly above the living room where the television was located, and I didn't want to wake them up.

It wasn't a matter of them getting angry that I was watching television, but a matter of letting them sleep in. Dad, during the week, was always up at about 4:30 or 5 in the morning to make some Cream of Wheat for breakfast and then head into work. I would wake up around 5:30 to the smell of his breakfast, and when I got older, I'd be heading downstairs around 5:45 or 6 and wish him a good day - and swipe a little of the leftovers, if there were any.

Considering that I learned my work ethic from my Dad, it doesn't surprise me that I'm up at 5am every morning to head to work. But I don't make Cream of Wheat before I go.

Anyway, I'd turn on KCRA out of Sacramento, and watch Mr Ed, and then Captain Kangaroo. Then all the good cartoons would start. It was always such a difficult decision to decide what to watch, because all three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS were the only ones back then) would be showing full schedules of cartoons from 7am to about 10 or 11am.

Oh, to have that be my most difficult decision in life again! Or to have had TiVo back then. I could have spent ALL day watching cartoons because I could have TiVo'd the other networks' shows.

I'd hang out with Bugs Bunny and Friends, and then the SuperFriends. HR Pufenstuff And Speed Racer - oh, Speed Racer was so good back then, not like the remade junk they're showing now. Just like Space Ghost, which rocked back then, but stinks now (on Cartoon Network).

And a full half hour of Schoolhouse Rock! I was so sad when that went away and they would just show one of the songs at a time between other cartoons. I would never know when one might come on, or not come on, and I would be afraid to run to use the bathroom because I didn't want to miss any of those cartoons. No, I never had any 'accidents' as a result, but I did miss a couple of cartoons because I was using the bathroom.

Snoopy, The New Zoo Revue, Zoom, Land of the Lost, The Pink Panther, Davey and Goliath, The Smurfs, Garfield, Danger Mouse... the more I think about it, the more I remember these cartoons. And then there were the Kroft Supershows - they used to have Michael Lembeck dressed up as Kaptain Kool (and his gang, which all resembled Elton John rejects) and they would introduce shows like 'Electra Woman and Dyna Girl' (no wonder I thought Diedre Hall looked familiar when I started watching 'Days of Our Lives' - she was Electra Woman!), Dr, Shrinker, and Wonderbug! Oh, WonderBug was great... I hated Bigfoot and Wildboy, and would watch Scooby Doo or the Archies instead.

Around lunchtime, Fat Albert and the Gang or The Harlem Globetrotters was on - my Dad loved to watch those with me. He was a big Bill Cosby fan (still is, I think) from the Cos' early days as a stand up comedian. That show would be the signal that the morning cartoons were over.

But CBS slowly stopped showing the cartoons... NBC gave up eventually too. Luckily for me, they started slowing down when I was in high school and on my way to college. Saturday mornings were spent sleeping in and catching up on reports I needed to research and write. But I didn't think about the impact that it would have on the kids I might someday have (and did have). In 1990, Congress passed the Children's Television Act which required that there was a minimal amount of educational programming aired each day. Cartoons were attacked as being "junk food for the mind".

What Congress didn't realize at the time is that they were destroying what millions of kids had as a bonding experience. "THERE ARE NO LA BREA TARPITS IN SCOTLAND!!" I stood up and yelled that in my college cafeteria one day, and was met with stunned silence for a moment, and then cheered. I heard people remembering all sorts of cartoons that I'd almost forgotten existed. I made lots of new friends that week - people I probably wouldn't have talked to otherwise, but we knew all the same cartoons and "grew up" together watching television on Saturday mornings.

Now I sit and watch my kids, and we have lots more choices on Saturdays, but they just don't seem the same. There's more educational stuff, like Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer. There's Animal Planet and Discovery Kids on NBC. CBS is back in the game with Nick Jr in the mornings. ABC never stopped showing cartoons - they may have cut the programming back, but they never stopped. If you look around, there's anime like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, or Disney cartoons like Kim Possible and Rolie Polie Olie. Or you could turn on Nickelodeon and find Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, or The Wild Thornberries.

But if you look closely, and carefully, you can find some of those old bright spots peeking through the landscape. Bugs and the Looney Tunes are still around, as is Scooby Doo. They've redone the Super Friends as The Justice League, but the principals are still there, and still good. Just without those annoying Wonder Twins. Every once in a while I'll pop in one of my DVDs from the SchoolHouse Rock 30th Anniversary set, and the kids and I will watch one or two of those as a break between programs. I haven't done that in a while, so I think I'll do that tomorrow with A&B - it will be a little bit different that what it was like when I was a kid, but I'll capture just a bit of that old magic...

... we went to the Four Legged Zoo, to visit our four footed friends... Darn! That's the end.