I'm going to jinx everything by saying this, but Phoenix is The Place To Be. We don't get hurricanes (unless you count that little weak-sister scare we had a few years back that was supposed to come charging up the Sea of Cortez and level the city and instead dropped maybe a half-inch of rain) nor do we routinely encounter earthquakes, tornadoes or Snowmageddon.

It's late (or early, depending on how you look at it) on the morning of Dec. 25 and Santa Claus may have finished his work for another year, but like many men, he has come home from the office to find a note from the missus: "Nicky: sorry I couldn't wait up. I left a pitcher of mojitos on the kitchen counter.

A close friend and I were ensconced in the armchairs next to the pick-up counter at the local coffee boutique, as is our wont on a weekend morning (at best, we view this once-weekly chat as cheap therapy; at worst, we're just hiding from our kids).

Recently, I had my biannual date with my periodontist, which usually involves a nice hygienist cleaning my teeth and then poking around with a little pointy thingy and calling out numbers and sometimes she says "Uh oh," and then gets the nice doctor who sometimes has to do things to my mouth that make me long for ground glass to chew on, if I have any teeth left.

Please take a moment to pity the poor mother who wants something special for Mother's Day and has to resort to the usual old tricks of leaving magazine ads around the house or turning up the volume and coughing "I'd like that" during commercials.

Dear Mom, Interrupted:

Do you remember TV doctors from the ‘60s and ‘70s?