Rainy day spew part 1......

Rainy days in the summer suck. But as far as rainy days go, today's kids have got it made.  Dvr, Boomerang, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nick jr. etc.etc., have made being a kid stuck in the house now so much easier than when I grew up.  With the touch of the remote cartoons and kid's shows are readily available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
On demand entertainment provided by mom and dad and your local cable or dish company.
Being a child of the 70s and 80s I had none of these. What I had was this

Antennas.
Metal antennas attached to chimneys were ubiquitous in my neighborhood.( Ubiquitous - noun   all over the place, can't  swing a dead cat without hitting one.)  Some were small and stationary, while others were monstrous yet magically movable.  Ours was the latter. A large bulky  box with a knob in the middle that sat next to our t.v. was our "remote".   Little number stickers, that were placed after much trial and error, circled the knob indicating the optimum position for reception of a given channel (Of course if it was raining, snowing, cloudy, windy, Thursday then all bets were off with this, you had to just keep moving it). I can remember we had at most 7 maybe 8 of these little stickers which means we were capable of receiving only seven or eight channels. (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and whatever local independent channels were around at the time).   Night-time  programming on any of these channels was a wasteland for kids, however I do have fond memories of Barnaby Jones, Barney Miller and the Rockford Files.  But every once in a while this


would pop up.  I'm sure my parents knew what was coming, even then we had tv guide, but we kids didn't. Oh how Peter's heart would start racing, finally something good is coming on, something I want to watch.
Even now watching that bumper I get excited. But these specials were too few and too far between.  Holidays, of course, brought Rudolph and Charlie Brown but for the most part the kid-friendly place on our t.v. was a small block of Saturday morning.  If I remember correctly I could get up and watch repeats of Leave it to Beaver at 6 until 7 am, then from 7 until noon , finally yes  Cartoons.