Grok grok! Don’t fergit about FROGS, y’ ol’ bag! Grok grok. Froggy, please don’t get started!

Sorry about that outburst, now where was I? My iPhone proclaimed five whopping degrees when I woke up this morning. It really doesn’t actively proclaim the weather, you have to wake it up and unlock it and push the weather button. And it is also not very accurate here on The Planet Ann Arbor. The official temperature reading comes from a micro-climate somewhere that can be as much as 10 degrees below the temperature reading on the north side of The Landfill. But that was enough to let me know that it was balaclava weather but not quite snowpants weather. Which is good because who wants to walk around looking like a purple Pillsbury doughboy?

It was cold and clear and, when I got to the schoolyard, I was so overcome by the gorgeous view of the moon with Venus above it that I dropped down on one knee and then on the other. Or not. People only do that in novels. Trashy ones at that. grok grok! That wuz a GOOD book! Grok grok. I like travelin’ fyoon’rels ‘n’ things. grok grok. Maybee one o’ those ladies’ll adopt me so I won’t hafta live with you, y’ ol’ bag. Grok grok frgok Oh, Froggy, “those ladies” are characters in a BOOK! They are not real. Now go somewhere and do something constructive. Froggy? Froggy? NO! When I said to do something constructive, I did NOT mean that it should have anything to do with your flying machine and a Listerine bottle!!! Now, why don’t you go and read a book to the little Squeak mouse. Okay? Squee-grok squee-grok squee-grok. I’ll read Froggy Gits Drest! grok grok GROK!

Sorry. Hopefully he’s gone now. Anyway, it was a small thing and I didn’t fall down to my knees but I did stop for a few minutes and it made a nice, positive start to my day. And then, when I got to work, I parked my cute little blue honda civic with the yellow flower stuck in the blower and looked out over the mostly frozen pond and saw a huge gaggle of geese huddled on the ice around the edges of a spot of open water in the middle. I stepped out of my vee-hickle and closed the door and few lookouts stood up, alert and ready to fly. I stopped. And tiptoed s-l-o-w-l-y toward the pond. I couldn’t get quite close enough to get a *decent* picture with my iPhone, so finally I turned around and went into work. (Note to self: carry Canon around with you too.)

Throughout the day, I was intermittently working on trying — again — to successfully put a call through to Mouse’s cell phone in Sénégal from my iPhone*. We have been working on this since the end of September without success. It’s not like we can’t talk to each other. She can call me. And text message me. And we can email, of course. Or meet up on Skype, although we haven’t tried that yet. But every time I try to call her, the call fails. I think I have tried from the land line* and had similar but different problems. I don’t ever seem to find the 10-15 minutes that I know I will need, as an infrequent overseas caller, to deal with figuring out how to get the international operator, et al. Gosh, it was easier to call Spain! Anyway. She had text messaged me again with what she thinks is the correct phone number with "011" and the country code and the whole works. No dice! I called AT&T and finally found out that my iPhone had to be “set up” to call overseas. They did that. I called. No dice. Except that Mouse text messaged me one last time to say that she had received the call but couldn’t hear anything. Progress, if not total success!

Finally, my Thursday night class is canceled tonight! Don’t get me wrong. This is a great class. The lectures are interesting. The interactions with the instructor and other students are fun. It comes with an internship, which I am enjoying greatly in spite of some initial terrification. But I can’t say I’m sorry that I don’t have to schlep myself and my computer all the way over to WCC tonight.

* Folks, we discovered earlier this week that our land line seems to be out of commission. It was working a couple weeks ago when Hans’s phone (next door) wasn’t. I don’t know how long it’s been out. I don’t know when we’ll get around to figuring out what the problem is. Almost everyone who needs to contact us by telephone (and I hate phones btw) calls our cell phones. If you aren’t in the loop and need to be, email me to get into it. That is all.

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