Imagine There's An Image

So I had to do a little errand at lunchtime today, a walk to the Post Office for stamps. I've been bringing my camera to work almost every day, and, well, you never know - why not bring it along for the walk.

As I got to the ground floor of our building, I realized that I hadn't looked in on our little colony of Green Frogs for at least a week. So I detoured out the back door and walked the couple of steps over to the goldfish pond.

But my delicate eyes weren't prepared for what I was about to see... a Ménage Á Frog!

After that salacious springtime of Cicada sex, I thought I had seen the last of creature copulation for this year, but here was Froggy, or I should say Froggies gone a-courting.

Not two, but three croakers doin' the dirty deed. What's wrong with this picture?

Well, for one thing, Froggy Number 3, at left, is a male, and so is Froggy Number 2. Froggy Number 1 is indeed a female, and 1 and 2 are properly oriented for amplexus. But what Number 3 is doing, I don't know.

Don't ask, don't tell.

A Very Merry Half-Birthday To Me, To Me...

Around 4 PM this afternoon, after writing "7/28/2004" in my notebook for two meetings and three phone calls, I realized that today is my half-birthday!

Yes, I am exactly 54-and-one-half years old today. And that was the quickest half-year I've ever seen. They just go more and more rapidly, and I must admit, it's a little scary.

Not only that, but as I get older I'm becoming increasingly more aware of dredging up more and more brain sludge. This is a term invented by Dave Barry to describe the crap we actually remember instead of useful information we should remember, like our bank PIN number or our kids' birthdays. For example, Dave points out that as we reach 50, most of us can't name the Secretary of Defense, but we can sing the Brylcreem commercial ... a little dab'll do ya!.

In fact, that's happening to me right now. As I'm writing this salute to my half-birthday, out of my brain sludge, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, crawls a little ditty from the Mousketeer Show (the real one from the '50s, not the fake one with Britney Spears) that "Jimmy" used to sing... "A very merry un-birthday, to you, to you..."

Make it stop!