My fifteen minutes of fame

Remember my pickerel frog sighting the other day? Turns out I was right: it is, indeed, a pickerel frog.  According to the folks who keep track of these things, they are pretty common throughout Vermont, but one hadn’t been reported in our town since at least 2004. The next time a map indicating confirmed sightings of pickerels will be published will be in 2015. And guess what?
My sighting will be recorded in it for all posterity!

I should mention that this won’t be my first brush with fame.
My other brush with fame was in 1990. I was a Park Ranger working in eastern Washington state, and my friend Carla from college was visiting. We went on a road trip to Seattle and stayed with my other friend Dean for a day or so, and we went to a Jonathan Richman concert that night. I’d been listening to a lot of Jonathan Richman that summer, so I was pretty primed.
He got around to playing a song that’s a duet with a woman, called “The Neighbors”. Only it was a pretty simple gig, just him and his cowboy boots and a guitar, no band, no backup singers. I was up toward the front of the crowd, singing along (along with everyone around me), to the other songs, and when he started “The Neighbors”, he invited me up on stage to sing it with him. Yep. Too bad this was before YouTube, where you can listen to the song here.
Can you tell I don’t have any new flower pictures for you? That I’m stalling? Yep. It’s thundering and lightning and I’m running on batteries in case we’re hit. The lights are flickering. Charlie’s on my lap.
We finally got out to my dad’s house yesterday via some navigable back roads. (Translation: no flower pictures.) And today it was sort of crappy light and then it rained. (Translation: no flower pictures.) I did sneak in a run – less than four miles. I have made a hard decision: I won’t be doing the next half-marathon, a month from now. My left ankle is all fracked up, I think from overcompensating from the orthotics. On the bright side, the original pain in my plantar fascia is totally gone. I have a new mission: to get in general shape – do exercise in addition to running. Maybe (ugh) lift weights.
Hey: I promise I’ll get some pictures up tomorrow. G’night!