Brrrrrrinnnnggggg! It was 0-dark-thirty or so, that batscope time of the night. It was my cell phone. I fumbled for it in the dark and tried to answer it but it lost the call. “Out of service.” I had been expecting a call from Lizard Breath saying she’d landed safely in California and, since her phone had the nerve to break yesterday, I expected it to be from an unfamiliar number. But it wasn’t! It was from The Master of The Universe phone, which is attached to the name “Mouse” in my cell phone, even though Mouse hasn’t used that phone since she started college. Still operating in a fog, I reasoned — in that batscope way — that Liz had called Mouse and *Mouse* had tried to call *me* to relay the message. I fumbled for the cordless landline receiver and, using the light from my cell phone screen, managed to dial The Master of The Universe number. No answer. Left a message, “grok grok,” and hung up. Tried again. Maybe she didn’t hear it ring? Still no answer. In a flash of relative brilliance, I thought to look at when that call had actually come in. Duh, *last Wednesday*? Roight. That would have been the GG, calling us at the airport. It was only then that I remembered that the GG is now the primary user of The Master of The Universe phone and realized that it was probably somewhere nearby in the cabin, turned off. In effect, I was trying to call myself. Then I heard the answering machine blaring downstairs and when I got down there, The Commander was scuttling around trying to answer the landline, an impossible feat since I had the cordless receiver with me. It was Liz, who had left a message while I was fumbling around with the phones upstairs. Okay. Glad to hear. Back to sleep. Or maybe not. It had been a scorchingly hot day, so hot that I had walked to Doelle’s and back in chest-deep water. We had left the screens in the doors when we went to bed and every window in the cabin was wide open. The wind had switched around to the northwest and was blowing a pretty good gale by that time. Things were rattling around and wind was blowing through the cabin. The GG shut the windows and I finally dragged myself out of bed and gravy-trained downstairs to put the glass windows back in the doors. I slept fitfully the rest of the night due to a bunch of banging around by something we apparently didn’t manage to batten down properly. Or maybe it was a bear trying to get in. I was too tired to figure it out. Did that all make any sense? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, I got the message, so thanks! And today, for about the first time all summer, I don’t have anything on my agenda. I don’t have three triple-loaders worth of laundry to do or ten people to help engineer food for or dogs to walk. No ropes to push. Not that I mind the people or the dogs or even the laundry but today I seem to be just sitting. And so be it.

This entry’s title is from a children’s poem by Laura Richards that I remember from grade school.

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