Things be dead here, folks.

The cold weather has killed pretty much everything. All, save the mouse which crapped all over my dish towels last weekend. I'd thought it had left, as no foodstuffs were mangled, no other issues noted, until I woke up in the wee hours to distinct rustlings. Next to the bed. I turn on the bedside lamp to find it was in one of the glue traps I set in the early Fall when spiders have a tendency to come indoors. After last year's little encounter, I thought I might prepare a bit more for their arrival. I hadn't noticed that the things also can be set for mice. 3am, and I have a completely gummed-up mouse, hanging half out of the trap, trying to drag itself and its new attachment along the floor. The worst part of it was its screams as I reached for it, picked it up, dispatched it. Glue traps. Good for bugs, gruesome for vertebrates. Sleep was pretty much shot at that point.

After driving home from Thanksgiving at the Farm, went to bed and in tryptophan-induced coma, dreamt that I was on an outer-space expedition. I am hovering, lunar-lander-style, over a pockmarked surface, perhaps the moon, perhaps Mars, perhaps something else, but I lower myself to float horizontally right over the surface. Below me, less than six feet, is a pool of water; actual liquid water, set like an irregular rectangle of deep blue glass in the ash grey of the surface. "Water! I've found water!" I say into my headset. This is a big deal. But as I say this, I realize how far I am from home, how far I've got to go yet after this great discovery, and how the cold is coming through the pressure suit.

The alarm clock on my cell phone goes off at this point. I stumble to the kitchen to kill the alarm. It won't turn off. Perhaps this is a peculiarity for all RAZR phones, or mine alone, but if the alarm clock goes off and the display is showing that I've either missed a call and/or have a recent voicemail, there is no way to shut off the alarm. I futzed with the damned thing at 6:30 this morning for well over 10 minutes, trying to get the phone to shut up. [If others know how to get around this very irritating characteristic of RAZR phones, please let me know.] Due to the length of time I had to spend cussing at my phone, this was just about as disturbing a wake-up as the doomed mouse at bedside the night before.

In between episodes of grading term paper drafts, I walked to the grocery store, during which time I've noticed that Central Indiana is now in the Ugly phase of Autumn, with no leaves, no green at all, little daylight, and incessantly overcast skies. It's time for a week of snow and then on to Spring. Shall we have a vote?