After last weekend, I have come to suspect that Frogger gained its staying power in the annals of classic games not only due to its ratio of simplicity to fun but also because of its roots in philosophy and real life application.

On the surface, the goal is straight forward and easy to grasp. You have to work on your hand-eye coordination and your timing or you’ll end up in the drink. Later, as your skills improve, so too do the opportunities for advancement and bonuses. You begin to get noticed by the powers that be, who respond by placing increasingly greater challenges in front of you with shorter deadlines until you find yourself scrambling to keep up, making stupid mistakes, and eventually ending up in the drink.

My dad likes to say that corporations promote their employees to the level of their incompetence. Like frogs, these poor saps just don’t know when to stay put and stop trying to cross the river. They get so focused on what’s right in front of them that they don’t even see that the lights guiding their way are attached to the front of a speeding vehicle. A vehicle that doesn’t understand what that repeating thumping sound is against the grill because its focused on what’s coming up next instead.

Seriously. Don’t go driving on the back country roads at night unless you can handle the snuffing of a hundred tiny points of light. Frogs are not smart.

You know the old saying. Maybe it’s just me but, I don’t think it meant 12:30am to 12:49am the same morning.

On most week nights, I turn in around 11pm. However, Mym had a presentation to give on Thursday that went until 11:30pm, so I decided to wait up for him to see how it went. He got home just after midnight, it went well, we hit the sack.

Twenty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was one of our vendors at work calling to tell me that some of the network stuff they monitor for us wasn’t responding. I called the point person for that area on our team to let them know and went back to bed. Five minutes later, I kicked myself back out to check my side of the network. Just in case. The critical stuff was all fine. I couldn’t get to some of the less critical items, but it made sense given the initial call so I decided to wait around a little bit for further developments. When 2 o’clock rolled around and I hadn’t heard anything, my eyelids army crawled themselves back up the stairs to my fluffy pillow, dragging my body behind.

4am. Another phone call. The power was out at one of our buildings and all hands were needed on deck by 0600. Oh, and the main street is closed, so you’ll need to come in the back way. When I got there at 5, I found this lovely scene outside the front door. Turns out, some kid driving a van had fallen asleep at the wheel at about 12:30am. He rammed the power pole outside our building’s front door so hard that it not only crumpled like a 3rd grader in front of the 4th grade bully, but it took its best friend down with it.

The power was out in the building for a mere five hours and kudos must be given to the local utility companies for all their hard work to get us back up and running so quickly while they continued to sort out the mess. We got everything on our end back online before the normal workday started, but it was not my favorite way to start a Friday, especially since it didn’t end until 6pm Saturday due to secondary fallout from the event.

Well, there’s no backing out now. We cut out the sod for the backyard landscaping today. The cutting was relatively easy, thanks to the rented cutter - worth its weight in GOLD, my friends. Removing the cut sod, however, was insane. What seemed like a rather smallish landscaping area (we had thought it would be bigger), turned into a billion wheelbarrow trips and two pairs of hands that can no longer grip anything larger than a bottle of booze. We are so grateful that the reality wasn’t as big as our mental picture. It’s fine the way it is. In fact, we now think it’s freakin’ huge. Did you know sod was that heavy? ‘Cause I sure didn’t. Holy canolies. But, it’s supposed to rain tonight, so we had to get it all done once we started. If we have any strength left tomorrow, we’ll put in the bed edging and call it a day. The plants arrive on Monday.