The phone has one of those customized ringtones that I prefer to make by hand. Oh, sure, I could download an app, stream a snippet of a song off of Telstar 6 and make everyone thing I’m contemporary. I could pull a file off of some site designed in 1996 and retrofitted to look like 1999 — please make it look like Angelfire! — and have a great Family Guy punchline as my ringtone.

Interesting, there’s a significantly large paragraph on Wikipedia’s Family Guy page for criticism. None of it has to do with how every one of their jokes is ripping off someone more clever.

Anyway, I could do those things with my phone. But I like to find songs no one has ever heard and edit the entire thing down to a 30 second snippet. I do this in Adobe’s Soundbooth, save it as an mp3 and then undertake the software steps necessary to convert the mp3 into something my phone will recognize. These steps are almost as complex as what launched Telstar 6 in 1999.

Rest assured, when I invent my time machine, the third trip I’m making is back to 1980. We’re going to have a talk about the old Apple slogan. I’m changing it to “Soon there will be 2 kinds of people. Those who use computers, and those who can’t people you have made such a ridiculous mess of iTunes.”

But I digress. The ringtone is important. Sets the tone and all of that. Also it tells you when your phone is ringing. I had a great De La Soul track from which I distilled an entire narrative into 30 seconds. Loved it. Everyone loved it. I grew self conscious of it, however. This is fits into the constructs of the person I imagine myself to be, but may defy the vision you have of me as independent, abstract character.

So I searched for new songs. I have another I love, a Fitz and the Tantrums song you’ve never heard. It is terrific, dramatic and soulful. It has to do with a metaphorical wind, and how this is going to change everything, and the intended target must simply deal with it. Great bass line, nice chorus, the perfect fade. It stands out when the phone rings. I may have to change the thing again.

I say this because it woke me up this morning, the ringing phone, from the other room. The Yankee said “Your phone is ringing.” After careful analysis we later concluded I said “Hrmmmmfarple potato sack race phone.”

The call went to voicemail. And then it rang again.

Fine. I’ll answer the farple potato sack race phone.

Turns out there were several message, most of them text alerts. The central portion of the state had been hit in a less than gentle way by the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. There were trees down on roads. Water covered roads. Hundreds and thousands without the pleasant hum of power that keeps you living a few milliseconds up from Little House on the Praire. These things I new when I retired last evening.

This morning I learned that campus also had no power. The place was closed. Class was canceled. I made a call to the boss. We decided there would be no paper tonight. Various other phone calls and text messages were shipped off into the early morning.

“I’ll be working from home today.”

So I did that, watching as a grimly light, overcast morning turned into a drab, chilly afternoon. We turned off the air last night, opened the windows and let the cat enjoy bird sounds. This was the first day you could have the windows open since mid-May. This is unseasonably cool — I marked the evening with the first long-sleeved t-shirt of the year — but not unwelcome, and brought on entirely by the clouds from that storm.

Oh, we got some rain, and our temperatures dipped into the 50s, odd for September in Alabama, but that was the bulk of it here. We needed the rain and that was plenty. We also had four tornado warnings yesterday, but nothing came of them.

So I read and tinkered at home today. I watched a bit of television. I fell asleep so hard on the sofa the cat thought I was dead. The cat was not overly disturbed. (She knows the next three days of Catember are auto-posted. So long as she has food, water and is famous on the Internet, she’s fine.)

Linky things: If you are looking for me a $60-70,000 birthday/Christmas combo gift, I’ll just point you in the direction of the Switchblade, a flying motorcycle, or any of the comparable competitors out there. If that’s a little more than you want to spend on me, that’s fine. I have ideas in every price range.

But a flying motorcycle? Sixty-three miles to the gallon on the ground? An 800 mile range at about 155 miles per hour by air?

You could chip in with everyone else that has me on their shopping list and I would send you all the best individual thank you cards. If you are with a 400 mile radius I’d hand-deliver them, by air.

Time is now running two new Tumblr accounts. The first, Lightbox is based on their similar photoblogging efforts elsewhere. The second, Time on Tumblr, “aims to be a digital scrapbook of (Time’s) vintage work, its indelible cultural influence and our own anecdotes on the work we do.”

You think of all of those archives and you just want to say “Publish faster, guys!”

I can note this: A few weeks ago, I guess it was, I noted on Twitter that a squirrel had walked up onto the back porch and stole the grill’s cleaning brush. The brush is much larger than the squirrel, has no redeeming value (barely serving at that level as a grill brush) and would have presumably been too much plastic and heft for a rodent to carry in his jaw. But as was pointed out on Twitter, the squirrel heart what the squirrel heart wants.

We noticed over the weekend, while grilling, that the brush was gone. I gave a cursory glance around the yard, focusing on where the squirrel ditched the brush the last time — he’d escaped to the trees by way of the side of the house, and he could not leap, climb and hold his bristled friend. But the brush was not to be found.

Found it today. The squirrel carried the thing halfway through the yard, finally giving up his prize when he reached the neighbor’s fence.

I’m tying the brush to a hubcap.