The Frogs from Hell are Back

After several weeks of traveling, a busy weekend and several consecutive nearly sleepless nights, I spent all day looking forward to a Tuesday night with no plans. 

I had dreams of sitting on the couch watching tv until exhaustion overcame me, which would probably be by nine o'clock.  I'm pretty sure I even turned off my phone.  And then, somewhere around 8:30, the unthinkable happened.

What, you might ask, could possibly get in the way of my carefully planned evening of blissful peace, quiet and a good night's sleep?

The frogs came back.

The frogs from Hell.  Sent specifically from Satan to torture me.  For the third straight summer.

Some of you may recall that I spent last summer writing about the deafening evening sounds of the frogs that congregate on my neighbor's unkempt above-ground pool, that left me running on minimal sleep for a solid five months last summer, for the second year in a row.

I called the police with a noise complaint, and they literally laughed at me.  I tried to catch them myself with barbecue tongs.  I tried salt in the pool.  And bleach.  Nothing worked.  If anything, I think all those substances combined to cause a mutation that made them louder. 

I called the city code enforcement, but they referred me to the health department.  The health department referred me back to code enforcement, and so on, for several hot, sleepless weeks. 

Finally, the health department got so tired of my calls that they sent someone out to make them take the pool down, and all was right with the world.

Until they bought another pool a few weeks later.

You can read all about my summer frog saga here http://andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/04/things-are-jumping.html

and

here. 

http://andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/07/best-of.html

It is the kind of thing that sounds very funny.  If it doesn't happen to you.

And now, after a winter of hibernation, with the neighbor's new pool quickly becoming as disgusting as the last one, the frogs have reappeared with a volume vengeance on the worst possible night.  There's nothing I can do about it, which is why I'm writing this instead of dreaming in my bed.  I'm pretty sure they've had this planned all along, to torture me as revenge for all those frogging adventures from the last two summers.   And I'm powerless to stop it. 

I can hear them as I type.  In fact, if you listen closely, YOU can probably hear them too.   Even if you're in Denmark.

And there's nothing I can do about it tonight.  I have no remaining solutions, other than perhaps to sleep on the couch on the opposite side of the house from my neighbor's back yard with the television turned up.  But I can still hear them, even then. 

The only potential solace I can think of is to buy an old Atari system and the ancient "Frogger" video game.  You know, I was pretty good at steering those virtual frogs out of danger back in the day (even if their organic cousins don't seem terribly grateful now). 

But in this case, I can pretty much assure that those frogs will be coming to intentionally violent ends early and often.  I'll turn up the volume as high as it goes, and as I repeatedly plunge the virtual frogs into digital oncoming traffic, those type of croaks won't bother me one bit.