I left Texas to meet my next contacts after the holidays, and got to South Florida just before Hurricane Wilma. I am beginning to think that I should have stopped in Kroner on my way out of Texas, afterall; I have seen too many hurricanes this year. But so has everyone, I guess. The climate is changing and I do not even know enough to know whether it is our doing, or theirs. The insects feel a change coming, though. That I feel through them.

Arthur and his brother Arthur, who was visiting, were not as concerned about the weather as I was. They had caught the fringe of Katrina too but Arthur said that he had lived through lots of hurricanes and as long as the water was not alive, he was not very worried. During the worst of the storm he told us a very creepy story about Fox and Dr. Scully and a Thing that emerged from the toilet. (I went beachcombing with little Leroy Suarez after. He is five and three quarters and he swore that it was all true, he saw it himself. We did not find any watery monsters, though, unless you count parts of a Physalia physalis that were slowly melting across a quarter mile of beach.) We have just gotten power back today; Arthur and Arthur called their sister Arthur this morning to assure her they were fine and there had been nothing to worry about.

In fact, they were more worried about the World Series. Arthur keeps saying that they know they do not need to hide anymore. He says for about the last sixty years, that both of the Sox teams have been the homes of alien players, who wanted to live the game but very carefully kept their teams out of the championships so that they could go unnoticed. Now that the invasion is in progress, he says, they do not need to worry about being unnoticed, and they are finally letting themselves win, and that is why the curses are being broken. Arthur says that he is obsessed and not to listen to him, but that did not stop him from cursing WQAM when we all crouched around the battery powered radio trying to listen to Game Three and they were playing hockey instead. (The aliens do not play ice hockey, you see, because they do not like the cold, so Canadian sports teams do not need to worry.)

I will be heading north from here, and I plan to be close to DC by the holidays, unless something else happens.