Last night I got to talk to my brother in Thailand on the phone for a half an hour at 3 cents per minute. He had internet access and was using a headset connected to his computer, dialing through Skype, and rang the house phone where I'm staying with the Havard's here in Mishawaka. The audio quality was no worse than any landline call you would make across the street, not choppy, no lag, no echo. Wow! He has also been using his account on Flickr to post a ton of awesome pictures from the trip. Check out the nice feature of how Flickr organizes by date the picture was taken. If you click on a particular month you even get a thumbnail for each day.
Friday during the day I had very little planned for the evening. I expected to go to the Havard's to jog with Robert-Michael and make some final arrangements for dog-sitting for them. I also made some last-minute plans to briefly join a group of friend's celebrating Allison's birthday, who I've gotten to know recently through a Lenten faith-sharing group. They intended to continue the celebrations later into the evening watching basketball, but I had a number of missed calls from Charles, so I ducked out halfway through. I'm also not much of a March Madness fan, which I know is blasphemy. :) Charles is a neighbor of mine with no steady employment who bikes around the neighborhood and near Notre Dame asking people for money and collecting cans and any scrap items he can recycle or pawn. When I first met him, he readily accepted prayers from me and a few friends, and told us how important smiling is as we parted ways. I've never given him money in the num