Everyone is excited because I met someone online who flew here from London to take me to dinner. Even I was impressed. Most guys I know have trouble finding their way uptown.

It was a week of e-mails followed by a three-hour transatlantic call that turned into a weekend about four weeks later. He booked a hotel in my neighborhood and suddenly he was here. On my corner, at an outdoor cafe, the real person behind the profile.

In short, the weekend turned out to be rather great. And so the question that follows is... now what?

I told the story to my mom. I thought she'd be happy to hear there was at least someone nice on my radar. After listening to my tale she said, "Oh I can't see you moving to London! I can't see you living there!"

Can I? Honestly, I'm not there yet, but it does make you realize just how many things need to be "in place" before you feel able to take that leap. I know there are people who leap first and look after. And then there are those like me who tend to look and keep on looking.

My neighbor down the hall was living in London before she was my neighbor down the hall. How did she get here? She was contacted on JDate from this guy (my first neighbor) in New York. They spoke for twelve hours. He flew over. Three weeks later they married. I was surprised when I found out the guy in that apartment had suddenly gained a wife.

"It was a JDate success story," they told me, trumping my JDate success story. I'd just had three dates with someone over a period of three weeks.

I told my mother that story too. "Sounds like she really wanted to move to New York," she said. In my mother's day women lived at home, and married because they wanted to get out of the house. Choices. Moving and romance. Do we move because we are romantic, or are we romantic because we need to move?

It's important to keep moving. It's important to get out. It is raining now, but I want to get out of the house. But I am going to wait. Because I just got a text message from London that a certain someone is planning to call.

In LOOKING FOR MR. GOODFROG Karrie is on Uh-Oh-L.com. That's frog language for AOL. But Uh-Oh is right, because I've spent the last five days in AOL Hell!

My book came out a week ago. If ever I need my web site. it's now. I sat down Saturday to update, edit, list my events, and blog. And when I tried to pull up my web site, to check it all out, it wasn't there. I was told it was "not responding." What was it? A weird date?

I first found out it was "incommunicado" through two "potential" JDates. Logging onto that site, just for whatever... I received an IM from a guy in Pennsylvania who told me he wanted to come to the city to meet me and had tried e-mailing me through my web site but it wouldn't load up. I immediately alerted my webmaster, until I received an e-mail from a guy in California who said he didn't want to meet me, I lived too far away, but he wanted to say hi. And by the way, he liked my web site. Pennsylvania guy was on AOL and California guy was not.

A bunch of phone calls later I found out anyone with an AOL Internet connection could not get lauriegraff.com but everyone else could. Well, I had to get it fixed.

I don't think people should be sent to jail. I just think they should have to successfully communicate with someone from AOL. It would be hell enough to have to penetrate the prompts and the robotic voices and say the first three letters of their screen name, and "yes" and "repeat that" and keep doing it and doing it until they A) got a person on the phone, and B)got their issue fixed. Why bother to lock someone up? They can be in a much cheaper hell spending days on the phone repeating themselves, talking to no one, and straining to understand the manual speak from someone with an impossible accent from wherever their unsolvable problem had been outsourced.

When it doubt, cry. So I did. To my hosting people. Globat. And after four days, count them, four, my tears got my problem escalated to a tier-two tech support guy who actually "got it." Then he got a friend who had a friend who once worked for AOL and knew someone in the Network Operations Center who found out that for whatever reason, AOL had blocked an entire server that affected fifty web sites. This guy said it was a really big problem, but I was the only one who noticed. Story of my life!

Anyway, it got fixed today. Five days later. The guy totally helped me, and the guy was also very nice. He's just 21 and clearly a tech genius. I was giving him the AOL lowdown just minutes before I had a radio interview for my book. He thought that was cool and timed his calls around it. And when he called back he wanted to know just who Mr. Goodfrog was. No one who works for AOL, that's for sure. Think they are still at toad status.

I wrote him a glowing review and sent it to his boss. So if you have AOL and you are reading this you have him to thank! And if you don't have it, well... I shall say no more.

My Uncle Harold was the inspiration for Karrie's "Uncle Sy." He and "Aunt Cookie" appear in both YOU HAVE TO KISS A LOT OF FROGS and LOOKING FOR MR. GOODFROG. In GOODFROG, Sy reappears with humor and zest, as well as his zeal for Karrie, clowning, and his favorite homebaked cookies. But this time he's lost some of his bounce. He has neuropathy.

When I wrote the first draft in 2004, my Uncle Harold was already feeling considerably worse than Uncle Sy. I hoped that would turn around. But it didn't. And last week, two days before LOOKING FOR MR. GOODFROG was released, my uncle passed.

A patricarchal figure in our family, a man whose waters ran deep, one whose silliness could rival his ferocity, he will be sorely missed.

I wanted to bite into a memory one day. The memory of tonight and the memory of the story I had been told. "I want the puggie recipe," I told my uncle Sy. "You dictate and I'll write." Sy gave the instructions and I wrote them down. He had substitued yogurt for sour cream Maybe I, too, would modify the recipe. One day when I baked maybe I would make a change. But at the very least, I knew in my own way I would continue the chain.

We will all miss you, Uncle Harold. We will always love you, and we will always remember.