It’s raining and everything is oddly green given that it’s December. But we’ve yet to have a freeze. So, rain and cool weather have the grass excited and growing. A reverse version of spring. And no cold is on the horizon either. So, I’ll probably need to mow at some point, although that’s just for cosmetic reasons and I have no HOA or neighbors tut-tutting over my unkempt grass. So, I might let it go for a while longer.

AI wins again. I had a batch of Word Files. I wanted a field inserted into the header of each document. I knew it could be done because five years ago I paid someone to write me a VBA macro to do a similar task. This time I simply asked ChatGPT for help. Quick as a wink I had a program. We gave it a few tweaks and just like that 300 files had a field inserted into a header on each document. It saved me time and money.

Once upon a time I considered myself a well-read man, a reader of the great books. But that feeling has long since dissipated. I’m unable to quote passages from favorite poems or phrases from favorite books. I can’t site references from memory. The words I’ve read from the books and poems I’ve read are scattered in my memory like so many leaves from winter trees. The titles are there, the authors are there, and even some of the characters are there as well. But nothing feels coherent.

There’s a character in Star Trek that’s irresistible, The Borg. Resistance, as they’ll tell you, is futile. The Star Trek heroes obviously resist but lots of cultures don’t. I think the internet is our Borg, and judging by how many people use it, I’d say resistance is futile. Although, perhaps in retrospect its technology in general that captured us. But that’s for another day. Right now, for me, it’s the internet, because someone in China is still perusing my site every day.

It’s a cool windy day with a promise of rain. A good staying inside day. A cold front’s coming. Lows in the 30s, highs in the 40s. A Texas winter. We’re the place where blue northers come to die, victims of the second law of thermodynamics. Don’t bring your arctic air around here. You’ll be balmy in no time. It’s one reason why so many refugees from northern climes live here. The cold air might chase them, but it will surrender in the end.

It is nothing for me to wake at night and instantly recall some moment in my life that needs re-litigating. Sometimes, they’re events close at hand, other times they’re decades in the past. The other night I found myself in the early 80s, at my second job out of college. I have no idea why I decided to relive those days, but there I was, wide awake, going over all the things I did or didn’t do and regretting some of them.

This is the month of revelations. The other day I looked back and realized how far I’d come since my college days, a long, long way. Then yesterday, I realized this is only the second time in my life I’ve lived alone. The first was a brief stint right out of high school when I took a job at the Houston Chronicle as a copyboy and had a room at the downtown YMCA. Between then and now I moved back home, joined the Navy, had a roommate, and then a wife and kids. That’s sixty years of always being in the company of someone. No wonder things feel strange these days.

I surrendered yesterday. Went back to Word. I tried to be 21^st century with a cloud-based solution, but it felt kludgy and inelegant. Also, I officially started work on my next book, and most of the essays I’ll use were in Word. So, I bit the bullet and bought a personal license, and I officially miss the days when you bought the software outright, and it was yours to use. I understand the license paradigm, but that doesn’t make it easier to tolerate.

Time. It certainly does fly. Whether you’re having fun or not, apparently. It stunned me, really, to realize on my recent trip to my college campus that fifty years had passed since I was a student there. Then I realized 20 years had slipped by since my father’s passing. And it’s been sixteen years since I moved to my current home. And a depressing number of folks have died along the way, which is par for the course, I believe.

Drove to Houston yesterday with an old friend to watch our college team play football. They lost. They could have won, and probably should have, but as seasons go wins are outnumbering losses by a good number and this has to count as a positive. Unfortunately, we seem to be in an age that demands perfection and we expect money to buy us happiness and victories. So, if we finish 8-4 or 9-3 next week, both good, there still will be a fair number of folks who will count the season a near failure.

There was a chance of rain around noon yesterday. The chance passed. So did the rain. There was a chance of rain at midnight. The chance passed. So did the rain. There are more chances today, but chances pass, unfulfilled, so I’m just going to wait and see what happens. I managed to hook up the drain pipe to the big rainwater tank, so I’m ready. But I’ll keep my hopes at a manageable level and not raise them again. I was more than ready at noon, but the rain had its own agenda.

I like the black of night. The dark. Especially around the house. It’s comforting to step out onto the porch and see what only the light from the moon and the stars allows me to see. I feel one with the natural world. There's the wind and the leaves and rustling grasses. I see the movements in the shadows, hear the rhythmic noise of walking, especially the deer. 

My energy reserves seem to have dwindled to nearly nothing. It’s a puzzling state of affairs. There are things that need doing, but none of them seem particularly pressing or worth pursuing. It could be age. It could be depression. It could be the aftermath of my latest bout with a viral bug. It could simply be the number of projects have overwhelmed my system. Whatever the cause, you can call me Mr. Lethargy.

I’m getting rid of some of my pets. The peeves mostly. I have too many, they’re a drain on my emotional resources, and I don’t want to become known as a curmudgeon. So, here they are in no particular order. Drivers who can’t read the signs that say the left lane is for passing only. Drivers who speed up when I decide to pass with my cruise control on. Drivers who don’t use cruise control. Drivers who leave their diesel pickups idling in a parking lot. Drivers who tailgate. People who use the word shoppe or any words similarly twisted.

Over the last several months doctors have poked and prodded in almost all the ways a person can be poked and prodded to determine the status of various systems. Routine processes in most cases. All have checked out. I am in good shape for a man my age. Tell that to my nasal passages, however, who have decided now is a good time to drip and run, blow and go. I am a tiny bit upset.

Odd thing about life, when I go looking for something, I hardly ever find it, but when I’m not looking here something comes. On Tuesday night, I wasn’t looking for the Northern Lights, but I found them. On Wednesday night, I went looking, but didn’t see them. I did see a shooting star that felt really close, and that was a nice substitution, because I’ve gone looking for shooting stars before and never found them.

It’s exactly the sort of call you want in the middle of the night while dead asleep. “Dad! Go outside and look at  the Northern Lights.” I did as I was told and was rewarded with the most colorful night sky I’ve ever seen. And I was happy I lived in a country town with a dark sky ordinance, where the night sky counts as something we want to see and it’s not just a thing that hangs over our heads.

In preparation for Veterans Day, I watched the Netflix movie House of Dynamite. On the one hand, I wish I’d skipped it because it’s about nuclear war, and I grew up on a diet of books and films like that: Hiroshima, On the Beach, Fail Safe, and Dr. Strangelove. I spent my youth scared spitless, even though I never once had to do a duck-and-cover drill. I guess Catholic schools felt that prayer was your best option, because we spent a lot of time being told that death could come knocking at any moment.

It’s a brisk 36 this morning, which finally feels like winter. No telling how long it will last, however, seasons in Texas are notoriously fickle. Although I have noticed that summer seems willing to be the goto season, as in, it seems as though it’s hot all the time these days. Last week we set a record for the hottest November on record. I suppose the operative word is record, because I guarantee you there have been hotter Novembers, we just weren’t around.

Of course, most people don’t seem to really care one way or the other. I suppose that proves we’re a wonderfully adaptive species, and able to take our warming planet in stride. But I think mostly it proves we have short attention spans. When the average life span is about 70 years the world feels relatively immutable. And in a way, I suppose it is. To the earth and the universe, as individuals, we’re a lot like fruit flies. We come and we go. Eating, feeding, and breeding.

Of course, I still care about the environment and the earth even though it feels a lonely voyage these days. I still remember the first Earth Day in 1970, before there was an EPA, or any legislation about clean air and water. But it all seems so long ago and nowadays a lot of people complain about those “burdensome” regulations. That feels like some pretzel logic to me. Regulations designed to ensure we have clean air to breath and water to drink are burdensome. Go figure. Anyway, I’m going to enjoy the cool day, hope we get some rain.

There’s a cold wind blowing, dried leaves are skittering down the dog run, heading south. The visiting Monarchs are departed. The heifers and their calves stopped by to feed this morning, and spooked when I came out onto the porch with my morning coffee. The cat boxes are ready for their first real test. Heat lamps go up this afternoon. I feel mostly recovered from whatever bug it was that bit me the other day. Pretty sure it was allergies, but isn’t that what everyone says.