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.

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.

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.

I’m an ordinary guy with an ordinary blog. Think of me as a small neighborhood business, The Caregiver’s Tales. Forty or fifty people a day stop by my website, mostly via Facebook, to see what’s up and go on about their day. No big box. No video. No noise.  So, imagine my surprise last week, when I had close to 200 visitors on two separate days, a nearly 600 percent increase, and they were going to my blog, and they were coming to it direct, as in not via Facebook. That’s a traffic spike. I was excited. Then I looked deeper and tempered my excitement.

Over my many years I doubt I’ve spent much time worrying about the whipsaw effect of daylight savings time as we sprang forward and fell back. I simply endured them. But this year feels different. I’ve grown accustomed to going to bed at 9:30, like a child I suppose, and being of an advanced age, I am less supple, both physically and mentally. My body, tuned to the rhythm of the spring clock, is out of step with the fall clock. What was once 9:30 is now 8:30, and I await sleepily to hit the sack.

I’ve been on a three day bender, drunk on camaraderie. It started on Halloween at a friend's house in a neighborhood well populated with kids, passing out Halloween candy. We passed seamlessly into the next day where we went shopping for bar stools, then ended the day with a house concert. We finished the weekend with a miniature version of Wurstfest, where we ate fried food, drank beer, and played games.

At one point, I had no cats. Now I have three. A mother showed up pregnant. She had four kittens.  I gave away two of the kittens. Another straggler appeared, a little black cat. That was four at home. Eventually, one of the remaining kittens died, and now I’m down to three. I gained half a cat recently when a stranger showed up to eat and run, then come back to hang out at night.

My fascination with quantum paradoxes popped up yesterday. I’d been mulling over two courses of action, ways in which my life would go one way or the other. One good, one bad, to me. An inflection point happened, I saw the path forward and as I did, I realized that tracing out and imagining my future was simply a way of holding alternate realities in my mind until the box was opened and the situation revealed.

There’s a cold wind blowing. My wind chimes have shifted from soft, melodious tinkling to an annoying cacophony. I had to disconnect the little swinging ringer causing all the noise. The quiet is beautiful. I'll put the ringer back down, when the wind dies, providing I remember. But maybe that’s for the best.

There was a time when I felt perpetually on. Sensitive to every twist and turn life was prepared to throw at me. If life was a roller coaster I knew better than to stiffen up and hold the sides. Better to relax and flow around the corners. Being tense in times of trouble bode ill for my chances of surviving the trouble. I tried to be like water, looking for the path of least resistance on my way to the sea. I relished the challenges.

There’s a chance of rain this weekend. So, yesterday I cleaned the front gutter. I climbed a ladder and used my battery-powered leaf blower. The job was fairly quick. The ground along the front of the house is fairly level. I could have fallen, but I took my time and measured every step. I used my nice extension ladder. There was a rhythm to the job. Set up. Blow. Leave the blower. Move the ladder. Do it again.

I’ve been poked and prodded twice in the last several months, checking my innards, first with an MRI and then with a fancy camera that detected a nuclear tracer. In both cases the subject of the investigation came back clean, which is a pretty good sign for the aging body of an old man. I’ll take it.

I think the universe likes balance. It sent us another cat to replace the one we lost. The newest one, much like the old one, eats and hangs out. No touching allowed. It mostly runs when I appear, although lately it has taken to simply moving a safe distance away and watching me talk to it. Yesterday it lay in the pasture grass across the fence while I sat on the back porch. I talked; it listened. Of course, there’s a high likelihood the new cat actually has a home, because outside cats are promiscuous eaters. So, I might be getting ahead of myself in calling it a replacement.