A swarm of Monarch butterflies stopped by yesterday to visit. They dined on the blooms of the Evergreen Sumac growing at the east corner of the south porch. It’s a first, and I was happy to be of service as they made their way south to breed. Milkweed may be a favorite food, but they sure seemed happy with the Sumac’s flowers. It will be interesting to see if there are more today.

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.

A sure sign of winter for me is the moment after sunset when there is still light to see but it’s all indirect. In that moment, the landscape is nearly colorless. The grass is brown and the green trees dull. Everything seems lifeless and you know the cold is coming. I had that moment last night as I sat in my front room and looked out at the pasture just beyond my fence.

It’s a bright, cool Sunday morning. Early on, there was a heavy fog on the park pasture as the moist, warm ground met the cold northern air. It’s gone now, chased away by the sun. The rain washed air is clear and clean. The forecast for the week is dropping temps. We’ll soon be down in the 40s at night. Not really earth shaking news if you live somewhere else, but it’s what’s happening here. So, it's all I’ve got.

We had a big rain last night, and now I get to use words like turgid because the earth is full and swollen with water. Digging, if digging needs doing, will be easy and I have some I want to do. Formerly wilted leaves are fat with water and standing tall, and if you’re a tree it’s a good way to go into winter, with a belly full of water. On my little plot of earth, the rain gauge says we got an even inch. That’s six gallons on a square yard. If more falls today it will probably run off and head to the rivers.

Winter’s coming. That’s the promise. Rain tonight. Cool next week. Not cold, but it’s a start. We’ve already got the dark. The sun is off to warm other climes. It’s another phase in the long dance of our spinning planet around its sparkling sun as both move through the universe in tandem. Lot’s of forces at play.

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.

I had a thought. Last night, after dinner, we played a game based on Dominos. The name of the game and its rules are immaterial. At the end of a round, each player counts up the pips on the dominos still in their hand, and low score wins after nine rounds. Here’s the thought. What if, at the end of one round a player accidentally miscounted, because wine and drinks were flowing and the player’s head was not really in the game, but another player of better math skills saw it, and thought it was done on purpose.

Off to the east, as I stand on my porch, I can see the waning crescent moon, with Venus hanging just below it, in the dark morning sky. Some low clouds are passing by and the sky is just beginning to light as the planet turns us to face the sun. The little wren is still asleep in his cubbyhole on the porch pole.

I have a car and I am exhausted. Partly, there’s always the nagging suspicion I might have done the wrong thing. I suppose second guessing is just in my nature. Then there was the stress of simply buying the durn thing. It takes an emotional toll. Finally, there was the wrestling with insurance and dealing with the rent car that toted me around while I looked for a new vehicle. Lots of t’s to cross and i’s to dot.

As third acts go, I’m having fun, particularly on the music front. I played an open mic again last night, and it went reasonably well. I held my own. I was ignored by some, complimented by others, and actually had someone dancing. That’s always nice. Plus, some friends came along, and one of them played, too, and that made the evening even better, because I like my musical friends, comrades in arms.

I wish I could get a good shot of the little wren sleeping in the cranny of my cedar porch pole. But I think it will take more effort on my part. I’ve tried sneaking up, but apparently I’m not a good sneaker. I think I’ll need to set up my tripod with my old school SLR camera. Or, I could just let the little wren sleep and keep my mental picture. Either way I’m glad to have him and happy he feels comfortable.

Round, round, get around. I get around. Catchy song and a given in today’s society. But I learned a sharp lesson when I lost my wheels a couple of weeks ago. Getting around is hard when you’re solo. There’s ride sharing, but it costs a pretty penny. It appears my best option when I’m carless might be the Capital Area Rural Transportation System (Carts). At first glance it seems pretty robust, and I’m sure there will be a learning curve, but I think it might offer me a car alternative, a backup system. So, I’m off to investigate.