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.

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.

More on the Monarchs. They’re sleeping in the Mesquite tree by the Evergreen Sumac. I assume they’re catching their breath before they continue their migration. I’m glad I’ve got a hotel with a nice restaurant close by for them. It makes me wonder if they were here last year or the year before, and I simply didn’t notice. It’s entirely possible. In the last several years November, for me, has been a month of travel and getting ready to travel. So, we easily could have been on separate journeys.

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.