The Start of Autumn 2014

The last week of September: Autumn has begun, not only officially, but in that the leaves of the trees are starting to turn. A few are already in one color or another. The goldenrod next to my back door has expired. I have cut it down and tied it up for the street department to pick up with the two bags of branches that have blown down from the big maple during the past couple of storms.

Another sign of autumn is my putting away the air conditioner for the year. That air conditioner is only a couple of years old, and yet it has managed to cool down the ground floor of my house as well as with the floor air conditioner. I am wondering whether it is worth keeping the latter.

I am not looking forward to the winter electric bills. The summer bills are already horrendous ($150+/month), and I can expect bills of over $200. It will be good when the car loan is paid off in a couple of months.

Museum Days has come and gone. I have had my elephant ear. I have done my time at the Book Sale Friday night and Saturday morning (we did very well for the library). And the parade this year had more participants than in past years.

Remember when I said that a good idea in attacking an ocean monument was to dig from below? Nope. I found some problems with that. One problem is that sometimes the wall of water does not appear, at least when the monument is near an island. The main problem, though, is that the big laserfish can sense your approach and hits you with a curse called Mining Fatigue, which weakens your hands and makes using a pickaxe, axe or shovel useless … unless you have some milk to drink. The curse hits you when you are within 50 meters of a monument, and keeps hitting you are inside that radius. Not … good!