Oktoberfest

When I was younger, the "old" people (must have been all of forty) would say, "If you think time flies by now, wait until you get older."  As with almost all of what they told me then, they were right.  Good grief, it's October already!  We've got to start thinking about holidays, the holidays, the big, important holidays, and I'm not ready.  I noticed the last few times I was in town that the stores were starting to display Halloween candy.  Just as an aside, when did they drop the apostrophe in Hallowe'en?  It is, after all, a contraction of Hallow's Evening.  Oh well, never mind.  Anyhow, does anyone honestly think that candy bought in September is going to still be around the house by October 31?  Not in my house, for sure!  I have no will power to resist candy corn or black jelly beans.  After Halloween (with or without an apostrophe), everything gets kicked into high gear for Thanksgiving and doesn't stop until the New Year.  Nooo, I'm not ready.

On my last trip to the feed store, slash hardware store, slash oh-you-name-it store (it's where I buy chicks in the spring), I bought two long tubes of foam insulation to wrap the standing water pipes before we get to freezing weather.  Chris is a long-time employee there and we tease and laugh a lot together.  I told him I was having a hard time not bonking him on the head with one of the tubes; he told me a woman he'd not talked to before did just that.  At least I gave him fair warning.

Pearl has an internal alarm clock set at five a.m.  That's about when I get up anyway, so I don't mind.  A girl's gotta go when a girl's gotta go and if that's when she needs to go outside, so be it.  I did get a bit peeved the other morning when, instead of going to the door to be let out, she led me into the kitchen to stand in front of the treat drawer and mew.  Getting up in the dark to give a cat a goody seems extreme.  Frank had a wimpy, rather pathetic excuse for a male meow, but Pearl has a broken squeaker, one of those raspy, cracked voices it is impossible to ignore.

Cindy seems to have rallied some and was more animated yesterday.  She had distanced herself from the herd for days and would still not go in with the others last night.  I've been coaxing her into the covered, fenced play yard to keep her safe.

Safety is the order of the day.  The hills resound with gunfire during deer season.  Some nutter must be using an elephant gun, it was so loud the other day; way too much fire power for hunting deer.  "My" deer are in the yard all day and evening, looking for sanctuary.  Their water pan must be refilled twice a day.  I think they bed down in my woods after dark.

Dark is coming earlier every day, and sunrise coming later.  Bedtime for my Bonzos (you'd have to be old enough to recognize that Ronald Reagan movie) is at 6:30 now or the girls won't go into a dark stall.

Where has this year gone?