Cold Front

On this FSU Homecoming weekend, Tallahassee is having it's first truly cold weather of the season, with lows at night in the 30's.  Gone are shorts, flip-flops, line-dried bedsheets.

Mr. Claudius the cat has a cold.  He is sneezing and wheezing and listless, poor thing.  He got on my lap any time I sat in my reading chair today.  We will take him to the vet on Monday to see what can be done.

A dead squirrel appeared on the front lawn yesterday, a mature female, quite large.  She looked unharmed, probably died of old age.  I buried her this morning.

We heard a critter up in our crawl space a couple of weeks ago, making a gnawing sound for several nights running.  A pest control guy blocked an outside metal duct for the pipes from the outside fan unit of our heating-a/c system with duct tape, and that seemed to stop it.  He was sure it was a squirrel.  I climbed up and found a snug little nest lined with paper/plastic bag scraps in the cellulose insulation, but no critter.

My sister A. posted on Facebook that the sale of my parents' lake-front house in west Orange County has been closed.  What do you say?  My other sister C. "liked" it, so I " liked" it too.

It was at the back of beyond when I came home on college breaks, a 45-minute drive to see my high school friends in Orlando.  In later years, we always felt a bit desperate staying there.  My parents' healthful regimen  had us conspiring to slip away for pizza, Mexican food and booze, like the old joke about why WASPs don't have cockroaches, (there's nothing to eat).