Things To Do in Less Daylight

As daylight shortens and nights grow long:

• watch and laugh at YouTube videos of parrots taught to swear
• buy something on eBay or Amazon every day before getting out of bed in the morning
• stave off morning coffee to extend the small pleasure of looking forward to it
• tap "Like" on every Facebook post
• stay up until 3:00 a.m. mending all the torn clothes and altering all the too-long sleeves piled up during the last five months 
• buy and eat Hershey bars
• buy and eat Hostess Snowballs
• procrastinate if there's any work to do
• scroll through hundreds of the latest memes 
• scroll through hundreds of before-and-after photos of plastic surgery
• attend fall festivals for 20 minutes and then go home
• drink

Why the Long Face?

I can't befriend a horse without thinking of the joke (and laughing, every time): "A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, 'Why the long face?'" Met this horse on today's early-morning walk. This horse's friend is wearing a fly mask to protect the tender eyes and ears it cannot protect on its own.

Some jokes never get old. One time a friend and I were arguing about nature and he passionately demanded, "Do you know the lifecycle of the cicada?" I replied, "No, but if you hum a few bars, I'll fake it," and that makes me laugh still.