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

Last of the Moguls

Missouri's a great place for antique home furnishings. Have two big ol' hand-me-down floor lamps, one brass (1940s), and one chrome (1930s; has a translucent marble base that lights up when you kick it a little). So old they don't have those modern plugs. So old they take an outmoded type of bulb not found on store shelves anymore, although I've been looking for a couple of years, hoping to stock up. I told the clerks,"It's called a Mogul bulb." They'd say, "Come again?" and "Never heard of it." Has a big base to fit a big socket. Expensive.

Found some Mogul bulbs online at "Bulborama.com" but then I saw they also sold ceramic adapters for reducing a Mogul socket to a regular socket -- for $4. So I bought two. That way my big lamps could use modern energy-saver bulbs. I also bought three-way energy-saver bulbs that don't work three ways, but I'm glad they work at all. (Have you seen the current prices for floor lamps?)

So my quest through the hardware and lamp stores for Mogul bulbs has ended, and along with it a part of history that was built into my home furnishings. Above you see the last of my Moguls, the adapter, and the new kid on the block.

Open Windows

Out here there's no need to blind the windows. The sky pours in all day. I see birds and sun, sunrises and sunsets, storm clouds, the porch. Yesterday came three fat bluebirds trying to drink from the birdbath. I can see Highway F and the postal carrier's lime-green jeep, the hills across the road, my rugged rural Missouri.

And the sky pours in all night. Woke this morning with rulers of blue moonlight right on top of me and my bed. That tells me the moon is waning. I'm snug under two blankets and a flannel sheet. The south-facing window on clear nights is full of stars. Nothing in their way: Just black sky and constellations.

If I curtained my windows, what would I have? It is true that SOMEBODY can sneak around the house and peek at me or my stuff. But a Peeping Tom would get no thrill, I guarantee you. And a thief wouldn't see anything he wanted. What, a space heater? A 25-year-old exercise bike with 4,500 miles on it? Hey -- you don't look INTO my windows to see treasure. You look OUT.