Dunwich is settling into fall. We had a week of rain and wind. We had one day of summer where it reached the mid-eighties and now it’s back in the sixties. The clown parade of weather men and girls have done their best to confuse their forecasts beyond human understanding but I could glean that we have about a week or two before the first real frost.
So today I went to store away the pool furniture and accoutrements. And while I was inside the pool fence, I saw a female preying mantis trying to warm up enough to remember how to trap insects. But there really aren’t many insects left. Well, there are but I think the mantis is waiting for the bees to frequent the flowers that she was stationed under. And the bees were nowhere to be found today. At least not on that side of the yard. There was a grasshopper hiding under a branch about three feet away from the mantis but it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as the predator was concerned.
I took some photos of both. I was temped to catch the grasshopper and try to lure the mantis into grabbing it with her claws. But I remember last year when I “brought” a mantis in at the end of the season. It died in about two days. It was like something out of a 1930s Universal Monster movie. I had delved into things that “Man was not meant to meddle in.” So, I waved goodbye to the grasshopper and the mantis and got back to the work Camera Girl wanted me to meddle with.
On Tuesday the battery in my car died and Camera Girl loaned me her car until the AAA guy came the next day. I gave them the make and model over the phone and they said they had the right battery so I expected a quick replacement. But the gods conspired to complicate my day. It seems that Toyota uses a special smaller battery to fit in the crowded footprint of the engine compartment. So, the poor guy had to travel almost an hour in each direction back and forth to his shop before finally finishing the job. Two hundred and forty bucks for the darned thing. Gee, I remember when a battery was fifty, sixty bucks. Well that probably says as much about how old I am as it says about the unbearable expensiveness of everything.
But I’m being greedy. The thing lasted seven years. That’s a pretty good battery life and at least it had the good grace to give up the ghost in my garage so I didn’t have to wait around in the middle of nowhere hoping for the tow truck guy to rescue me. But I guess it’s really the time of the year I should thank. Last week was the first large drop in the ambient temperature since last year. And that change in temperature probably decreased the voltage of the old battery below the minimum needed to crank the engine. So as unnatural as it is for me to be grateful for the end of summer, I guess I should be. Bah!