I will never tire of these lovely days. This morning’s air has a coolness leftover from last night. A bright sun is framed by the deepest blue sky. The trees in the back are still so ladened with green leaves much of the yard is in shadows with only a spot of sun here and there. The birds are dining and taking turns at the feeders. The dogs are sleeping. I am drinking my second cup of coffee. We are all content.

When I was a kid, Sundays always started with mass. I didn’t have a choice. The alternative was a mortal sin symbolized in my catechism by a blackened milk bottle and an afterlife of eternal damnation in the fire pits of hell. I was afraid of both so I went to mass every Sunday. When I was younger, I paid attention and gave all the correct responses in Latin. When I was older, I sometimes smuggled in a book surreptitiously and sat in a corner to read it. With my head bowed while I was reading, I looked pious.

Today is another one of those days when my muses have deserted me. I wrote a few ideas, but they didn’t lead anywhere so I deleted them. One was about fashion. I had little fashion sense when I growing up. I always wore a uniform so it didn’t matter, but I do remember one Christmas when I got the best clothes, fashionable clothes, what everyone was wearing. I got a pink fuzzy sweater, a bright pink fuzzy sweater. I got ski pants, black stirrup ski pants, and a pullover ski jacket which had a zipper from the top and a zippered pocket. I wore it all the time even on the coldest days.

The spiders are taking over. Every day there are new webs and rebuild webs. This morning I saw a web which crisscrossed from one leg to another to another on a dining room chair. It is gone now. The top of one lampshade has a new web every morning. Other webs stretch from one frond to another on some plants. I have become frenzied in my search.

This uke week includes practice, my lesson and two concerts.

The morning is cloudy and dark. Every now and then a wind blows. The high will be 71°. Tonight will get down to the 50’s. I could do errands today, but I’m thinking today is a good day to stay home. I’ll do my errands tomorrow.

Yesterday, I filled the bird feeders, my single accomplishment for the day. Today, I have no to-do list. I’ve decided, instead, to support my inner sloth.

Today I muse.

When I was a kid, one of the talents I developed and was most proud of was my ability to dunk a Graham cracker in cocoa and eat it before it dissolved into the cup. It took timing and finesse. I still dunk, but now I use a biscotti and dunk it into coffee, a grown up choice I guess.

I always thought the milk left in the bowl after the cereal was gone was the tastiest. The only way to drink it was by lifting the bowl to your mouth, but you had to be careful as sometimes the milk sloshed from the rim of the bowl.

We always had white bread. It was soft white bread. Peanut butter, when I tried to spread it on the bread, always tore a hole, but I used the peanut butter like paste and repaired the hole.

I always thought the praying mantis was the most amazing bug. I remember watching one for the longest time when I was a kid. What I found amazing was it stood upright and really did look like it was praying. Its eyes were bulging and a bit scary looking. It never flew. Last night I watched The Deadly Mantis from 1957. It flew. It ate people.

Saturday was the busiest day. My father did his errands uptown. He’d drop off and pick up his white shirts at the Chinese laundry, have his hair trimmed and visit a few friends. At home, he’d do his mowing in the summer and his raking and burning leaves in the fall. The winter meant no outside work unless it snowed. Every father on the street did the same. It was an unwritten rule.

We didn’t have much when I was a kid, but we had butter, not margarine, and the milkman always left one bottle of chocolate milk with the white. It was supper during the week but dinner on Sundays because there was always a roast, fancy meat.

We couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. Sometimes we’d have frozen fish sticks with French fries for supper or English muffin pizzas. My favorite supper was fried dough slathered with butter and a bit of salt. We stood in line at the frying pan.

I’m watching, in between words, a science fiction film from the 50’s. It is Saturday and time for Creature Double Feature. I chose The Crawling Eye, but The Tollenberg Terror, released in 1958, started instead. I tried twice for The Crawling Eye with no luck. Finally, I set Google on a task. Come to find out they are the same movie with different titles. The Tottenberg Terror was the name in England while we got The Crawling Eye. For my second creature feature I’m hoping to find The Fiend Without a Face.