Monday

Happy October first. I love this month, and it's indeed starting to feel a bit autumn outside already. I'm grateful, even though I know this will make me less enthusiastic about beginning two years of pure summer later on this month. Still, the dry leaves on the ground, the wood smoke smell in the air, the apples and pumpkins beginning to pop up at the produce vendors, these are a welcome reminder that I do get to spend half the month in a land with seasons. We're back in Falls Church safely, by the way, after the five hour sixteen minute drive between a Sears in North Carolina and our Oakwood parking lot last night. It was a nice, uneventful trip. This afternoon, when Sunshine was preparing to head out on some errands, our car wouldn't start. Besides a flat tire, nothing has ever gone wrong with that car. Now here we were, two and a half weeks from never needing the thing again, and it won't start. We agreed it was probably the battery, but why? It worked fine last night. We didn't leave the lights on. Of course the answer was that the battery was just shot: moldering and blue, corroded, dead. Triple-A arrived in a dazzling ten minutes and replaced our battery on our own parking lot. That did the trick nicely. The guy said the battery could have died at any point, even while we were driving. Sunshine imagined the panic we'd have felt last night if the car had quit after our deserted rest stop somewhere around Thornburg, VA. Shudder. Anyway, to celebrate October, I watched El Vampiro (Fernando Méndez, 1957),¹ part of CasaNegra's recent series of classic Mexican monster shows,² this one neatly out-doing the Universal Studios' Dracula with spooky Latin glee. [Cavin]