A little kitten, about eight weeks or so old, has been hanging around. Because he’d appear and disappear instantly I named him Zip.

Last night we had a crowd on the deck and Zip appeared and did his thing, zipping underfoot snagging food. Then ran off under Nick’s truck while simultaneously  reappearing under our feet.

This was a bit too much for us inebriated types to comprehend, so it took a while.

A little later we saw two darker-than-midnight Zips eating from the same plate. Well, some of us saw four Zips, but it was readily apparent that there was more than one Zip!

So _that’s_ how Zip did it, disappearing and instantly reappearing in a differerent place!

These mountain critters are playing tricks on me.

Mister Tigger remains unimpressed.

Fall is falling. Acorns hit like shrapnel; the hickory nuts sound like an artillery barrage on the tin roof of the nearby cabin.

But while fall is falling no one’s told the leaves yet, and the temperature hit 87F today.

Geese are landing at the nearby farmer’s pond. The first time we heard them one of us said “What the hell’s that noise? It sounds like someone’s choking a flock of….geese!” So now the geese rotate through daily and announce their presence every evening.

I saw a couple of lightning bugs tonight. I guess they don’t want to give up the summer and are hanging on for all they’re worth. But the seasons change.

This is all new to this Florida cracker. Back in Florida we had two seasons; the hot season and about a month of “freeze the balls off a brass monkey” season” .  (that’s a nautical term; I’ll explain it to you even if you don’t ask)

But basically the season was the hot season, followed by the hotter season followed by the hotter and steamy season. I’ve worn shoes exactly twice in the past three years. But I do have knockaround flip-flops and dressup flip-flops.

And I fully intend to wear my flip-flops through the fall into the winter until we make it back to Florida.

They don’t call us Floridiots for nothing!

We haven’t quite adapted to this Tennessee weather yet.

In Florida the weather guessers forecast a 50-percent chance of rain roughly 300 days a year.  That means your BBQ has a fifty-fifty chance of getting rained on.  So we cook out 300 days a year and only occasionally get rained on.

Conversely, up here on the mountain, it seems that a 20-percent chance of rain means that 20 percent of the rain in the area will definitely fall on you.

I thought it was a chance of rain, like gambling, not a percentage of total rainfall. I thought wrong. The last time it was 50 percent it was a real frog-strangler.

I’m not looking forward to 100-percent chance of snow.