Baby, it's cold outside....

The days are getting shorter: when I get up at 6 am the sky over the Chiricahuas, the eastern side of our valley, is now red rather than yellow, and the sun does not top the mountains until 6:45, when I am almost home from the morning walk. But the sun is past the highest point in the mountain range in its travel south, so I should be seeing the sun rise about the same time during the next week or so.

Nights are cooler, though in the whole month of October we have not had a frost. The insects are feeling it, and in the evening there are a lot of them clung to the house for warmth. Most of them are moths and grasshoppers, with an occasional walking stick or mantis thrown in. In the morning a lot of them are dead on the porch, succumbed to age and cold.

Yesterday I saw this little rattlesnake on the porch outside the kitchen, probably also looking for a warm place to hide. Being young it had beautiful markings and it barely had a rattle, just a button. It took some convincing to get it to slither onto the offered shovel, but it finally did so and Dan carried it off east to where there are no neighbors and where it is unlikely to be pestered by a couple of nosey, but careful, dogs.