Right on cue! Or almost. The last day of summer was September 21 and two days later the temperature dropped precipitously. How much? When I drive to work I switch on the car heater. Using a more objective way of measurement one would say that temperature dropped to slightly above 20 deg C. Clearly our increased tolerance of higher temperatures came at a price, we turned into weaklings when it comes to handling cold.

The cooler weather is the beginning of one of the two pleasant seasons in Houston (the other occurs in the spring) which resembles Calgary summer and in a good year lasts nearly three months. It is pleasant, rather than just character building, to go for a walk and it would be nice to sit in the garden if it were not for one small problem. Or more exactly, a whole swarm of little problems. Yes, mosquitoes are still around and since we see people sitting outside there is obviously one trick that we have not learned yet. Kumiko believes the secret lies in fumigating and spraying the garden, I am reluctant to do that due to the large population of frogs, toads and lizards we have and which I believe do a good deal of insect control of their own. Maybe we just need to eat more jalupino peppers.

We have, however, solved another of Houston's little mysteries. Why do so few people park their cars on the street? Often you will see three or four cars huddled together on the driveway in such a way that all have to be moved to get the one in the front out. It seems so inconvenient. Well, not any more. Last Friday night Kumiko woke up at to the sound of tremendous thunder (I have a long track record on not waking up. Like the time when our neighbor's house burnt down or when they arrested a Dallas mass murderer next door). She went to look at Monica's car, which was parked on the street in front of the house. We know from the big flood of 2001 that the street has a tendency to turn into a Venetian canal. But even though it was raining fairly hard the water was flowing and not accumulating. However, when she checked a second time the street was already under water. She went and got into the car, which now had about 15 cm of water inside. Amazingly, the car started and she was able to move it to the driveway which is above street level. We spent the following weekend draining and drying the interior. We also tried to empty the muffler by parking the car on an incline and running the engine - the exhaust pipe produced a respectable spray which lasted for almost an hour. For the following week we parked the car in the sun, opened all the windows and put an electrical fan inside to keep the air moving. The smell is almost tolerable now.

Among other news, hechima keeps on growing and invading neighboring gardens. Hechima is a Japanese plant (kind of a wine), producing cucumber-like fruit which can be stripped of its fleshy parts leaving an organic skeleton used as a bath sponge. In May, I put one seed in an empty spot in the rose bed. It grew fairly well until August, few pretty flowers, but no fruit. Then in August it went completely out of control and after taking over the entire rose bed it attacked and completely covered our neighbor's crepe myrtle tree, climbed over the roof of the garage of the house behind us, reached for cable and electrical wires and is moving over to our garage roof. This in spite of my continual attempts at trimming it back. It finally started to show some fruit. It turns out that there are separate male and female flowers and like cucumber the male flowers start blooming first. So far, even though there are many little fruits we have not detected anything of usable size. But we probably still have another 2 to 3 months of growing season ahead of us and maybe something will show up.





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