In the license plate game, no news isn’t good news, it’s just no news. Which is to say that you probably guessed from the extreme lateness of this report that there were no new sightings in October. I did cruise through the M.V. Hospital parking lot toward the end of the month to see what I could see. I saw Louisiana and Montana, which would have been exciting last spring, and Texas, South Carolina, and Oregon, which aren’t hard to get but at least aren’t (ho-hum) New York, New Jersey, or any New England state.

But not South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, or Alaska.

Time is running out, but I’m not giving up. One year I spotted Nebraska the last week in December. I clinging hard to that possibility.