Tag Archives: fall

Peace but not quiet…

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I’m going to spend an obscene amount of time this weekend shuffling fallen leaves from one bit of the property to another. We’re still in the part of the season when trying to keep up is a fool’s errand, but moving leaves is one of my very favorite lost causes. 

After the week that was, a lot of hours of droning power equipment and wandering around the yard is probably just what the doctor ordered. For a brief time between when I have everything sorted and a strong breeze knocks the next batch of leaves down, it’ll look like I really got some work done. That’s generally more than I can say for anything I do from Monday through Friday. At best that stuff might have an illusion of accomplishment, but it’s even more ephemeral than a leaf-free yard in the late fall. 

After that, I have no definitive plans to speak of for the next two days. Books, coffee, tea, gin, cat, dog, tortoise, and a few well-cooked meals. That’s ample enough leisure for my tastes. Sure, I’m probably still high maintenance, but mostly in the way I think even simplicity should be well done. The thing I desire most out of these two days is pace… given the amount of leaf blowing that needs done, quiet is obviously out of the question. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Friday afternoon. Once upon a time, I actually enjoyed Fridays. They were a day full of promise. Now, of course, Fridays are just the day the Good Idea Fairy makes its rounds or people remember shit they should have done earlier in the week and try to jam it through so they can claim it got wrapped up before close of business. I can only urge you not to be that guy. Don’t wait until Friday afternoon. I promise you, deep down in places professionals aren’t supposed to talk about, no one give a shit at 3:30 on Friday how good an idea you’re having or whether something gets done or not. Maybe there’s an exception for immediate threats to life and safety, but otherwise all anyone on the line cares about on Friday is getting the hell away from cubicle hell for a few days. I know the uberbosses, enthroned high on Olympus, have forgotten their days lower down on the org chart and truly believe that everyone wants to (or at least should) give 300% 24 hours a day, but the heights of Olympus aren’t a reflection of any kind of universal reality. Sometimes those memos are just going to linger over the weekend… and I’m perfectly fine with that.

2. Paper cups. I know it’s saving the world or whatever, but I miss Chick-fil-a’s Styrofoam cups. In its new, socially responsible paper cups, the lemonade gets watered down on the ride between drive-thru and office. It’s just disappointing.

3. Heating and cooling season. So here we are well into autumn. It’s a special time of year where I fire up the furnace each morning to knock the chill off the house and then a few hours later when passive solar heating has sent the indoor temperature well into the 70s, switch the air conditioner back on to get the place back down to a reasonable sleeping temperature. At least in this part of the world this mixed season doesn’t usually last long. While it’s here though, I spend an unreasonable amount of time pondering the time, effort, and cash it takes to maintain a steady 68 degrees. 

The best ten weeks…

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Here we are in mid-October, I’m comfortable saying I’ve mostly adjusted to the diminishing daylight and have started into one of my favorite times of year. Sure, it’s about to be the “holiday season” or whatever, but that’s not really it. Not directly, anyway.

I’ve long made a habit of mostly hoarding vacation time through the first 2/3 of the year. With the arrival of October, though, it’s time to start letting those days spool out. For me, that means the next two and a half months look something like this:

Three-day weekend… Work for two weeks… Five day weekend… Work for a week… Four day weekend… Work for three weeks… and finally the last, glorious Fifteen day weekend capping off the year.

The annual burning off of vacation time is a real thing of beauty. This annual rite of autumn is made easier in my case by not having to burn time during the rest of the year to tend to sick offspring or in accommodating spousal wishes. I sprinkle days through the rest of the year to get a quick breather when necessary, but it’s here in the fall where I really get my head right.

In a few months the new year starts and with it a new round of hoarding time off begins… with the promise of another fall filled with days not spent dwelling under fluorescent lighting. For now, though, I’ll happily celebrate the best ten weeks of the year,

The vagaries of memory…

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Picking Concord grapes is one of my first vague childhood memories. There were friends of the family (distant relatives, maybe) living way the hell north in Erie. They had a house in town, an endless supply of Pez candy, and what now would be called a vintage Volkswagen van. Back then, in the early 1980s, it was just an old van, of course. It’s funny, the things we remember.

We’d go north to Erie in the fall. There was grape picking. I know my memory isn’t completely faulty on this because not long ago I saw the photographic evidence. I’d eat those damned Concord grapes until I got sick. Forty years later, if I don’t impose a touch of self-discipline, I’ll still eat those uniquely purple grapes to the point of making myself sick.

I’m convinced it’s these partially formed memories that are responsible for my ongoing love of grape soda, or candy, or anything flavored in that particular grape-y profile. 

My local Mennonite fruit stand had Concord’s by the quart basket this weekend. I didn’t clean them out, but I put a dent in their stock. They’re the kind of thing that have to be enjoyed in season so when they’re ready it’s a race to eat as many as possible. I’ve avoided making myself violently ill (so far), but boy I’m right there on the cusp… and I regret nothing – especially the memories.

Fall or: Embracing the worst season…

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I hate that we’re losing a few minutes of daylight every day. The older I get, the less enamored I am with the onset of cold weather. Fall, as a season, doesn’t have much to recommend it. Even so, fall is a happy time of year. 

Aside from fresh apples, fall really only has one major factor in its favor – the fact that so many of my favorite living authors seem to have themselves plugged into a fall release schedule for their newest works. The first of many pre-orders has started hitting the streets and will be showing up on my doorstep in dribs and drabs between now and early December.

There aren’t many things I’d rather be doing than settling in with a good book and some spiked apple cider, so despite its other clear down sides, I’ll be firmly embracing the season’s slow descent into seemingly perpetual darkness.

A minor concession…

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Today was the first of many concessions made to the changing season. Putting on jeans instead of shorts isn’t exactly abject surrender, but it does mark the day as the tipping point of the long slide into hibernation weather.

I’m ready for a bit of a break from schlepping hoses all over the yard, keeping the grass in check, and keeping up with the long list of other items on the summer maintenance list. Even though I’ve largely been home this summer, the indoor “stuff” always takes a back seat when it’s nice enough to be outside. With the extra traffic in here for the last six months it’s probably well past time to shift focus.

I’ll be in love with these days of coffee on the porch during these increasingly crisp morning… right up to the point where crisp gives way to cold. After that, of course, I’ll spend a few months pondering the virtue of those creatures that head south for the winter.

For now, I’ll appreciate the minor concessions… and hope that we catch a last few days of Indian summer in the coming weeks that will make such minor concessions briefly unnecessary.

The fall season…

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There was an article this afternoon running on AP that blared the headline “TV cliffhanger: New season in jeopardy amid virus shutdown.” It turns out the fall season of network television is now officially in jeopardy. Which is definitely an issue if you are somehow involved in the entertainment industry.

Once upon a time, I’d have probably been in the ranks of the concerned. Fortunately, most of my favorite television is two decades old. If it does happen to be newer, it’s seasons and seasons deep into its run and there’s a better than average chance I either own copies of every episode or can fish them off the interwebs somewhere. Even if that weren’t the case, having fallen in love with Game of Thrones taught me that two years between seasons is a “perfectly reasonable” amount of time. 

The trouble with Coronavirus crippling the television industry, isn’t necessarily that so many shows might end up delayed or lost forever. The real nightmare scenario for TV in the Great Plague era is that these delays in scripted television may loose a new and terrible age of unscripted “reality” television upon the land. I can’t imagine any way to make contemporary television more irrelevant to my life than to cram even more Housewives of Wherever or Kardashians in Quarantine onto the airwaves. 

The last gasp…

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Under last night’s onslaught of sub-freezing weather the last of the summer’s potted plants gave up the ghost. It was dollied through the back gate and unceremoniously dumped in the woods at dusk without even the courtesy of a shallow grave. I feel like I should have done more to mark the indisputable passing of warm weather for the year. That was the last gasp of the summer that was – and Casa de Jeff is now fully winterized and rigged for the coming unpleasantness.

Between inhabiting a world that’s only lit during business hours and the arrival of Thanksgiving in a few days, it’s just another in a long string of reminders that we’ll soon be hunkered down till spring. It’s not quite the Starving Time, but it’s frankly as close as I have any interesting in getting.

I regret the (temporary) dying of the light. I’ll even miss the yard work for the next few months. There’s something about freezing your ass off blowing snow that’s just not nearly as satisfying to me as keeping a well trimmed yard.

Regularly scheduled broadcast…

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With the heavy lifting of last week over, I’m fairly certain that we’re now returning to your regularly scheduled broadcasts around here. Mercifully, the coming week will largely be about administrative minutia and doctoring up the aftermath to make sure everyone comes out looking good. Being a master bureaucrat of long experience, thats the kind of work I can churn out all day long without calling on too much brain power. It’s for the best really, because I’m still not sure how deep reserve of that I have, even after the long weekend of making no decision more challenging than when to eat and what to watch.

Our great bureaucracy is in the midst of that magical time of year when just about everyone’s thoughts are turning to the two month “holiday season,” those eight or nine weeks of the year between Veteran’s Day and New Years that are punctuated by 4 federal holidays and everyone trying to burn off the last of their use-or-lose vacation time. It’s not quite a “slow” season, as the beast always needs fed, but the pace does ease – if only because at any time it’s likely one or more of the people you need to talk to to get anything accomplished will be elsewhere.

In no way should that be interpreted as a complaint. In fact I’m counting on the schedule taking a few stutter steps if I’m ever going to catch up on email and all the other stuff I’ve been largely ignoring over the last few weeks. When I was last at my desk, the unread message count stood somewhere around 300+. If Thursday and Friday kept up the pace, I could have a personal best 500 messages waiting for me to read, file, delete, or continue to ignore indefinitely.

While in an of itself that all seems pretty bad, I can tell you this is the least angst-filled Sunday night I’ve passed in quite some time. I’m counting it as a win.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Fall foliage. I live in the woods… but not the deep woods. That’s a plan for the future. After a couple of days of wind and rain I’m reminded that I have neighbors. For the first time since mid-May I’m starting to see them again. Well, not “them” exactly, but certainly their houses. I’m deeply happy with my little plot of land, but at this time of year I’d be ok with another hundred yards – or maybe a few more miles – of trees between me and the next guy.

2. Rain is the new snow. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve seen any rain to speak of. I know it must be a frightening and unnatural experience for everyone. I know this because for the last two days everyone has driven like there was eight inches of new-fallen snow on the roads. If nothing else, it has served to reinforce my long-held belief that most people are idiots. As usual, though, it’s probably all my fault for having even the lowest of expectations of my the average man on the street.

3. Draftees. As the American Army, the most decisive fighting force ever fielded in history, is drawing itself down to the pre-World War II levels, the Russian president is drafting an extra 150,000 of his citizens into military service. Let that sink in for a minute. In terms of troops in active service, that will put Russia within spitting distance of parity in manpower. Figure in their increased pace of modernization and the simple fact that they don’t have to move their personnel across an ocean to get at many of the world’s current “areas of interest,” and in my humble opinion, this brave new world of our is going to look very familiar… almost like the one we left in the early 1990s. Talk about back to the future.