2004-09-22 - 11:18 a.m.
Autumn starts today around 12:30 p.m. Fall in New England is pretty cool. To me it means Football, fresh apples and foliage. It means crisp, cool nights and fledging sunny days.
It also means getting the yard and house ready for winter. I’ve got a few short weeks to close up the pool, put away the patio furniture, rake the damn leaves, stack the pellets for the stove, and clean out the garage so we can park the cars inside for the winter…Oh god. The garage. It’s a mess. All over the place are piles of debris and stacks of tools left over from summer projects. Damn. I hate cleaning out the garage. I don’t know how I am going to get everything done.
The good news is my wife and I will be celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary this fall and we are taking a week off and heading down to Aruba. We’ve never been to Aruba and we are both looking forward to it. We love the islands. We’ve been to St Marten (that’s where I proposed to her on the beach), and Antigua, and we have also spent some time in the Bahamas. Everyone has told us Aruba is beautiful. I am hopping the weather will be ok. I am also hoping that this short dose of the Caribbean will be enough to carry me through a cold, New England winter. If not, we also made plans to go to Florida in January. After typing that, this winter doesn’t seem like it will be too bad…hopefully we’ll be able to get a ski weekend in up in Maine too.
The start of Autumn means one sure thing: Summer is over. It’s the time of year that I start to envy folks with a more southern latitude and in a few months when the snow is up to windowsill I will outright loathe them.
Here in New England, we get maybe 8-10 weeks of summer. of that we get only about 2 weeks of "real" sumemr. You know, weather warm enough (and dry enough) to hit the beach, or roast outside on the lawn chair and get a decent tan. This summer wasn’t too bad. Surprisingly, I think the majority of the weekends were rain free, but I don’t recall ever getting a real good stretch of hot weather, just a few good days here and there.
I spent some significant time this summer at the vet. At the beginning of summer/late spring, one of cats wandered upon a raccoon and her cubs (Cubs? Racoonettes? Litter?) and our cat almost had her head bitten off by the mother coon. She is just about fully recovered. We keep a close eye on her now when we let her outside.
We also had a great 4th of July cook out in the backyard, complete with some kick ass fireworks and a campfire and music blasting well into the night. Good times.
I usually make up some mint juleps in the summer. This summer I only made one batch. I’ll have to correct that next year….
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