Fall is my favorite time of the year. I love the cool days and chilly nights. I love pies made from fresh picked apples and the smell of pumpkins. I love the fall foliage. Fall always ends when a series of windy wet storms come through knocking the last of the leaves off the trees and starting the cold nasty weather we associate with November. Officially fall continues until December 21, but those rules were made by the ancients living along the balmy Mediterranean Sea.

A cold wet storm came in last night and most of the trees have lost their colorful foliage leaving mounds of brown slick stuff all over the roads. It will snow overnight. By Halloween it may be a little warmer and dry, but the Fallness will be gone.

I took off yesterday in order to get many chores done. I drove Mom to the doctor and I spent a ton of money getting the front end on the truck fixed. I found time to sit on the bench in the yard with Gracie on my lap enjoying the last great fall day. It was sunny. I wore a nice thick wool sweater and sat in the sun for an hour.

The dark and depressing Winter months come after Fall . I am already getting for work in the dark and soon the time change will force me to drive home with the lights on. Any daylight that I see for the next five months will be through a dirty window looking out at a brick wall.

I can’t think about my retirement fund, but I wish there was a way that I could spend my time doing what is important to me. It is a waste to spend the day in a depressing cubicle writing the same sad code over and over again. In the last post I wrote that I first picked up The Martian Chronicles when I was about 12. Here it is more than 45 years later and inside my head I am still the same kid I was back then, hardly changed by the years. I am always surprised when I look in the mirror and see that old man looking back. That 45 years went like a flash and I feel the next twenty or thirty years speeding towards me. I hate to waste it.