Getting ready for Winter...
...it's comin' whether ya like it or not...

I try to take things day-by-day, and I appreciate autumn days like this when the sun's out, so I get out and try to enjoy the weather. But at the same time, it's as if things are shutting down. I'm not the most gregarious person in the universe, but on these autumn weekdays, "there ain't no life, nowhere"...it's as if City Park becomes a graveyard without tombstones. The leaves are beginning to fall as the days shorten, and it's just all sad, somehow. Already I'm thinking forward to the arrival of next spring, all the while blocking out thoughts of winter, but as is obvious here, I'm painfully aware winter's on the way.

To me, winter feels like a sentence that I've got to serve. It's like a yearly punishment for something I've done. During the winter months, I feel like I'm in solitary confinement in my house, doing whatever I can to keep up my morale. So I flip on the TV, activate the CD player, or dig into the record collection...whatever it takes. For me, it's a real "bunker-mentality" type of thing anymore, getting through winter. It was different when I was a kid; snowball fights, snow forts, snow sleds, no school on deep-snow-days.

As I've aged, "snow" has become a four-letter-word. Well, I've heard this might be an "El Nino" year, so maybe the snowfall won't be as severe and my pipes won't freeze this winter. But, as the picture below demonstrates, we all have to gear up for the winter...


The folks at www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/hbo have resigned themselves to the fact I tend to screw up their photos...