Friday, September 18, 2015

Timely solutions for a too-busy Fall


I don’t want to come off as sour on romance, but I hope next Fall some lovely young couple invites us to their wedding, has a big senseless fight at the rehearsal dinner and acrimoniously calls the whole thing off.
I swear I’ll send them both presents.
It’d give me a surprise vacancy on a calendar that’s far too crowded.
Fall is maybe my favorite time of the year. I love the crisp air, the tartan leaves, the quickening of the days.
And I love to mostly ignore all of that while sitting inside my basement on long Saturday afternoons watching college football.
But Fall somehow’s become absolutely insane.
I guess people sense the weather is about to close in on us all and we’ll be marooned inside for the next six months.
They feel a pressing need to squeeze all the outdoor time in the can. They plan picnics, festivals and reunions.
And they invite me to all of them.
It’s too much.
Ray, my wood guy — and by saying wood guy, he’s an actual person and not some cigar store Indian — is busy right now.
(Aside: I posed a Facebook question asking PC-PD if to be perfectly politically correct we should refer to cigar store Indians as cigar store Native Americans and my high school buddy Mark Reinhold shared, “TOKE-a-Hontas.” Yes!)
He dropped off a load of wood at the bottom of the driveway. Then he rolled his log splitter out back and set to work splitting a big stack of poplar we felled in the spring.
Now today he’s going to show up to timber a once-stately sugar maple tree that about three years ago got damaged in a heavy spring snow.
So — and I love this — I could spend the next three weekends playing lumberjack.
Break out the flannel!
See, Ray splits the wood, yes, but I like to split them so I can order the 9-year-old girl to carry small stacks up the stairs when I’m too lazy to do it myself.
Cutting wood with either an axe or a chainsaw is, unlike blogging, tangible work.
You see the work being done, recognize it is actual labor and at the end there’s a big pile of something you can see.
Some would argue this blog is a big pile of something, too, but let’s conclude the analogy right there.
And although you they sound virtually alike, you can’t set fire to a big pile of seasoned blogs.
I love when the seasons turn chilly and we can cozy in around the fireplace and infuse the whole house with the heady aroma of hearty soups cooking in the kitchen.
But this Fall that is not to be.
There’s something going on every weekend.
It’s not that I’m anti-social. It’s just I’d like to control when the socializing takes place, how distant it is from my hearth and when it ends.
I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to see all my friends and loved ones, but in the middle of the week when their bosses say they ought to be working.
That’s why I’d like to be invited to a wedding that busts up.
It’s be the sudden vanquishing of a weekend commitment, the liberating of precious free time to lounge.
I’ve long advocated we need to expand Daylight Saving Time to add years to our lives.
For instance, this year we set the clocks back one hour on November 1. It’ll be the to most glorious hour of the year. For every American, with the notable exception of some Hoosier eccentrics, it’ll be the most glorious hour of the year.
It’s like finding a $20 dollar bill breezing down the sidewalk.
I say we should escalate it by rolling back the clock an hour each week.
We’ll all be getting younger!
Why not expand the idea to have daylight saving seasons? I’d like enjoy a festive and fun-filled fall and then right before Thanksgiving have it announced we’re going to get a big do-over; a daylight savings fall.
That way we could enjoy maybe my favorite season all over again — but without all the activity clutter.
Now I understand some Type A calendar curmudgeons are going to complain that it’ll upset the rest of the year.
Well, I’ve got that all figured out.
We’ll skip winter!

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