Fall isn't all bad, I suppose. The prevailing fall color here is yellow, but in town we get the occasional flaming red from scattered maples, and red sumac flares up along the roadsides outside town and in the tans of the pastures.

Wednesday night, a generation of yellow leaves from the hackberries and the burr oak in our yard hit the ground, but Friday two young boys of this household who needed pocket money were home from school, so they spent part of their otherwise free day as hired rakes. Our big elm out back will drop its leaves later this month, and the boys will find themselves employed and flush with cash again. For weeks afterward, every load of wash will be laced with a soggy leaf or fragment of one that had hidden in a pocket, sleeve or cuff.

What else? Fall fills the house with the scents of baking breads and cakes, of roasting briskets and hams, of simmering stews and soups, and of steaming pastas and sauces. There is a downside to this pleasure, of course: I think I've found the two pounds that I lost earlier in the week; they're back in the same place I last saw them.

Could this entry possibly get any lamer? Well yes, it can and it will, but I can explain. My energy this week went to getting new classes off the ground. I stay energized in the classroom and I do love those first days of a class, but I also feel drained and glazed afterward outside the classroom, and I'm seeing (and displaying) the result of that energy loss right here now.

Oh, I am not un-chipper; I just don't feel creatively productive. My concentration is better suited at the moment to cleaning the little crumb tray in the toaster or to estimating the number of mints in an Altoids tin, but the task of cleaning the toaster, a semi-annual event here, is not due until the end of the year, and I just noticed that the label on a nearby Altoids tin says that it contains about seventy-five mints (three mints per serving times "about" twenty-five servings, all with no cholesterol or fat). So, what am I to do?

This entry demonstrates perfectly that after a brisk walk to the bank to make a deposit and to the city offices to pay a water bill, I am perfectly suited today only to vegetate in front of a football game and then a baseball game. Besides, the sound of football and baseball broadcasts wafting through opened windows is another bonus of fall, so I'll turn up the volume and open a window, and by that means I'll perform a community service. I am so selfless.

Okay, so there wasn't much here today, but I liked the picture.

Reading: Work stuff. The inactivity of the web log reflects the extent to which work-related activities have interrupted my recreational reading.

Watching: This evening I'll flip between football (Texas Tech vs. KSU) and the World Series (NY vs NY).