The End of Summer

Even though the leaves have been changing color for weeks now, the end of Daylight Savings Time marks the end of summer for me. Thursday was my last day of biking to work for the season, mainly because I don’t like biking home in the dark.

Friday night we drove around looking at Halloween lights, and Saturday we hung out with the neighbors passing out candy together. We think our family is a “well-known neighborhood” because we think we got 200-300 kids over the course of 4 hours of trick-or-treating. We never quite got the sea of kids at one time that we had a few years ago, but it was still a lot of kids. We went through at least 4 bags of candy from Costco.

It’s cooled off considerably the couple of days since, and last night we got a pretty big rainfall which lasted until late morning. My jogging has been going pretty well, and I went out running in the rain this morning – the end of DST means it was light out before 7 am when I started, instead of having to wait ’til 10 past 7 to get started. Neither my Apple Watch nor my iPhone shorted out from the water, and I didn’t get totally drenched. But I don’t think I’ll run in much heavier rain than that this winter. I am trying to get braced for colder temperatures, though.

The big sycamore tree over our house is turning brown and dropping its leaves, and I’ll be raking them up for the next two months, I’m sure. Maybe a few more good rainfalls will knock most of the leaves out a little early – that would be nice.

This morning I also tested out the furnace to make sure it’s in good shape. Even with windows open, it started heating up the house within a couple of minutes. The smell of the heat in the brisk air made me smile.

Here’s hoping we have a nice normal winter, and take a bite out of the state’s drought.