Beset by deadlines, I shutter myself in the house & office. My second Nova Scotia fall is passing me by, which is a shame because I was too upset to really notice the last one. It's all crisp goodness. The ivy outside my window is an unlikely shade of crimson. The bluest of blue jays squawk & chitter & swoop around when I walk to work, distracting me out of my morning fog. If I look past the ugly university buildings and I'm on just the right patch of ground, I can even see the Minas Basin: a horizon that is gold and a waterline that is that special shade of oceanic bluegreen that promises great joy & hypothermia all in the same siren song.

What will I remember when the snow closes in? A really long walk through the woods, I guess, and the way everything crunched underfoot. I will remember the day they stopped selling green onions at Noggins because that was the moment I realized that the summer bounty would end eventually - was, in fact, ending already. I will probably forget the exact night that snuggling into a warm bed became a hotly anticipated activity rather than an inevitable end to the day.

Oh! It comes to me now that I'm still mourning the blossoming rainsmell of spring. No, I'm not ready for winter yet. Make a note of it.

We went grocery shopping last night, as the Boy fears that today is his last day on the video beat. We've been mentally preparing for this for what feels like an eternity: the Boy's employer is the kind of man who won't give advance warning of changes because he's afraid of subversion. This is, of course, a clear invitation to subversion if I ever saw one. But anyway, the end of things has been hanging in the air for months now without ever having been clearly articulated, and this has seriously poisoned the Boy's working environment. Yet to quote the Onion, 'you will feel a strange mixture of sadness and relief when you are laid off from the manure packing plant.' This is probably for the best.

It does mean many changes, though, and foremost among those changes is that we'd lose the use of the company van. This is why we thought it prudent to drive to the supermarket & stock up on groceries while we still had a motor vehicle to do the donkey work. It was kind of fun, actually. There was a strange, grim joy to it, like we were preparing ourselves for the attack of Hurricane Unemployment. We got to say things like, "our soup stores are low" which quickly devolved into "our canned sardine stocks are low" and "our individual-serving frozen quiche lorraine stores are low." Not that we bought any of those silly things, we were just having a good time in the supermarket. It's funny-strange how anticipated adversary can make life funny-humorous, if you're sharing it with someone you love.