When I was a kid I never understood how anyone could say that Autumn was their favorite time of year. Without hesitation, I’d argue for the virtues of summer and all of its barefoot glory. These days I get it though and if you ask me, I’ll tell you how much I love the moderate days and cool evenings, watching leaves change color and flutter from the trees, and filling my weekends with football and yard work that doesn’t leave me drenched in sweat.

So far this Fall I’ve found two different potential pickup football games to participate in. I played with a group of guys for a couple hours on Wednesday in the park across the street. And this morning Mary and I played with a church group that we bumped into a week ago, also playing in the same park. Later Mary made a huge batch of cabbage rolls (I don’t like cabbage, but after simmering with beef for four hours these things are ridiculously good) which is kind of one of her family’s Fall traditions and we ate these while watching the University of Michigan look like a halfway decent football team in beating Penn State.

Mary and I also teamed up to roll a gigantic boulder in our backyard to a new location this afternoon. We had about a dozen of these rocks scattered throughout our yard in what must have been an enthusiastic “natural” landscaping scheme years ago. I’ve slowly been digging these couple-hundred pound behemoths out and rolling them to the other side of our fence. This last boulder wouldn’t fit through our gate though and I was destroying my back going at it solo. So it now has a new home in the corner of our yard.

I’ve got a wife who plays football, cooks great food, watches football on TV, then slaps on a pair of work gloves to shove a rock around. Awesome.

Usually email forwards are completely asinine. Every once in a while though I laugh out loud:

Three finalists for “Man of the Year”

So, basically all that we’ve learned is that Notre Dame has an atrocious football team this year. I’ll take it though. And a 38-0 drubbing makes next week’s Penn State game a little more compelling. And on a pseudo-related note, I love living on the west coast during college football season. We’ve got games on at 9:00 in the morning! Watching football over breakfast, how great is that? March Madness basketball should be fun too.

I’m in the process of revamping the photos page on this site. A little slow-going, but I do have a start on the last three years of photos up right now. Given how cheap hosted server space is these days, I’m moving all the image files in-house. Organized by year. I know it’s a bit sluggish loading all the thumbnails on each yearly page, but it keeps it simpler on my end and most people have broadband these days anyway. If you happen to bump into any bugs (missing images, weird display issues) send ’em my way.

This is a post that was probably better meant for last weekend, given that’s when I actually completed the fence project mentioned below. Oh well. I discovered in the course of my digging a likely reason why the fence undulated the way it did: gigantic roots and a layer of fist-sized rocks. After much hacking and digging though order was restored. Not perfect, but everything is definitely much sturdier. The next order of business is a re-contouring of the hilly area around our peach tree (pictured above Taylor in the picture on the left) and at some point in the coming weeks an upheaval of our scraggly looking lawn. I noticed this morning that the peach tree produced one nice-sized peach and deposited it in the dirt near it’s trunk. That’s it. One big, bird-pecked peach for the year. This is one reason for the contouring of the soil around the tree. Currently the ground slopes away dramatically and this area of the yard tends to receive very little water. Little water = paltry fruit production. Next year I’ll be providing graphic support for Roald Dahl.

I celebrated a day off from work by spending all morning cutting and pasting our raggedy-looking back fence. Top left, you can see the ill-advised undulations of our fence. The posts are also tilting mightily in a few places. My plan, you can see taking form top right. Basically I’m knocking out all of the boards and returning them on a level plane. This, as it always seems to turn out, is taking forever. Mainly because I’ve had to move quit a bit of dirt so far to make room for boards that drop down. Anyway, I’m now halfway done and calling it a day. Also pictured: confused dogs and blurry praying mantis.