posted 2007/10/09 at 20:46
Lost amidst yesterday's obligatory anti-Cleveland sports joke was the fact that I did, in fact, go to Cleveland for the third time in my life on Saturday. The first time was in 1995 to see Björk perform at the Agora; the second time was this past winter to attend a dance game tournament being co-run by Lara. (I arrived too late to take part in the tournament, but I mostly went to show Lara support and to provide brownies and cookies for the participants.) This third time I pretty much just hung out with Lara and played dancey games with her. For a change, the trip went pretty much as planned, and in addition to having a fun time hanging out with her I also enjoyed stopping at a number of service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike and paying way too much for bad food. (Seriously, there's just something about that experience that appeals to me.) I missed most of Hockey Night in Canada that night, but that's kind of a small price for me to pay, especially considering how infrequently I get to socialize these days.
As I mentioned before the trip, I'm hoping that I can get Lara over here for an afternoon soon. Given that Toledo has never been that good of a location for dancey games, I figured that the best thing we could do would be to photograph the autumn leaves together, and so far she sounds up for it. The only real problem I'm running into is trying to figure out what would be the best Saturday for it. Right now it's still kind of early in the season; there are a fair number of leaves on the ground in our backyard, but they're mostly of the yellow and tan varieties, and the trees themselves are still mostly green. I think that rules out this coming Saturday, but I'm not sure which of the next two Saturdays would be better. I've been looking through my autumn galleries in .photography trying to determine if the 20th or the 27th would be better, and it kind of feels like a day in between would be best. (Unfortunately a mid-week trip is out of consideration because of our usual commitments.) Then again, I'm guessing that trying to figure out the weather to that extent is probably an exercise in futility at best.
The first two days of the week this week we broke 90 degrees each day, then today we only got up to about 75 or so. Starting tomorrow the highs are only scheduled to be in the mid 50s to low 60s for the foreseeable future, so it's finally going to start feeling like autumn here shortly. In all honestly I'm more concerned with how the lower temperatures will interfere with my workout schedule (I've been playing dancey games in the garage a lot these past few months and I'm probably thinner than I've been in over three years now), but I do hope to get out a bit more here and enjoy the changing of the seasons. We're just starting to get the first patches of gold on some of the trees now, and even though I like it most when we get the reds and oranges in full bloom, it's still gorgeous out now. I should probably make a trip to another park by myself here just so I can really document this autumn in full, both for my own personal record and to show the rest of you.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon