summer about over? or is the jury still out?

My poorly-chosen profession has led me to say that summer's over on Memorial Day.  I used to say that it was over on the 4th of July but the always increasing pace of activity in a college bookstore doesn't seem to give me even that much of a break anymore.  Or, maybe it's my always increasing stupidity that makes the pace seem so much more frantic.  I thought for awhile that it was an international conspiracy against me but, when I bring that theory up in casual conversation, people's eyes glaze over so quickly that I've kind of let that one slide.

There's strong evidence that we've moved into the fall season.  We started our fall semester at my beloved North Hennepin Community College.  Tons of the books we spent the past three months hauling into the store and piling up on the shelves have now found their way back out the front door in the hands of eager young scholars, most of those presumably having passed by our cash registers.  We could argue about the wisdom of starting any fall semester before Labor Day but most everybody's doing it so there doesn't seem to be any going back on the concept.

And Miz Susan's summer break seems to be over.  At any rate, she's gone back to getting her brains beat out at her beloved Linwood/Monroe Arts Plus Upper Campus.  Again, we could argue over why the Upper Campus is actually down the hill from the Lower Campus but the geniuses who work at 360 Colborne (which is even farther down the hill than the Upper Campus) have got that one set in stone.

The State Fair definitely seems to be over.  That's usually a pretty good sign that summer is, too.  Snelling Avenue traffic levels have returned to their usual merely stupid instead of four to six lanes' worth of parking lot.  Plus, the obnoxiously inane behavior of local TV station weather reporters has subsided now that these fools are again chained up in their studios where they belong.

Miz Susan and I managed to sneak in a trip to the Fair on the Sunday before Labor Day.  We even ran into a handful of people we knew which turns out not to have been all that big a surprise.  We were among 165,000-plus saps who turned out for Day 11 of the Great Minnesota Get-Together and Cheese Curds Massacre.  Statistically, it would have been nearly impossible not to have known a few other people out there.  For the record, I didn't get to eat nearly as much food that's bad for me as I'd hoped I would.  I guess that's what next year is for.

And then (a few days after I started this piece), low temps overnight were down into the upper 40s.  And into the lower 40s up Grand Forks and Roseau way.  And, of course, near freezing for International Falls.  Show offs.

The sign of the end of summer which I've liked the most (other than surviving 8,000 community college students looking for my head on a pole because of textbook prices) was seeing Orion for the first time since late last winter.  He was off in the southeast at 5:15 this morning, just starting his march up and across the sky.  Come midwinter, he'll tower over the night sky but, for now, he's mine alone in the wee small hours.

The sign of winter's approach I like the least is the idiot on the bike I saw today.  He was practicing for his stupid winter bicycling behavior by riding with his right hand on the handle bars, texting madly with his left hand and cutting a trail of delicate sine waves eastward up Marshall.  He made the right-hand turn onto Fairview, straying no more than 10-12" from the curb as he wobbled around the corner.  I'll admit that I advised him that he was a stupid fuck as I went past him toward Selby.  He'll do just fine after the streets ice over and darkness falls at 3:45.  If it's not snowing, in which case dusk will come at about 2.

And now in mid-October (I started writing this weeks ago), temperatures are back down into the low-50s in the morning but we've had a string of 80+ and 70+ temps over the past couple of weeks.  Miz Susan has imsisted that I keep cutting the lawn on a weekly basis when all I really want to do is lay around and channel surf hoping to find a postseason baseball game to ward off the great barren winter of football/hockey/basketball.  So far, so good.

I know that the ice and snow and my snow emergency email blasts are waiting in the wings.  I'd be fooling myself to think otherwise.  But there's still a ray of hope.  In our neighborhood, summer's not really over until the Dairy Queen on Snelling closes down shortly before Thanksgiving to make way for the Christmas tree lot.  And from that point, it's only four months til DQ opens up again in time to catch the drunks staggering out of O'Gara's on St. Paddy's Day.

I'm predicting a short winter.