Gray Morning.

This was not the forecast, but we know by now that the fancies are as often as not sticking their hands down in the big bag of weather icons and slapping up on the board whatever they pick out first. A big blue H and a sun with a little fluffy cloud down where its skirt ought to go? Super. We've probably still got the big blue H somewhere nearby — don't get me wrong — but I'm guessing it's a little less nearby than the big board had it last night, and I'm guessing this is some kind of low-level low-energy something that slid in underneath our big blue H, and even though it looks like it's already starting to burn off some, it's lovely in its own way, and I say pour another cup of coffee and tug on an old shirt and sit on the porch and enjoy it. The dog will have none of that, of course: She's gone back to bed.

Comes next the glinty sun and the seventy-four degrees and the fall breeze and the windows-down drive to 27244, and even though the drive to 27244 means going to 27244, perhaps the windows down will mitigate some of that, and I can summon something up from within me to cancel out all the whiny complaining about my job I've been subjecting the inside of my head and the inside of my house to for the better part of two weeks. I am not loving the job part of my job right now. I am loving the coming-home-from-my-job part of my job right now. I have had to say one too many times this term that the breakup endured when you were fifteen, Meghan, is probably not a suitable subject for your art. And not to be pissy about it, but it's probably not even a suitable subject for the deadly serious late-evening convos over at the Phi Whatever house right upon the conclusion of an All New Very Special Gossip Girls. Oh, and Brian? No, I don't think you should revise that poem about Brett Favre.

This of course will be the weather report that one of my darlings over at J. Crew U accidentally stumbles on while googling "dog poetry weather flannel whiskey Meghan," so let me go ahead with this blanket and actually true disclaimer: I love the job anyway, even when I have to fight fights I don't want to fight. But something about real and true fall settling in makes me want to do a little less of the job — teach a little less and write a little more, walk the dog more, drink coffee more, explain one or two fewer times about why the phrase "pure as snow" isn't really acceptable under any circumstances, not even weather-related ones. I don't know what my problem is. I've got the big head, somehow think I've earned my way away from misery. I know I'll be explaining why you can't say "In the growing dark, we made decisions" until the day I die. I know that this sort of misery is not really chain gang misery, and that folks out there suffering real and true and actual misery mightn't even have the patience for this little lament. So I apologize. Maybe it's this gray morning. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm going to work now. Mark the novel. Another cup of coffee. Then it's in to 27244, in to my other job. I'll make it. Don't worry about me. Attend to your own miseries out there. When the oxygen mask descends, friends and fans of weather, make sure your own mask is secure first, and then assist the person in the seat next to you.

New York.

"The kid in the city, big ears like a puppy" is how Bill Matthews has it, and that was me, standing in the blazing sun, squinting up the street, hailing a cab, riding twenty blocks south and wondering how in the hell I'd ended up there and then doing that. Temps in the mid-seventies, little breeze. Textbook fall. Look it up, and there it is. Not one quiet moment in forty-eight hours, not one time when you couldn't hear brakes and trains and horns and sirens and disagreement in the languages of your choice. NYC seems right on the edge of filthy, such that when the little breeze does come, if it brings a kind of fresh air, you notice. Still: In all that stench and noise and busy there's something to be much loved, the feeling that Something Is Going On Here, the kind of feeling I used to get crossing the campus at UGA, passing the library, say, or the science buildings, getting hold of the notion that Things Were Happening, and that's for sure what I felt on my Friday cab ride, looking up and out the window at building after building after building, each one holding somebody working her way towards something else, towards what's next, or what might be. Buzz at the right door and they just might let you in, just might say Hello, just might say It's good to meet you, just might, just might, just might.

We dragged that weather back with us, minus the noise and the smells, and so with not much further ado let us here at ANYLF Global Fall Headquarters welcome you to a new season. In 20 minutes, at 11:44 a.m. EDT, the sun slinks by its predetermined point and we shall all of us here squint out at the autumnal equinox. There may be a few tomatoes left out there on the vine, and the determined among you may be able to coax another crop of greens along, but we move now toward harvest, toward storing up for the winter, toward the longer nights and shorter days. Now is a time for projects. Make your lists, friends and fans of weather. Get up just a little earlier. Do the work that needs to be done.

It's fall. It's possible this whole project has been aiming itself towards this.

Weather Update.

Go outside. Go outside right now. Do not come in for a long time. Do you hear me?

Turned Cool.

First flannel shirt of the season yesterday. Cooler tonight than last night. I'm not sure it smells like fall, but it smells like it smells like fall. And in other news, the new bathroom is all but in outside, and nothing's leaking any more. The sink leaked for a day and a half, but that's because PVC and metal don't so much go together, and also because I twisted the thing the directions said to not twist. The toilet's not leaking because I have lived a very nearly just life and am being rewarded for it—that, or basic principles of hydrodynamics are for whatever reason on my side this week. I don't know. All I know is that we had a post-Fay bathroom outside on Friday, and now we have a post-post-Fay bathroom outside.

More than one plumbing dude at Lowe's knows me by sight. Hey, I say. Can I ask you a question?

We head to NYC this weekend for some insanity literary and otherwise. The forecast high for Friday in the Big Apple is 65. With sun. That, friends and fans of stupid winter skullcaps, may be stupid winter skullcap weather, at least by cocktail hour. I don't have the kind of life where I can up and jet to NYC, but that's what I'm up to: it's a kind of fairyland craziness, and for now, I'll take it. If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. It's up to you, 10003, 10003.

Crickets at it hard here in 27408. Dogs barking off in the distance, but not across the street. Plumbing functioning as it should. Jeans and boots weather. Dog happy. Dishes washed and kitchen ready for morning coffee. Getting dark earlier and earlier. I'm ready, goddamnit. Maybe not for sleet, maybe not yet, but I'm ready.

Dog Storm.

Whatever this is, we're getting pretty good rain out of it. At about 6:45, just before it started rumbling, the dog hopped up on the bed seeking solice, and I thanked our resident barometer and ran outside to roll the windows up on the truck. By the time I got back in bed it was raining, and it has been since. What thunder we did get was that kind of low, peeled-apart-sounding thunder, cloud-to-cloud, slow, sleepy. So far at least a half a inch. So far the shed and its spanking new half-finished bathroom remains dry. So long as I've been up the temperature's been holding right around sixty degrees. It's enough to make a person want for some blue jeans.

I know there are people who don't care much for this kind of thing, who know now they're looking at a morning of jogging across parking lots and walking soggily through chilly grocery stores and post offices. This is the weather where if you want a funk to come down on you, you can sure as hell engineer that. This is one of those harbingers of colder things to come, of summer headed out and fall waiting there in the corner, a lurker at the party. This is the canary in the coal mine. I've always wondered if they named those guys. My grandmother had a parakeet when I was a kid. Name: Birdy. But that is not the point. The point is no, people, no. Don't sulk. Have more coffee instead. Have more coffee and wear one of your long-sleeved t-shirts from the Boulevard Bolt. You love those things. It's been too warm to wear them. It's been months since you pulled on one. Get one of the ones you cut the cuffs off of. Hunker down. Crack a window. Cut a light on. Read something. It's Tuesday. Something's coming through. It's raining.

Hot, Windy.

Something's coming, but man, it's warm out there, even now, even late. The bathroom reno rolls on. Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes: In June, when I swore off wet rooms for life. It's my friend JBW who warns against the wet rooms, goes face-dark at any mention of plumbing, of water damage. A half-teardown of the outside bathroom: Shower stayed put, but everything else came out. There were some anxious moments trying to figure how to raise the toilet flange -- called, quaintly, a closet flange in the biz -- to the level of the new floor, but that problem's all but solved, and we may again have indoor plumbing outside by tomorrow night.

Mid-September means today's ninety degrees could well be our last ninety degrees until next May or June or, if the last few winters tell us anything, March. We keep picking up these ninety degree March days, getting all the daffodils scorched, pushing the fruit trees to bloom just in time for the corollary March freeze. We can fret that out in six months, though. For now, let's look at the seventies and fifties forecast for the end of the week. Hat weather coming. Even in the ninety degrees, you could sniff that out.

Each picture out of Texas looks worse than the last. The one that's sticking with me tonight is the one of the man in Galveston standing on his porch, flood halfway up his steps -- he's got his hands on his head and he's watching the house next to him burn. Watching a fire in a flood would bust my head wide open. Galveston's half rubble. Houston's got glass in the streets. The pictures out of Crystal Coast suggest that there is no Crystal Coast. Nobody can get to anybody to help with much of anything. Does every coastal town figure it'll get wiped clean every hundred years or so?

It's too hot. We've got wind. Here, that means we're toggling between seasons. Here, we're lucky that's what it means.

Missed Days.

Weather update, live from 27408: two cool gray days gave over to something like a warm sponge yesterday, and today we've got what looks like summer back and set in and sunny and hot. Down in Texas they've got the ocean in their living rooms. Here we're tearing out the shed bathroom, the last work left from Fay. New floor, new everything. Yesterday we got the PTA newsletter, intended for Blue-Tick Beagle Paul across the street. Today we prime and paint the new floor.

My apologies, weatherheads. I missed two good chances to tell you how gray it was. Now all I can tell you is how much I miss the gray, how ready I am for the sort of weather we've got cooked up today to be something I miss, too. Back outside to do what I can do to make the floor work like a floor, the toilet work like it's meant to, too.

New Belt.

I bought a new belt today. First belt I can remember buying. My other belts were from high school. Turns out: belts matter. They keep these newfangled Gap jeans on my body. Bought me some Gap jeans off the interwebs. AMR had some kind of sale card thing. This was a while back. My other Gap jeans, which I bought a whole other while back, when we stopped at an outlet mall on the way back from the beach two years ago looking for overalls for my mom, didn't much stay on, either. Probably gonna try out my new belt on those things, too. Hey, new belt. All y'all out there should get yourselves belts. Yeah, belts.

It rained most of the time I was shopping for my new belt and most of the time that followed that time, but not much overall: a tenth of an inch here. More than that out in 27244, where it rained more earnestly. Gray and cool. Like maybe long-sleeves cool. We'll be hot again, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about chili walking through the breezeway between Whitley and Alamance today. Whitley and Alamance sound like a turn-of-the-last-century comedy team. British. Ladies and germs, please give a rousing welcome to Whitley & Alamance.

Me, I've got time and energy to spare, enough to make jokes about belts and buildings. Good luck to those of you in Texas who have no such luxury, who need plywood and, well, luck. Ike looks bad at this point. They've been half-wrong all year, so maybe they'll be half-wrong again, and maybe that thing will settle down, but it's over warm water, and that can't be great.

Gray and cool and drizzly here tomorrow. Heat building back in this weekend, but cooler, crisper days may be in the offing after that. It's surely time for that kind of thing. We'll see.

My new belt's so new that when I move the leather creaks.