Case of the Tuesdays

Fig. 1. The Doughsbury Pillboy.

NoVA has been suddenly cool these past couple of days, with briefly achieved high temperatures in the low- to mid-70s and a lot of rain and gloom. It's remarkable how cold and wet this weather feels when it follows the usual hot and wet late-summer weather here. Add to that the dead maple leaves on the sidewalk out front (the tree's apparently rooted near enough pavement that it doesn't stay green for much of the year, though the taller ash trees near it do well enough) and leaving for work feels strongly like walking to middle school during the first week of the new term. If humans have any inborn reaction to seasonal changes, my summer-to-fall one has been completely co-opted by the thought, "Back to school..." And so I trudge just a little bit heavier through my Monday and Tuesday at work than usual. Even my windowless office space, which maintains a fairly consistent level of medium-dark and medium-cool throughout the year regardless of what's going on outside, seems both darker and cooler than it should.

A little while ago our grandfather finished reading "Great Expectations"; he told us that he had thought he'd read it two or three times already but, after finishing the book, was amazed to realize he had never read it before after all. Prior to this morning I would have told you I had changed one of my car's headlight bulbs before, but the experience turned out to be surprisingly unfamiliar. Added novelty came from the particular way in which the power steering fluid reservoir blocks one's line of sight to the headlight apparatus in a 2000 Civic, my general awkwardness with gadgetry, and the moody drizzle falling on my back out of the overcast skies. The driver's side headlight, happily, works now, though the passenger's side light stopped doing so at some point during that whole process, but I have higher hopes -- greater expectations, if you will -- about repeating the process tomorrow morning. I'd do it tonight but I'm gambling on having no rain at all by then.

As I'm typing this, a small pink something, curiously shaped and wet, appears as if by magic below my laptop keyboard: Sort of like crumpled tissue paper, with two stalks rising from it eerily like antennae... A little bit of slightly weirded-out probing reveals it to be two stuck-together tree flowers. My first hypothesis was that they were somehow disgorged by the AC unit directly next to my table but it's more likely that they just fell off of the top of my head.