Prequinox

Kids are back in school, football season is underway, the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler. But it is still technically summer. I realized that this morning because my whole commute seemed oddly underpopulated, from the bus to the Metro to the underground shops between the station and my office. Usually I associate that phenomenon with federal holidays that my office stays open for (like Columbus Day) or the day before or after a holiday weekend when people can get a four or five day mini-vacation by only using 8 hours of leave. So I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out what the occasion might be for which people would take a Friday off, but “last weekend of the summer” was the best I could come up with. And I’m not really sure if anyone really celebrates that.

I would love to take a random celebratory Friday off but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Over the spring and early part of the summer I took a lot of time off when little Ludwig von Howlsatnight had ear infections and couldn’t go to daycare, and I am now in the hole on leave time. I’m grateful that my employer is flexible enough to let me take off whatever time I need without much hassle and just let me work it off later, but it is nonetheless depressing to see a balance of -11.25 in the vacation slot on my timesheet. I should be back on the plus side sometime in November. Wheeee.

My employer is really flexible on a lot of points that make my life and work/family balance easier. Most days I work from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. so I can get home ahead of rush hour and get to daycare before they close. Of course that means I have to leave the house as close to 6 a.m. as possible, which means the alarm clock goes off at 5. Roosters don’t get up that early, man.


And over the last week or two I’ve gone from leaving the house as the sun is coming up to leaving the house when it’s dark. I wish I could come up with a devastatingly witty metaphor for how much that sucks, but instead I’ll have to ask you to trust me. It sucks. And reminds me that summer is going, going, just about gone. (I tried to find an appropriate picture of hourglasses or sunsets or whatever to signify the passage of time but everything I found was way too heavily symbolic and I didn’t want you to think I’ve turned into a depressed thirteen year old girl. Well, MORE of one.)

Still, even if I wasn’t able to blow off work today, and had to get up on the wrong side of sunrise, I am glad that it’s almost fall because I like that season, and I will celebrate on Sunday as we’ll have some out-of-town friends over and some local mutual friends as well. There was a distinct lack of cookouts in our summer this year but we’ve managed to pull together two in September. Here’s to procrastination.