The leaves are gone

After a very blustery day on Saturday indeed, the rainbow of fall colours has landed in our forlorn-looking winterized swimming pool and the trees are creaky and bare, shivering in the cool November wind. Sort of like me.

I have that not-yet-settled-into-the-cold-season, odd Ontario November wardrobe that consists of jacket (on second thought, too light for today's brisk wind out of the north) and scarf (how could I have forgotten that this one makes me so itchy?) and shoes (I am NOT wearing boots before December if I can help it!) that are inadequate for the odd patch of mud I've encountered on my travels around town.

Daylight savings ended on the weekend and on the dot of 6:03 pm, my body is now telling me it's time for bed. "To bed with you!" my body cries. "It's dark," it whines in an obnoxious and somehow pathetically yearning way at 6:14 pm. "Why are you ignoring me?" my body cries at 6:27 pm. "To bed! What's so difficult to understand?" And still I somehow resist. Barely.

I'm possessed with a hibernation instinct not normally attributed to humans, I think. But I can't indulge the "pathological need for sleep" that the sleep doctor declared me with. He was amused that I slept for 13 hours in his lab. A world record almost and in summer, the season of light no less! So excuse me body but I have a career that requires that I set an alarm every night. A career that is currently composed of several jobs. And not quiet, unprovocative jobs but loud, rather demanding jobs. Promotions to get on with. Websites to re-structure. Clients to counsel. Blogs to write. Books to develop from ideas into words.

But, but, but...I'd rather sleep for 12 or 13 hours a day. What could be better than yummy, delicious, cozy micro-fibre sheets wrapped around me sleep? No, I don't have time for that whole grown-up career thing at this time of year.

And on top of all that, the lighting in the bathroom at work has begun to betray me again. It's an annual event - a shift in the space-time continuum that somehow results in fluorescent bathroom lighting illuminating a pasty pallor and frizzy hair that cannot possibly belong to moi. I, career woman/rip van writer girl, feel the almighty urge to runs screaming from the terror and travel down that intimidating yet somehow enticing aisle at the drug store that contains the cream for "mature women's skin" and "anti-everything serum".

Good thing I'm having a great time with my career. When I'm awake.

ZZzzzzzzzzz. Let me know when it's Spring.