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It is my sad duty to report that summer has finally crashed to a skidding halt in the Bay Area, to be replaced by sudden-onset winter. I know that in some areas there’s a period of gentle transition, known by various names (autumn, fall, Indian summer, November). We didn’t get much of that this year. What we got was nice weather followed by lousy weather, with the promise of a lot more.
It rained hard during the night. It didn’t keep raining all day, but there were periods of heavy cloudburst and that miserable, drizzly feeling in the air. Mostly it was just dark and gray, and now we face the resetting of the clocks this weekend, which will smudge the afternoon sky with night even earlier. Some people enjoy this time of year. Good for them.
What this time of year brings to my mind is this: I wonder how many more flushes are left in my toilet before the ground water backs up into it. I wonder how often I’ll be sitting in the dark while the utility company fixes other people’s power outages before getting around to mine. I think about getting my rubber boots down from the loft and putting them on every time I go out to get the mail.
So far I’ve resisted the temptation to turn the furnace on for the first time. I doubt I’ll get through the whole winter without heating the house. I probably won’t get through the first week, but this weekend I’ll drain the air cooler of water and take it upstairs, and bring down the space heater. I’ll get out all my sweatshirts and dust them off. I will face that grisly monster winter with pluck and resolve. I mean, it’s not as if I live in Frostbite Falls. It won’t get me down, any more than the very thought of it already has.
I do have one thing this winter that I didn’t have last year. I have a cell phone with unlimited web access, so when the lights go out I can sit around watching my favorite videos on YouTube until the power comes back on. Or at least until the phone battery dies. | 
