Fall.

It's fall. I live in New England. I'm sure you've heard by now that the fall in New England means crazy leaf colors. What it means to those of us who live here is indeed crazy leaf colors, coupled with the inevitable result of changing leaves: fallen leaves.

As a kid, I never liked yard work. I avoided it if possible. Luckily, I lived in an apartment, and thus, no yard work needed for most of my childhood. I was only really exposed to the terrors of rakes when cleaning up my little league field, my grandparents' yard (to jump into leaf piles) or watching cartoon characters step on them.

That all changed when my parents bought a house on seven acres of former Tree Farm. It's as if they were trying to make up for lost time or something. That purchase, along with my burgeoning adolescence, and thus, distaste for all tasks handed down to me, led to my current anti-yard work stance. I'm sure my father's constant over the shoulder management style had something to do with it as well (this is a tangent that would take far too long to describe adequately).

This brings us to the present: there are four or five mature, and generally welcomed trees overhanging my back yard. The majority of trees here are shedding more and more leaves with every wind gust. The trees overhanging the yard are no exception:

This is the result of four or five trees continually leaking. This image is a little misleading, as by the garage, there is no visible grass, or even asphalt:

Crap.

On Saturday, I spent the morning raking and mowing. While raking, I counted each leaf. 16 trillion; all of them on our property. Three or so hours later, and the driveway was cleared, for the most part, and the yard was kind of cleared (I half assed this by raking up and removing the big piles, then just mowing over the rest, hoping to catch as many as possible in the mower bag).

In other news, we did a few drive by's of potential properties and apartment rentals. Nothing major.

Also, Amanda's little sister and her boyfriend showed up to watch a movie, eat some food and play some Rock Band. As a result, nothing was finished, or started, house-wise after I put the rake away on Saturday morning. Luckily, we have Wednesday off for Veteran's Day, so I'll get cracking on the roof stuff then.

Lastly, I just noticed that this is the hundredth post. That seems significant considering our love for the deka system.