![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Autumn has broken. I don't mean that it has finally arrived, rather it has been here for awhile and it is broken. The weather has been cool and autumn-like, but without the crisp clear days that one would come to associate with fall around here. Other than a few breaks in the cloud cover now and again, it has been bleak and grey here for weeks. It seems out that September was an anomaly. After ten consecutive months of below-normal temperatures, we had the warmest September on record. October is below normal again.
Road construction is usually done here by the end of September, but they've been they're tearing up the streets like it's still July. Yesterday they dug holes at approximately three-block intervals in the centre lane of Main Street. There is no obvious reason for the holes, but that is indicative of much of the construction that we have seen this year. There are three fairly major intersections near my office that they dug up for sewer work through most of July and August this year. They finished that work in September, but this month they dug up all three intersections again, blocking half of the lanes in each intersection. They didn't put anything in the holes, or at least nothing I could see. They simply left them open for a couple of weeks and then filled them back in again. I guess they were just inspecting their earlier work.
Perhaps the most significantly broken thing this season has been the trees. Our trees have malfunctioned. They should be bare by this time of year, but the majority of the trees still have the majority of their leaves. Some have finally started to change colour, but they have still only dropped a small portion of their leaves. A lot of others haven't even started to change colour yet though. On some species of trees the leaves are clearly dead, because they have curled up and turned a sickly grey-green colour, but they haven't fallen. Other trees look like they would in mid-August, with the exception that their leaves are showing serious frost damage around the edges.
I don't know if it was the cold summer, followed by a hot September but something seems to have disabled their usual mechanism that sends them into hibernation. I have heard some concern expressed in the local gardening community that if they missed that signal, there is a chance they could also miss the signal that tells them to send out buds for new leaves in the spring. It will be a rather depressing summer next year if the trees decide to give it a miss and don't put out any leaves. On the plus side, maybe it will wipe out the caterpillars and canker worms.
On the computer front, portable Firefox is working very nicely at the office. It is a little sluggish starting, and occasionally it freezes for a few seconds while it deals with the slow memory stick it's running on, but it is still a lot faster and more stable than the IE7 installed on this computer. it would be nice if this computer had USB 2.0, and/or this was a faster memory stick (I got it as a freebie at a trade show last year), but I'm happy.
Road construction is usually done here by the end of September, but they've been they're tearing up the streets like it's still July. Yesterday they dug holes at approximately three-block intervals in the centre lane of Main Street. There is no obvious reason for the holes, but that is indicative of much of the construction that we have seen this year. There are three fairly major intersections near my office that they dug up for sewer work through most of July and August this year. They finished that work in September, but this month they dug up all three intersections again, blocking half of the lanes in each intersection. They didn't put anything in the holes, or at least nothing I could see. They simply left them open for a couple of weeks and then filled them back in again. I guess they were just inspecting their earlier work.
Perhaps the most significantly broken thing this season has been the trees. Our trees have malfunctioned. They should be bare by this time of year, but the majority of the trees still have the majority of their leaves. Some have finally started to change colour, but they have still only dropped a small portion of their leaves. A lot of others haven't even started to change colour yet though. On some species of trees the leaves are clearly dead, because they have curled up and turned a sickly grey-green colour, but they haven't fallen. Other trees look like they would in mid-August, with the exception that their leaves are showing serious frost damage around the edges.
I don't know if it was the cold summer, followed by a hot September but something seems to have disabled their usual mechanism that sends them into hibernation. I have heard some concern expressed in the local gardening community that if they missed that signal, there is a chance they could also miss the signal that tells them to send out buds for new leaves in the spring. It will be a rather depressing summer next year if the trees decide to give it a miss and don't put out any leaves. On the plus side, maybe it will wipe out the caterpillars and canker worms.
On the computer front, portable Firefox is working very nicely at the office. It is a little sluggish starting, and occasionally it freezes for a few seconds while it deals with the slow memory stick it's running on, but it is still a lot faster and more stable than the IE7 installed on this computer. it would be nice if this computer had USB 2.0, and/or this was a faster memory stick (I got it as a freebie at a trade show last year), but I'm happy.
