A Chill in the Air

Autumn officially begins tomorrow. There's a distinct crispness to our air this morning. All right, it's downright frigid. All the windows in the house are open and I'm sitting here in sweats, shivering, but it's glorious. We're going to be warming up to summer temperatures again this afternoon, but for the moment I'm rather enjoying the chill. It's a change, something I don't normally deal with well, but when it comes to the weather, autumn in Tennessee can only be described as breathtaking. There are two places in the world that I will argue are quite possibly the most beautiful in autumn. One of them is the entire state in which I now reside. The other is Brown County, Indiana. These are the places you travel and look at the landscape, the brilliant fall colors, the glory of nature, and you have to ask yourself, "How could anyone witness this and say there is no God?" It just brings tears to my eyes.

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow at sundown. I have a friend of the Jewish faith, a great guy I've referred to here before as my expert on all things kosher. I learned about latkes (pronounced laht'-kees, in case you didn't know) from him. If you've never had a real kosher latke, go find a good kosher deli somewhere near you and have one. With sour cream or applesauce. Oy, is it yummy.

I was trolling the blogosphere a bit this morning, catching up on a few posts from yesterday. There are a few you should peruse:

My Literary Siblings and the Killer Year bunch have pages up at MySpace -
JT Ellison
Brett Battles
Killer Year

Sarah Weinman cracked me up with a trip down memory lane -
"Shiny Happy Peppers"

Little Sister Sandra has a new look to her blog (love it, btw) -
On Life and Other Inconveniences

Killer Year cofounder Jason Pinter is now a married man and is on his honeymoon -
The Man in Black

And, my buds over at The Writing Playground are into their usual fun -
The Writing Playground

A bit on cats. Haydn (pronounced high'-duhn - after the composer) is the middle of our feline children. I've just spent a few quality minutes admiring his poise and balance. The bookcases in my study are side by side along the front wall, next to the window, which is recessed into the floor so that it's level with the ground outside (kinda difficult to explain the visual on this). The window has a railing that goes up about three feet off the floor of the study. The railing itself is only about three inches wide. Haydn decided he wanted to do a bit of exploring (the whole curiosity killed the cat thing), so he jumped up to the top of the railing, perched there for a minute, then attempted to get up onto the bookcase. Now, the flaw in his logic is that there are stacks of books on top of the bookcases (my infamous TBR pile). Just to help satisfy his curiosity, I helped him up to the top of the bookcase so that he was rather crammed into the narrow space between the backs of the stacked books and the wall. He couldn't really go anywhere - backing up would have meant falling off the bookcase, and going forward would have put him behind the seven stacks of books (yes, seven - I'm not exaggerating), which probably would have resulted in his knocking them onto the floor. I moved two of the stacks so that he could get down, and he did, landing quite gracefully back onto the three-inch railing around the window. Kind of like the gymnastic balance beam. It's a distraction, but they're fun to watch. You have to wonder what's going through their little kitty brains sometimes.

Now that the distraction has moved on to seeking out a comfortable place to curl up and cat-nap, it's time to settle in and work. I'm so very pleased with my progress on this book. JT is chomping at the bit to do the first read-through. It's amazing how much the story has changed from where it started, but I think it's all the better for all my agonizing and self-searching. Once it's done I'll have to share that story with you. In the meantime, it's still darn cold up here and I need more coffee.

Read a book. It's good for you.

=) JB

P.S. In case you've been missing the Lunch Room interviews and the Critic's Corner, I promise they're coming back soon. I told Sandra and JT yesterday I need a huge dry-erase board calendar to put on the wall so I can keep up with all my assignments and deadlines. Sigh.