Jumping Into Fall
I have the feeling that this year, fall will fly by very quickly. Summer threw us one helluva going away party with a one week heat wave and now it is starting to present us with overcast skies and temperatures in the 60’s, fully 40 degrees from where it was just a week ago. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying the cooler weather and I think my succulent garden is happy to be out of the scorching heat, but it is all coming on very quickly. Now that Air Canada and its pilots union have come to terms and averted their much discussed strike for this week, we are on the plane tomorrow to the great north, flying from San DIego to Toronto and then on to Halifax, Nova Scotia in the middle of the night. We literally arrive there at 1:20am, which is probably as late as any scheduled flight I have ever come in on. We will have to sleep quickly at the Prince George Hotel because in the morning Kim goes off to find the rental car back at the airport and I go up to Truro (an hour north of Halifax) with my buddies Steve, Chris and Mark to pick up our rental bikes at Brookspeed Motorcycle Rentals. That will give us a 69 mile ride back to Halifax to get used to the bikes. The weather in Halifax looks to be in the mid 70’s with low or no chance of rain. If I just use the Halifax forecast I see that we should be OK on the precipitation front,and the temperature looks to be hovering in the 60s most of the week with our early morning starts being in the low 50s. That’s not quite frost on the pumpkin weather, but I sense that it will definitely be fall-like and that I will be glad to have my polar-Tek vest to keep me warm under my riding jacket.
When we return on September 25th we will be officially in the fall season with the autumnal equinox having slipped by unnoticed on the 22nd. The weather back here on the hilltop then looks to be low 80s for the high and high 50s overnight. But it won’t be more than a week before we are headed north for a distinctly fall program of touring Northern California and Oregon. The geography will allow us a more gradual acclimatization to the weather by taking us up through Cambria on the Central Coast and then Mendocino, where it will be about 20 degrees cooler and decidedly seasonal. We will crawl up the coast through the Redwoods and into Coos Bay and the Portland before hopping over to the little rural community of Maupin on the Deschutes River. Before that we will follow the Columbia River Gorge eastward to The Dallas and then south to Maupin, where our friends Faraj and Yasuko are fishing for salmon. From there we will head south to Bend to meet up with our old neighborhood friends Sam and Chris.
On of the highlights of the trip will be to spend a night in Ashland, near Klamath Falls and Crater Lake. Ashland has a well known Shakespeare Festival that runs into the fall season and we have tickets to see Much Ado About Nothing. This light-hearted Shakespearian comedy should be just right for a pleasant fall evening in the far reaches of Oregon. I’m sure the people who live in Oregon don’t think of it as being so far north, but somehow, for us SOuthern Californians, having to drive through Redwood forests and through relatively uninhabited parts of Northern California to towns we have barely heard of, sure makes it all feel rather remote. From there we will be venturing into California gold country with a night in Nevada City before wending our way south through the San Joaquin Valley. Then, after passing through the dreaded L.A. basin to drop off Gary & Oswaldo, our companions for this adventure, we will slide back down to our hilltop to settle in for the remainder of the year (save one trip for Christmas into New York City).
Somewhere in that schedule, after Oregon and before the Holidays, we will have the trauma of perhaps the most critical presidential election of our lives and perhaps of the history of the United States (I don’t think that’s an overstatement). We are all feeling better about the Harris/Walz momentum and the apparently dwindling strength of the Trump MAGA movement, but until the vote is in the record books and the challenges from Trump and the other Republicans are behind us, it will be a tumultuous time to say the least.
My fall is also shaping up to be pretty busy on the expert witness front. I know I have at least two or three depositions/testimonies in November and I suspect work will need to be done on five or six other cases on my roster as well. I do my best to give visibility to my scheduling conflicts to my clients, but they are often not the complete masters of their calendars as well. In the legal business, the combination of the courts and arbitrators as well as the opposing counsel have a lot to say about when and where things happen. Pacing is always an issue and expert witnesses like me have a dual problem of wanting to be available and flexible for our biggest clients while keeping as full a roster as possible to fill in the work flow as much as possible. One of the big constraints remains that lawyers like to leave expert work for the last minute to both compress the billable hours and leave as much optionality in the strategy and opinions as possible. It all creates a rush-rush-rush approach that is followed by stillness and work gaps. The best I can do is be a pest and keep asking for timing guidance as much as they can give it to me. It becomes a season by season thing. This year I was busy in the winter, slack in the spring, very busy in the early summer and slow in late summer. That says to me the cycle calls for me to be very busy in the mid to late fall again.
After travel and work, that leaves the property and whatever work will be needed to prepare for winter. This is simply not a climate that requires so much winter prep, but there are a few things that will need doing before the rains of November hit the hilltop. I have some wildflower seeds to sow on the north-side wildflower bed and several new plumerias to find homes for with the plan of transplanting them in the early spring. I will do some seasonal pruning of the flowering trees and maybe, if I feel ambitious, do some repair work on the Fairy Village and the Hobbit House. I also go around each fall and find a few project thoughts for spring so I can start planning out how I want to attack them. I know Melisa is planning a Japanese Zen Garden and that may inspire me to look for a place to do my own version of the same sort of thing.
Every season brings with it some re-energizing aspects. Falls is far less collegiate now that I am more distant from Cornell and I have stopped teaching. But summer heat has turned fall into an important travel season and planning season in laying out what wants to get done next year. In the business world, fall was always planning time and I suppose that was for a more holistic reason than not, so its not so strange that it carries over into regular life. So its probably a good thing that I am ready for jumping into fall.