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This is November. Brown and orange. Cool and brisk. Gray skies -- really gray skies that can produce no rain but are simply the norm -- are reintroduced in November. Yes, this month has its share of sunny days that are actually quite pleasant (despite being cool and brisk), but those days are just a tease for colder and bleaker days to come. November gets dark so early. You hit that time change, and too quickly, that sun is below the horizon too soon every late afternoon. And it only gets worse as winter approaches. Between the day after Halloween and Thanksgiving's aftermath, November is filling. And sugary. Yet, this is the worst time to work out. The weather isn't always agreeable to exercise outside, and there never seems to be enough time to work out inside. November is indecisive in so many ways. This month is personal for me because my birthday lands here. I get through it, and the remaining weeks are a blur through Thanksgiving. Maybe I'm not giving the rest...

Before my side goal in November , I had been blogging about some fall memories. I had written this and intended to post it around my birthday, but never got around to it. Before December, here's one more fall memory from way back when. I've been in the newspaper industry for almost 22 years (and that's not counting my first couple years working for my college's newspaper). Yet my first newspaper job wasn't writing or editing or clerking. Eight years before I set foot in a big-city newsroom, I was a paperboy for a neighborhood weekly. I had wanted to deliver newspapers, following the lead of some of my friends who did. My parents didn't want me (and them -- on cold days, who's driving?) to take on the commitment of waking up early every morning to deliver a daily newspaper. But in the fall of 1982, they did let me take a job delivering the Harlem-Foster Times. Published once a week, the Harlem-Foster Times was one of a string of neighborhood weekly papers...

It's been awhile, hasn't it? I haven't posted in more than month. I've been busy. For the fourth November, I attempted NaNoWriMo . Three years ago, I finished, achieving a 50,000 word novel. The last two years, I didn't make it so far. But I was optimistic this year. I had an idea that I had been thinking about for months, and in October, I even started writing things down -- characters, plot, logistics. I was looking forward to finishing Novel No. 2 in November. After midnight on Halloween, I started writing and knocked out 700 words before the month was even an hour old. Then, November happened. November happened in a big way. November really started in October -- the last two weeks of that month completely throttling my schedule. I wasn't able to manage any more prep work for the novel, and though I was still confident in my imminent creation, I should have recognized the signs that November would be nutty. On top of the extra meetings, the extra co...

I'm sitting on the couch with my laptop, typing this post and watching "All the President's Men" on TCM. The last two weeks or so have been nonstop, and tonight, I finally feel like something isn't impending. That's false, because things are pending -- contract work, shifts at the newspaper, soccer, more soccer, registering the boys for basketball, Halloween, NaNoWriMo . We went to Moab last weekend for a little vacation. The trip was fun, culminating with Lori running a half-marathon. As we walked to the car following lunch in Moab after her race, very suddenly, I felt a cold come on. We stopped in Price so I could buy some Cold-Eze and attack the cold, because two hours in, I knew it was going to be annoying. I got a flu shot last week, and I wonder if it was simply a residual effect of the immunization. Nevertheless, it hit quick. Lori got a one-day break before departing for Milwaukee on a work trip. I felt miserable Monday, slogged through Tuesday, and fe...

(It's been more than a week since my last post about fall . On the bright side, my Internet is finally faster. Alas, my PC is just slow ...) This post recalling autumns past is actually about two years: 1993 and 2011. The story starts 19 years ago. Lori and I had been dating about five, six months in the fall of 1993. She was living at her childhood house on Milwaukee's far west side, keeping it up while her parents, who had moved to northern Wisconsin a few years earlier, tried to sell it. We used to go for long walks at night in her neighborhood and nearby Wauwatosa, just talking, getting some exercise and breathing in the cool fall air. I loved these walks. As we walked through the residential neighborhoods, I would look at the fronts of houses, some of them with the window shades open, and wonder about the occupants inside. What were their lives like? What did they do today? Were they bored tonight after a long day of work? I didn't want to think that these homeow...

I'm fondly remembering the days of dial-up. In 1996, my first foray into the Internet was via America Online. We got a disk with the new computer, plugged our phone into the tower, logged in, endured 30 seconds of an annoying connecting sound, and voila, we were online with a reminder that "You've got mail!" It all seems so quaint now. We just take instant Internet for granted. Within a couple years after moving into our new house in 2003, we had DSL installed. Double-click on the Netscape shortcut (damn, Netscape sounds so quaint too -- I must have switched to Firefox very soon after) and I was on the web much sooner. And it worked better as well. It had to work better with the arrival of YouTube and websites that ravenously gobbled data. Songs would that would take 20 minutes to download from Napster (the nostalgia continues!) took only two on iTunes. DSL was wonderful. Eight years later, our Internet is slow again. I thought maybe it was just my older compute...

( Click here for my last post about fall and how nice Wisconsin is this time of year.) Football is in the fabric of every fall. No matter how much I don't want summer to end, I know that football season is one thing I will look forward to every September. And yes, the football memories abound from all these autumns. I blogged about my grandfather taking me to a Bears game when I was 9 . That wasn't my first Bears game, however -- I went with my dad to one a couple years earlier -- nor was it my last. I saw my high school's football games; unfortunately, the four years I was in high school might have been the losingest stretch in the history of the school (1-8 my junior year, ouch). I saw my first college game at the University of Illinois when I was visiting friends in 1988, then saw a bunch once we moved to Madison. I covered high school football as a reporter. I collected football cards and 25-cent helmets from gumball machines. I played Tecmo Super Bowl. I still own...