The leaves are falling, and each time I hear one plunk to the ground (they sound louder than usual this year) I realize summer is behind us. Oh yes, the “colors of fall” are just lovely, but each time the wind blows I feel like the warm days are flying out of here way too quickly. Today, as I was driving around town doing some errands, I was trying to remember the trivia fact about which tree loses its leaves first; you know those things you learn in elementary school when you have lots of memory cells ready to dedicate to things like this. That factoid definitely was lost.

There are days when I humor myself, and last Sunday was one of them. The weather was gorgeous, and I sat reading on the deck before what I call "exercise guilt" intruded (this is not to be confused with "book guilt"). I grabbed my iPod and took a brisk walk around the neighborhood trying to mimic the people who I always see from my home office window on Fridays happily strolling along. Since walking sans a purpose does not work for me unless I am on the beach, I was using this opportunity to get landscaping and porch ideas since I want to reinvent ours as they are rather dated.

We’re back! Thank you to all of the readers who wrote notes to congratulate us on our 13th anniversary. I responded to many, but not all of you, and will try to get caught up on those that I missed over the weekend. (More on why that was delayed in a few.) I shared your sentiments with the staff and we all really enjoyed reading the comments on the blog. You really made the start of our vacation time terrific with that sendoff.