And just like that, the summer is over.
I know, I know… The overwhelming majority of adults in this world don’t even get summers off and I shouldn’t be complaining, but no matter how great summer vacations may be, it always sucks when they do finally end.
No more pool. No more naps. No more quality time with Wifey and The Squirt seven days a week (I’ll have to settle for two plus evenings for the next nine months). No more going for wonderful sunset runs after the kiddo goes to bed. And while it’s not the end for cookouts and watermelon and sweet tea and lemonade, none of those things taste quite so heavenly when the weather is cold.
I mean, whether you’ve got a summer vacation or not, I think you can lament the end of all that awesome stuff right along with me, can’t you?
Despite everything, the return of school is a genuinely exciting venture even eight (eight!) years into my teaching career, and with that excitement comes the deliciously rich complexities of autumn—a season that, despite not being quite as amazing as summer, actually doesn’t suck.
So in an attempt to pump myself up for the beginning of autumn, I wanted to delve into my Top 5 Reasons For Looking Forward to Fall. Here they are:
#5 – Chili Cook-Off
While summer foods like watermelon and ice cream and lemonade tend to go on vacation when cooler weather hits, a whole new gaggle of good eatin’ swoops right in behind those foods’ departures to make sure that we fat Americans can still get our fill of carbs and calories. One such autumnal delicacy is chili, for which I happen to have a stellar recipe.
Mine is a thick and meaty brew, with myriad herbs and spicy spices, and while some colleagues have jealously called it “Too Sloppy-Joe-ish,” I know that deep down in their hearts they understand the quality of the concoction. That’s why, in 2009, I won the teacher chili cook-off at school, replete with Golden Ladle.
Wifey and I also have plans to reintroduce the chili cook-off to our own group of friends this October, as we’ll be hosting a gathering of wannabe contenders vying for crockpot reputability. Neither she nor I are sure how we’re going to go about it yet, but we did one a couple of years ago and had a blast. I can say with absolute certainty that this is something we’re looking forward to doing again this year, though I’m not sure yet what sort of trophy I’ll have made up…
#4 – Picking Out a Halloween Costume for Paige
Eventually, my daughter will be old enough to tell us what she wants to be for Halloween, but eventually has not hit the Brigham home just yet, and that means we get to choose her costume once again this year.
In case you were curious as to why this is so exciting (More exciting than chili? Surely I jest), understand my child is a determined one, and rarely do we get the opportunity to exert our will upon her without some serious kicking and screaming. This is probably the last year that we’ll get to dress her up as something awesome, and I don’t want to blow the opportunity.
Last year she was a duck because the costume was painfully adorable, but this year we haven’t even talked about it, even though it’s already mid-August and time is clearly running out. (This isn’t a joke; there are baby Halloween costumes already on sale at Meijer). As ever, I’m hoping to go the comedic route, but it’ll likely be a fight to the death with Wifey, who’ll be pulling for “cute.” There’s really no middle ground between those two extremes, which means it’ll have to go one way or another.
Knowing where Paige gets her willfulness, I think we can all guess who’s going to win this particular argument. Penguin (or bunny or panda) it is.
#3 – TV Shows Come Back
Having stuff sitting on my DVR stresses me out, mostly because I really don’t want to have important episodes of my favorite shows (of which there are many) spoiled by Facebook or Twitter or Entertainment Weekly. So I always push Wifey to watch our stuff as soon as possible for fear of reading about things I’d rather not have read about.
The downside to this means that by the time summer hits, we’ve got nothing backlogged to occupy our evenings, so we end up scraping together a smattering of odd TLC and History Channel shows that’ll just have to do while we wait for the good stuff to come back on. Luckily we had “Game of Thrones” and “True Blood” and “Breaking Bad” and “Louie” to sort of keep us company during the delay, but it’s good that the majority of the stuff we both really care about will soon return to our high-definition television.
Here’s what we can’t wait for: “Sons of Anarchy,” “Parenthood,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Archer,” “Raising Hope,” “Modern Family,” “Community,” “The Office,” “30 Rock,” “Happy Endings,” “Dexter,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and “The Amazing Race.”
Yes, we actually watch all that crap.
“House” has started to get on our nerves, but we’ll watch it because we’ve invested too many years of our life not to.
We quit on “American Idol” last year and found that we didn’t miss it at all. Similarly, “Glee” was fun once upon a time, but we only wanted to hear Rachel sing, and when they went away from that, we went away from the show. Done and done.
While we’re on the topic, here are some new shows I’m looking forward to checking out when they premier over the course of the next month or two: “Terra Firma,” “American Horror Story” (tagged as a “psychosexual horror mystery series,” and it appears on FX? Yes please!), “Grimm,” “Person of Interest,” “Up All Night” (which I’m not optimistic about, but is has GOB so I’ll try it), and “Hell on Wheels” (which looks sooooo awesome).
Truthfully, we’ll be lucky if two of those end up being any good.
Also, I might like TV a little too much.
#2 – Rader’s Farm & Tanner’s Orchard
Few places in Central Illinois make me happier than Tanner’s Orchard, and now that I’ve got a little squirt to take along with me, it’s only that much more enjoyable. (Especially since, you know, it’s sort of made for squirts in the first place).
Like any self-respecting orchard, Tanner’s does apples. Buy an empty plastic bag for something like $8, and they’ll cart you out to their tangle of fruit-bearing trees, where you just pick the apples that look most delicious, shove them into your bag, and then take them home for pies or pies, or even pies.
Jonagold apples are my favorite, and they’re impossible to get nice and crunchy from any grocery store, so a trip to Tanner’s is the only way to get the most out of that particular brand of apple. That’s also the brand I use in my apple cream pies adapted from my Grandma Beauclerc’s recipe, so God bless ‘em, every one.
As for Rader’s Farm, it’s a local pumpkin patchery with all sorts of things for kids to do after picking out their future jack-o-lanterns. It doesn’t hold quite the special place in my heart that Tanner’s does, but it’s become a quintessential part of my Octobers as well. Between the two locations, we’ve got a whole lot of happy autumn happening. And it ain’t no autumn if it ain’t a happy autumn. Na’ mean?
#1 – Fantasy Football
Go ahead and roll your eyes, ladies. I’ll wait.
Done? Okay. There’s more to fantasy football than you think, and for me the absolute peak of enjoyment out of the whole process is the draft itself. Once a year, right around Labor Day, my teacher friends and I get together in one buddy’s basement after a delightful cookout and take turns selecting NFL players for our imaginary teams.
This is fun for a number of reasons, the most important of which is making fun of friends who draft like idiots. Last year, one of my guys drafted his first quarterback in the sixth round, and it was a player who wasn’t even going to be the starter. A year has gone by and we’re still giving him crap about this, and we’ll continue to give him crap about this until each and every one of us is dead.
The rest of the fun comes over the course of the year, though, where we’re able to make trades with each other, talk all kinds of trash, and if you’re good at it (I am) even make a little bit of money when it’s all said and done. I love the competition of it, I love the camaraderie of it, and I love football, which I guess should probably get its own slot on this list, but whatever. I’m grouping it all together, and NFL football plus fantasy football is so easily #1 on this list that it’s painful. Painfully awesome.
Honorable Mention:
The Hibernation of Yard Work – Screw you, lawn. Screw you, weeds. Screw untamed hedges. You can sit and rot until the spring and I won’t miss you one iota. In fact, I’ll enjoy the break for a few months, at least until snow shoveling has to happen. The respite will be brief, but deserved. Seriously, screw you, yard work.
So I guess the fall really isn’t so bad. That’s the lesson I’m trying to make myself learn right now as my final hours of summer tick away. It’s been a good one—really and truly—but now there are other fish to fry. Or apples to bake. I guess it kind of depends on the season.
