A Moment of Patriotism

Fall is in full swing. Trees are reddening (and browning and yellowing and orangeing, and is that even a word? Orangeing? Orangening? I could look it up, but it’s more fun to speculate). I felt like writing something here, but it all came out so generic. The leaves are falling and the days are getting shorter and the birds are flying south and something about the changing seasons and maybe the circle of life, and then a rousing rendition of Turn! Turn! Turn!

Multicoloured Cocoon

Fall is in full swing. Trees are reddening (and browning and yellowing and orangeing, and is that even a word? Orangeing? Orangening? I could look it up, but it’s more fun to speculate). I felt like writing something here, but it all came out so generic. The leaves are falling and the days are getting shorter and the birds are flying south and something about the changing seasons and maybe the circle of life, and then a rousing rendition of Turn! Turn! Turn! Gah. Maybe I wasn’t that inspired after all.

(Problem: if I’m going to have a more bloggish feel to this Web site (ie: shorter, but more frequent, updates), I can’t just write something for the sake of writing. It has to have… substance. Or at least, style. Or a point. Or something. It can’t just be about what I had for lunch, or cleaning the appartment, or talking about people you don’t even know, stuff that would be boring to anyone but me. But on the other hand, I can’t keep writing these big long essays with deep insights and stuff that take months or years to finish (depending on how disciplined I feel). There’s got to be a happy medium; I just have to find it. But then I’ll probably have to rename that section. “Essays” sounds too… stuffy. Unspontaneous. I don’t know if that’s a word either. Making up words is doubleplusgood.)

So, fall. This weekend I went down to Como Lake Park to add to my Fall Foliage gallery, and got some gorgeous pics of a young maple tree showing off its red leaves. Wow. I ask you, is there anything more spectacular than a maple leaf’s unique fiery orange-red? And even though the colour actually has nothing to do with why it was picked for the Canadian flag, for just a moment, it made me feel all… patriotic.

O Canada, terre de nos aïeux
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux

(Second aside. I only knew the first stanza of the French and English versions. Then I looked up the rest of the lyrics, and they’re even more fiercely royalist, nationalist and Christian. Oy. Although I did get a giggle out of the first line of the third stanza: «De son patron, précurseur du vrai Dieu» Heh. The original version was French, after all. English Canadians, not so big on the Saint-Jean-Baptiste.)

Maple Fire

The days are getting shorter, and the sun’s lower in the sky. No more outdoor volleyball at work. But when you’ve got spectacles like this, I really can’t complain.