After months and months of summer, fall arrived in a single week. I had my AC on not that long ago and now I have to close my windows because it’s getting too cold in my apartment. And yet we’ve got temperatures in the seventies coming up next week [or in a day or two, as this post goes up]. It has been an absolutely wild Fall, so far, and I’m reminded of that Spring from a few years ago where we went from cold, wet, and snowy to hot and humid in a week and a half in May. We had exactly one week of Spring after a very long Winter and then went straight to Summer. Sure, we’ve had more Fall than that already, and it looks like we’re going to have plenty more as the temperatures change up and down (which is usually a sign that most of the heat it coming from the sun rather than from the weather and prevailing winds), but it was a rather drastic shift to go from weather routinely in the high seventies and eighties that rarely dropped into the fifties to weather dropping below freezing and barely breaking out of the fifties for a few days at a time. It looks like, finally, a couple weeks into October, Fall is here to stay.

Normally, I love fall. Warm drinks, hot food, cool breezes, and open windows at night letting me sleep with heavier blankets. What’s not to love? Tons of colorful tree leaves, occasional Fall flowers, early sunsets, late sunrises… it’s all good in my book. Even in years past, when I struggled to keep my apartment warm enough to live comfortably in the Winter, I still enjoyed Fall since I could get all the benefits of the cold days that I liked without the horrible warmth management I had to do in my apartment to keep the temperature above sixty. That’s not as much of a problem in my current apartment, even if I do still struggle with a sort of knee-jerk discomfort any time I start to feel cold the way I did back in my previous apartment, so I’m ready for the Fall to truly arrive. I’m just struggling this year because the constant warmth of the weather, combined with my sleep issues, made it feel like time wasn’t passing that much. Now that it is suddenly feeling and looking a lot like Fall and I’m getting enough sleep to combat the memory problems I was having during the worst of my sleeplessness, I feel like I skipped a month somewhere. Like I went straight from August to October.

I sort of did, to be fair. I’m not kidding about the memory issues. I remember all the major stuff and anything I really focused my time and attention on, but the rest of September (and early parts of October) is a blur with bits of Dragon Age 2 interspersed throughout it. It was all just warm days, back pain, trying to stay cool in my apartment, and doing what I could from one week to the next in order to keep myself functioning. Even without the memory stuff, all those days would still have blurred together since all I was doing was getting through one day at a time. Just like I’d been doing for most of July and August, when I was super busy at work and dealing with the start of this back pain saga, all while sweating in the summer heat. September just blurred into the two previous months and now, somehow, I’m two and a half months away from the end of the year, through two full weeks of physical therapy, and finally starting to feel grounded again, even if it’s not really a great feeling, yet. Fall, though is helping with that. The visible passage of time is helping pull me out of my head and the haze I’ve been stuck in these last few weeks, so I’m hoping that it continues and I continue to improve. It’d be really nice to be feeling like myself again by the time winter rolls around, if not sooner.

In the meantime, I’m putting back up the sort of warmth barrier I created for my bedroom last year. Most of the stuff stayed in place, since it involved making alterations to my bedroom door and putting specially-cut carpeting chunks down, but there was a little bit to put back together again. Fans to move around, carpet to vacuum and steam so it would lay flat again, and a door to get used to closing again. After all, in the warmer months, my bedroom door stays open so I can blow AC into it from the AC unit in my living room. Now, I need to get back into the habit of closing it every time I pass through, so I can keep what warmth there is in my apartment out of my delightfully chilly bedroom. I’ve also started to dig out my sweatshirts. Even if it is still pretty sunny most of the afternoons when I’m going on my walks, it has started getting windy enough that I’m usually grateful for the heavier outer layer for at least two thirds of my daily walks. The last third, I’m warm enough that it starts to feel a little uncomfortable, but I can always roll up my sleeves or take it off for a couple minutes until I need it again. I think there’s something to that idea that I could metaphorically apply elsewhere in my life right now, but I think I’m too tired to see it. Too tired and too cozy in my comfortably warm little office.