This morning my Jeep reported the temperature was about 35°F when I started driving around.

I worried for a moment that I might have to scrape my windows, but they were just liquid enough to be cleared by the wipers and lowering the side windows.

The afternoons have been in the mid 60s, and the forecast holds with that for the rest of the week. The current forecast calls for 70s over the weekend, and then a lower dip after.

It's clear that summer is over. As I look out at my yard, I chide myself for the tasks not done.

I didn't finish building my planting beds. I might try to get the remaining box built, placed, and filled with the dirt in its intended spot. Maybe. I haven't done it all summer, so it might not happen in the fall.

I didn't get the fence rebuilt. The garage construction tore up the fence, and the contractors didn't figure it was their responsibility to close the gap. I placed some tomato cages in the hole to keep the dogs in the yard, figuring it would be a short time until we found a fence company to come and replace the fence, or we would decide to attempt it ourselves. I've done it before, and could do it again, if I weren't so lazy. Instead, the weeds took the protection of the tomato cages and grew to phenomenal volume. The dogs were contained, but the fall and winter-prep clean up will be busier because of it.

The neighbors across the street took out a big tree in their back yard. This doesn't directly reflect any of my efforts, but it does expose my front yard to much more sunlight longer in the day. I need to step up my lawn care and maintenance of the front hedges and border areas, as this will surely cause different growth next year. Additionally, this means the planting beds on the south side of the house may get more sunlight, so I need to prepare for that. The beds are still a bit protected by lilac bushes to their west, but that isn't the same shade from the trees across the street.

The garage is still a mess. We pulled all the things for the summer camp into the garage to be dealt with later. Later doesn't seem to have come. In the cooler weeks to come, I hope to move the containers into the garage's loft, so there's room for the Jeeps within. We also moved our smaller trailer back to the house, so I either need to place that outside or move it back to the house in Wisconsin. I've used the weak excuse that the construction people took the cinder block I used keep the trailer neck off the ground; they're cheap and abundant, but I never grab one when I'm at the right store.

There's still some bits that were removed from the garage into the house that need to be returned. Some of the excuses about why this hasn't happened are around the aforementioned bins in the garage.

And there's the mess in the basement that I planned to slowly filter out to the trash, or find proper places to stow, all summer long. I have taken a few armloads to the trash, and have rearranged some stacks, but there's so much that it's hard to see.

None of these make good winter projects. Maybe some of the basement clean-up.

I'm doing well at kind of keeping busy enough, but I am not doing a lot of the more important busy work. I'll try to get better at it. It's just the end of the first full year of retirement...