simply fabulous

The color is starting to become amazing! I'll say it again -- fall in Iowa is in a different ballpark than fall in Minnesota/anywhere with trees.

This year seems to be a big one for orange leaves, which is a nice surprise. Typically they only make it to yellow before it freezes hard or a few days of heavy wind go through.

The challenge is determining whether your area is "peaking." What does peak look like? You wonder if this is the peak. Or maybe this. Or leaves falling -- maybe this looks like a lot of leaves falling. But then a day comes when A LOT of leaves are falling, enough that they're tangled in your hair and blowing in your door as you open it.

The sad thing about fall is you never know how long it will last. It's not unusual for the trees to go from reasonably full to empty in one day. Or some years the leaves won't have colored much at all before they go.

I use the family birthdays as a gauge of early and late falls. One year in particular, the leaves were pretty and falling on my mom's birthday (Oct. 14). The next day, my sister's birthday, it got blustery and the trees became bare.

Tonight was a fun night. A bunch of friends met at the best-ever sandwich shop for dinner and then came back to my apartment to bake cookies and just shoot the breeze for three hours. You've got to love those friends where you don't need anything but yourselves to have fun.