Falling into fall

Sigh. The flowers at the Farmers' Market all have the same look to them, since the summer bouquets are gone. Dahlias seems to be the only ones left, beautiful as they are, but when they are gone, it will be only dried bouquets (maybe a few chrysanthemums) until next spring. Fall is in the air, and many of my blogging friends are posting pictures of the riot of colors appearing in their parts of the country. Here, we are just now beginning to see the maples turn.

Yes, the title of this post was hopeful but alas, not to be. I was hoping to "fall into fall" at the Drop Zone in Snohomish this weekend, but today it's raining and tomorrow has a 40% chance of rain. So I am reluctantly thinking that the season is coming to an end. Here's the Climate Prediction Center's temperature forecast for the next 6- to 10-day period:

This is not hopeful for the next few weeks, at least in this part of the country, but it does mean that the fall colors should pop out reasonably soon. There's always an upside somewhere. The bruise from my flu shot is almost gone and my arm is no longer sore. I'm glad I got it, since everywhere I see people coughing and sneezing already, and it's only October. October! Where did YOU come from? Wasn't it just spring the other day? There's no doubt that time passes much faster when you're older, or at least it sure seems to. Only three more months left in 2011!

This is the time of year when I will be fighting to hold onto my hard-won weight loss. For whatever reason, it's when the chill in the air makes me feel cold most of the time that I begin to eat more. The fifteen pounds I lost this spring and summer will want to creep back on if I don't stay vigilant. There is a reason that the definition of the amount of weight I lost was also known in the U.K. as a "stone."

The stone is a unit of measure, abbreviation st which, when it ceased to be legal for trade in United Kingdom in 1985, was defined in British legislation as being a weight or mass equal to 14 avoirdupois pounds (about 6.35 kilograms). It was also formerly used in several Commonwealth countries. (Web definition)

Carrying it around felt like a stone, all right, and I sure don't want to add it back on. Any ideas about how to keep weight from creeping up during the winter months? Other than dieting, that is. For some reason it seems almost anathema to diet in the winter. Maybe it's time to start a knitting project to keep my idle hands out of mischief.
:-)