what went wrong - your grades were good

well there is nothing like a 15-mph tailwind (gusting to 25) to get one's ass in motion. going home will be a different sort of experience.

today our fair city picks up the leaves in our neighborhood. high time; passage along red oak street is, as you can see, becoming restricted. i didn't take a photograph of mixtwood, which is even worse, because i don't actually ride down that stretch. this year the city announced it would begin enforcing an old ordinance restricting the placement of leaves onto the street until 24 hours before the scheduled pickup. this unworkable concept met with considerable resistance (particularly from the lawn service contractors), so the city laid themselves down, as they so often do, and let us sweep and rake at our own convenience. the idea behind keeping leaves out of the street, of course, was to demonstrate a "best management practice" for reduction of nutrient load to the huron river as per the state's phosphorus TMDL. although it's tempting to think of leaves as being "natural", there is in fact nothing natural at all in piling them onto a network of impervious pads, and routing their decomposition products directly to surface waters via an efficent system of storm sewers. in the woods, leaves are for the most part incorporated diredtly into the soil matrix. on the other hand, i'm not sure how detritus-based loads of nitrogen and phosphorus in november and december actually contribute to eutrophication issues (it's a little cold for algae right now) but i didn't do the modeling; the reduction targets are annual in nature, seasonal processes notwithstanding.

did i mention the risk of vehicle fires caused by persons stupid enough to park their blisteringly-hot catalytic converters in a pile of leaves (there are such persons)? and then they are just kind of ugly. they blow around and stuff. i'm like - leaves? ick.

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note: the pool with the stones is part of a bench outside our office, placed in memory of paul rodgers, who was a vital force here right up until his untimely death in a helicopter crash while on the job. i walk by this bench every morning after parking my bicycle, and last winter i noticed how it provided its own interpretation of the weather conditions. so i decided to take pictures of it this year.