The first signs of something

I was going to write about winter in Georgia. About how the cold weather somehow always just seems to appear out of the blue, without any kind of advanced warning. Sort of like your in-laws (although not mine, because they're really very nice). I was going to mention how I spent Sunday afternoon in my bathing suit, vacuuming our mini-pool, and how last night, the temperature suddenly dropped down the mid-50s. I was also going to respond to my Dutch readers' supposed exclamation of "But that's not cold at all!" with a very smart retort amounting to the idea that dropping from 100F to 50F is almost as bad as dropping from 20C to 0C, even though that mathematically did not make any sense at all.

But I'm not going to write about that today. Well, at least not any longer. Today I wanted to share with you what happened on this first very cold day in the fall.

This morning started off fairly normal. I say fairly because it wasn't entirely normal. As you all know, I usually jump out of bed at the first sound of the alarm, singing and dancing, and calling out to all my animal friends to help me clean the house. This morning, however, there was no singing. When the alarm went off, I just burrowed under the covers, groaning loudly. Apparently, the benadryl I had taken the night before had not yet worn off. Why did I take a Bendrayl you ask? Well, for the four wasp stings on my foot of course (let's just say that on Sunday I discovered that a colony of wasps had been squatting illegally under one of the steps ofour pool ladder). So I got to work at 8:20 as opposed to 8am. And I had just settled in to do really important things, like grade papers, prepare a class, check up on my blog friends, and update my Facebook status, when I heard a loud siren on the other side of the building.

For those of you who don't know, I work on a university campus. One that is filled with thousands of loud and boisterous students whose sole purpose in life seems to be to do something weird at least once a day. Hence, I've completely lost my inborn reflex to jump and be startled at loud noises. So I ignored the siren, thinking that if it was the fire alarm, it would have gone off on our side of the building too. Then I heard a voice over a loudspeaker. Again, not in our part of the building, but I could hear it was our "big voice" system. Well shoot. That meant our students could not be to blame. But I was going to be damned if I was going to get out of my cozy office for a drill at 8:20 in the morning, so I stayed put. That is, until a police officer came running down the hallway, yelling at everyone still in their office, well, let's be honest here, just me, that I needed to get out of the building pronto because there was a gas leak.

So I dragged myself, my laptop, and my purse out into the front parking lot. And that parking lot is in the shade at 8:30 in the morning. And it was freezing. It was so cold, that even the fact that within a few minutes, three fire trucks, the EMTs, and the local television station pulled up to the building, did nothing to deter my grumbling. My only hope was that they would take so long, that I would have to cancel class.

But of course that did not happen. An hour and something after we were all evacuated from the building, we were let back in. Just in time for my class. No fair.

But yes, fall has come to Georgia. That is what I have been trying to tell you.