Some people love Autumn. “It’s beautiful,” they say. “Look at the wonderful colors.”
It’s like standing on the great, gaping maw of Hell and saying, “Listen to the glorious bells as they toll our final hours.” Or, at the edge of a black hole, “See how the light refracts so wonderfully, just as it is sucked into nothing never to return from its unknown doom?”
I prefer summer.
Autumn is a time of preparation, especially for homeowners. We fortify our homes against the oncoming doom, knowing that one crack in the outer shielding of our houses will cost us our lives or worse, hundreds of dollars on our gas bills.
To make this easier for those of you who share a similar fate, I’ve put together the following list.
- Disconnect your hose. You don’t need to put the hose anywhere, just make sure it’s not attached to the house. If it’s still attached when the first freeze happens, ice demons will crawl up its entire length, slipping their frigid appendages into your home and cracking your pipes.
- Avoid raking. It’s hard sometimes, but try to avoid doing anything like raking. Once you make big piles of leaves, you have to bag them up and then where do you put them? That, or you’ll just leave the piles and that kills your lawn. Better to just mow the leaves and mulch them in. (I’m actually serious about this one. One of the professors in my Horticulture school did a study)
- Close and lock all windows. Creatures of wind and ice will be pounding on them all winter long. Windows that are not perfectly locked are sure to come open.
- Put those insulator things in all of your outlets on outside walls because that totally does some good.
- Take a moment to gaze upon your garden and curse all those damn vegetables you forgot to harvest. It’s too late now. Start planning next year’s garden. Why the hell did you plant kale, anyway?
- If you set out pumpkins for Halloween, make sure they’re in a good spot so that they don’t get in the way when you’re shoveling all winter long. It’s a real pain in the ass to shovel around rotten, frozen jack-o-lanterns.
- Make sure your Netflix streaming account is all paid up. Did you ever see The Shining? Jack didn’t have Netflix.
- If you have kids, they’re going to want to play out in the snow making snowmen and angels. Now is a great time to prepare a list of excuses so that you don’t have to think up something on the spot.
- Now is also a good time to think up some clever things to say once that first big snow hits. Snowpacalypse, snowmageddon, you know, that kind of thing. If you can, try to mix the word snow with the word Ragnarok. If you can pull that off, people on Twitter are going to think you’re so cool.
- Wrap your young trees because it gets cold out there and a flimsy sheet of paper totally helps.
- If you own a three car garage, now is a good time to ponder how horrible a person you are. I mean, really, do you really need that much space in your garage? Would Jesus want you to have that many spaces? If, like me, you only have a two car garage, then now is a good time to try to cram all that shit into the corners because there’s no way you’re getting two motorcycles, a car, and a truck in that tiny fucking garage. No. Way.
- Sprinkler systems are a nightmare of maintenance. If you haven’t already had the special guy stop by with his special truck, then you’ve probably already ruined your whole system. Ice demons, you guys. Why doesn’t anyone believe me?