Belatedly equinoctial
Meant to post a week ago to note the autumnal equinox, in the middle of the night (California time) last Saturday night/Sunday morning.
Days getting shorter, nights getting longer. The other day the high temperature was 64° F. I can no longer pretend that it's summer. Foo.
I guess the plus side (in this hemisphere, anyway) is that it's only three more months 'til the days start getting longer again. . . .
When I went to check on the exact date and time of this fall's equinox, I found a Fall Equinox page at infoplease (possibly reprinted from some other info source; the attribution lines at the end are a little unclear), which has a nice photo of fall leaves, plus a great example of why some photos should remain uncaptioned. The caption reads: "The autumnal equinox is a sure sign of fall."
Yes, and when small white ice crystals fall from the sky to form soft white drifts on the ground, that's a sure sign of snow. And when a door is filling a doorway in the way it was designed to do, that's a sure sign that it's closed. The surest signs are the tautological ones, I find.
(Hee--MW11 defines "tautological" as "tautologous," and defines "tautologous" as "involving or containing rhetorical tautology: REDUNDANT." A "tautology," of course, by definition 2, is "a tautologous statement.")
