Being the worry wart that I am, I’ve got to find something associated with my upcoming race to vex about.

How about the weather? Talking to one of my weather friends last week, I learned that the longest-range model, the Global Forecast System model run by the U.S. government’s National Center for Environmental Prediction, shows a big storm headed our way, rolling up off of the coast of Central America and heading north, until it gets caught up in the westerlies.

So now every morning I fire up the model page to see when the storm’s forecast to get here. It looks like it has the potential to be an impressive storm, but this morning the model run I look at shows it just reaching our southern border by race day. Yay.

David Appell commented earlier this week on the moment when you realize it’s fall:

Every year it’s the middle of August plus a few days. In mid-August there’s inevitably a several days-long rain, followed by a clearing in which the climate is suddenly different — clear blue skies, significantly less humid, cooler, especially at night. This year was no different, and the change is palpable….

He’s up in New Hampshire, and I infer that fall seems to herald for him some unpleasantness – “all too soon” – whereas here it’s a sort of soft and comforting blanket being gently draped about our shoulders. I love that moment when it suddently snaps – a subtle meteorological phenomenon, but a clear mental step function.

In Albuquerque, we demonstrably had it Wednesday morning, if I can gunk up the romantic feeling of cool mornings and the smell of roasting chiles with the practical empiricism of meteorology. The summer high that wobbles around the southwest like a wandering drunk is pretty much gone, replaced by the upper-level westerlies that dominate fall and winter. Overnight lows have slipped into the ’50s and the first chile-roasting picture has appeared on the front page of the newspaper.

The westerlies brought in a cloud cover Wednesday that would be unheard of under the summer high, and the low of 52 Wednesday morning was a record. This is all vaguely early – the summer high and the resulting monsoons often linger into the first week of September. But the kids are back in school, the state fair starts next week, and I can see some yellowing leaves on the big cottonwood across the street, so I guess it makes sense to get on with things.