The mountains are shrouded with fog and the last fall leaves are shivering from gold to brown before spiraling down to carpet the earth with their fading color.

The cityscape looks like a daguerreotype, all faded colors and the glass-and-steel angles of civilization softened to murky stone. Across the way, a careless pattern of raised and lowered blinds gives a dim brick building an abandoned air of decay. Winter closes in. The city huddles within its streets, guarding doors and windows while the gusty wind whips around corners and down the pavement, catching unwary pedestrians and slicing through coats and scarves to steal their warmth.

Sometimes staring out the window is a good way to kill twenty minutes of that after-lunch coma but when you find yourself wondering if you can spell "daguerreotype" without benefit of a spelling program (I couldn't), it's time to get back to work.

In theory, I'm re-writing our website this week. In actuality, I'm staring at the pages I wrote the last time I tackled this project and bemoaning the fact that I didn't even get them uploaded before whoosh! we changed partners again and it was time to write up information on an entirely new business model.

Not that what I wrote last time was so great, but it was miles ahead of the blank page I've been staring at for the last three days.

It's a pity that contemporary architecture is so ugly, don't you think? Where are the graceful towers and the textured stonework of yesterday? Red brick always looks so solid and respectable to me. (Okay, I've just realized that the graceful tower I'm looking at is actually an unused smokestack, but you get my drift.)

Glass-and-steel structures, on the other hand, say, "He was an architect, not an artist. An engineer, not a designer."

There's a shade of beige-brown stone, of course, that screams, "in the fifties we had no taste." I wouldn't care to see that come back into fashion. I'm very fond of gray stone, though. It looks like fairy-tale castles.

My subconscious is working on the web pages. Really. Part of my mind is admiring the virginal invitation of a sheet of clean, white paper, but part of it is plotting to deface the paper with three colors of ink, arrows drawn in all directions, and copious amounts of white-out. The rest of it is mumbling phrases to do with comprehensive assessment and diagramming protocol restrictions. I live in hope of something useful being generated from that last section.

Any time now.