Weekends in November are almost exclusively reserved for raking leaves. And, not quite redundantly, raking leaves is exclusively reserved for weekends in November.

It's rare that I take part in that activity at other times. (Until I killed the big tree out front. Since its leaves start falling in May now I get a jump on those leaves and I don't wait until November for them. But that's not what I'm talking about here.)

This year, though, due to a number of reasons, I'm needing to squeeze in the raking at other times.

Which is how I found myself racing home on Monday afternoon to take advantage of what little daylight was left so that I could do some outside work.

Here's the confluence of events: I'm down a November weekend of yard work because we have to go to New York this weekend, it seems like the leaf collection stops a weekend earlier this year (or it could be because Thanksgiving is so late and the next week is December my internal leaf calendar is off), and my wife's busy work weekends have all forced me to accelerate my leaf-picking-up and take advantage of gathering leaves when I can.

So on Monday I had the rare (these days) opportunity to leave (no pun intended - leaf! Ha!) work at 3:45 and try to get home before it got dark (roughly 5pm) and do some weekday afternoon leaf pickup.

It helped that it was Veterans' Day - I realized when I left work that traffic was not going to be an issue. (Vegetable pickup was a slight issue - I had to swing by the farm for our Monday veggie pickup, but that's directly on the way home so it was only a minor - if any - detour.)

The picture above gives you a good idea of the amount of daylight when I got home - not quite dusk yet.

I was able to run inside, get into some sweats (yes, I'm at that stage where I don't care if I'm picking up leaves on my lawn in sweat pants. Who do I have to impress?), and pack two of those big bags with leaves. (That's in addition to what you see above, bringing this week's total to six bags, in addition to the 10 from a week ago. If history is any indication, there's still 10-15 more bags worth of leaves to be gathered.)

It was a productive afternoon - I felt like I snuck in some extra time, which was the whole point.

And, you might not think this way, but here's how I think:

When I'm finishing up my leaf pick-up for the season the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd (although I'd love to have Thanksgiving weekend to finish up every year if you're listening, Town of Framingham), I'll remember this extra bag and a half that I snuck in on Monday and I'll thank myself. (Ha! Thanksgiving. Pun not intended.)