My heart is broken. We said good-bye to our big Sam today. He passed at home after a brave battle.

No other words tonight. Just sadness.

TruTails Sam I Am

12-09-2003 to 9-16-2012

Rest well, sweet Sammy. We love you.

No! Say it isn’t so! Remember I talked about Taylor Ham, Egg & Cheese breakfast sandwiches from Jessie’s? We won’t be eating these again anytime soon. Last night Jessie’s burned.

At 4:30 a.m this morning we were rudely awakened by lots of sirens. First one volunteer whistle blew, then another further away. Then a constant stream of police sirens. It was hard to tell where they were exactly, but in my sleep-fogged brain it didn’t seem like it was close. The sirens stopped, then started all over again. Kind of like the fireworks.

Once were got up news started to filter in through the neighbors and we learned is was Jessie’s Deli that had burned.

The road in to town is closed so if I want to go to town I have to make a huge detour. And I do have to go in to pick up new meds for Sam and a few other important things. Maybe I’ll wait and see if the road gets opened back up again.

Until then, neighbor Aileen allowed me to walk down their private road to the main road. What follows are from the scene this morning at around 8:30 a.m.

It’s my understanding that most of our local volunteer fire companies are away at a convention in Cape May (poor planning!) and they had to call in companies from further away. The main road below our house was pretty much paved with fire trucks.

One neighbor said that they went in to open up this morning and smelled smoke inside the Deli. When they opened the door to the kitchen, the fire erupted.

There are no fire hydrants so they were pumping water out of nearby Monksville Reservoir into tankers. When I was there the fire was basically out in main structure but the propane tanks were still burning.

My sister and her firefighter husband just missed all the excitement by one day!

How very sad. We’ll miss you Jessie’s!

(P.S. I forgot to say that Jessie’s is just over the hill from our house.)

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Update at 3:03 p.m.

NEWSFLASH!!! I sent the first photo to the local newspaper and I just heard back from them that they are going to use it in Sunday’s edition! Woohoo! We’ll see now if they really do! Follow this link to see my photo in the online version of the paper! Here’s the link.

Remember the Craigslist guy? Well, he called. Again. Rick had not checked his iPhone for messages over the weekend and he had called and emailed on Sunday to say he wanted to pick it up that day. Then he called again two days later. Rick told him we had sold it (which we haven’t) and he said. “Oh.” Guess that’s the end of him.

The train situation yesterday worked out kind of funny. We planned for my sister to take the train from Penn Station (where her Amtrak train arrived) to the Suffern, NY station that is closest to us at a time when Rick would be leaving from the same station within 20 minutes. My sister’s train arrived at 3:43 and Rick’s was to leave at 4:03. When my sister’s train arrived we soon discovered that it would be the same train as Rick would take. They just pull in, flip all the seats to the opposite position and are ready to go! Weird. That doesn’t happen very often!

This strange bug was skittering around on the deck yesterday. I don’t know what it is.

The chlorinated little frog didn’t make it. Yesterday when I checked the skimmers, one had a shrew in it and the other one had two little frogs. When we opened the pool and skimmed the leaves that had fallen Rick scooped up a HUGE frog from the deep end of the pool. Must be that time of year. I hate to find things dead in the pool. Sometimes I can rescue the frogs and sometimes I can’t. Next week I won’t have to worry about it anymore, but it was nice to sit out there with my sister and brother-in-law to have a glass of wine yesterday afternoon and admire the pool.

Back to the train station twice again today: once to take my sister around noon and again to pick up Rick around 7:00 p.m. Good thing it’s a pretty drive which just happens to take me right past the entrance to Skylands. I just might take the camera with me and stop. Stranger things have happened.

Early morning shadows.

As in not sure what I am going to blog about. I feel like I should post something. But I can’t seem to drag myself out of my malaise.

Is it because Sam is really sick and not going to get any better and I’ve been playing caregiver to him?

Is it because this is normally the time of year we head off to the cabin? We went in late May/early June this year and yet it seems like we didn’t go at all. Like we are missing out.

Or is it just because. I honestly don’t know. So I have a feeling this will be a random dumping of things going around in my head this morning.

I mowed the yards yesterday and in doing so picked up a lot of leaves that have fallen. It was a beautiful afternoon so it wasn’t really a chore riding Johnny around and around. I am hoping the grass is just about done with its growth cycle. Then it will be leaves, and oh boy, do we have a ton of leaves!

Last night it got down to 46 degrees F. BRRRRR! The pool is not going to like that. We did manage to swim on Saturday for ten lengths of the pool but little five-minute rain showers kept drifting by that weren’t helping anything. We thought we had broken a record by having the latest swim ever, but in my archives the other day a post popped up about the Ren Faire from September 10, 2007 and I talked about how we had gotten so hot while at the Faire we came home and jumped in the extremely cold pool to cool off. So, we didn’t break a record after all. Almost. The pool is scheduled for closing next week.

Good thing too. Every morning when I go out to put chlorine in there is a little frog on the solar cover. I can’t catch him, so obviously there is not enough chlorine in the water! The fallen acorns were covering the pool deck the other day and we swept them off. A few days later you can’t tell we did anything. Even sitting in the house you can hear them hit the pool cover with a resounding thwack! nearly as loud a gun shot. After not bearing any nuts at all last year our oaks are making up for it. I have a plan for the little acorn hats. If it works out I’ll show you.

We walked the dogs after dinner last night. The days are getting so short that dusk fell pretty quickly from the time we set out to the time we were walking back up our road. Good thing the dogs were leashed because there at the edge of the woods stood a deer frozen to the spot. The dogs all saw it and it saw them. We were getting closer and closer and still the deer just stood there, so finally I yelled SHOO! and it took off. Next thing we knew another deer broke cover from the opposite side of the road and crossed in front of us. The dogs were going crazy but stayed under control, thank god. I’ve had enough dog-related injuries to last a lifetime. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.

My sister and her husband arrive tomorrow afternoon for a brief overnight stay on their way to vacation in New York City. Rick has a seminar in the city, so he’ll be departing to NYC as they arrive here! Since Rick will be traveling by train and my sister is coming via the train, I should be busy shuttling to and from the train station tomorrow. Maybe I can take Rick around the same time as my sister arrives. Otherwise, Skylands is in the middle between the house and the train station so I just might amuse myself there!

So, see? Random thoughts!