I am now sitting pool side because its days are numbered. We know we only have one, maybe two more weekends left of pool enjoyment before we have to close it. The temperature is down to 77 degrees now, which Rick reassures me is at the low end of what the Olympic pool is allowed to be. I would rather the top end than the low end, but it is what it is.

As I lay on my float with the not-too-strong sun beating down on my body it feels good. Like my veins are filled with warmed jelly instead of blood. I feel incapable of lifting myself up from my supine position.

After looking at the bright sunlight, when I close my eyes the sun still dances in front of my closed eyelids like the flickering of an old film reel.

The strident voices of children drift over from our neighbor’s who are having a party.

The air show is in town today and once in a while they fly over our house in a burst of spectacular showmanship.

>

or not!

Later on ...

Tonight after swimming 30 lengths of the pool we built a fire in our little fire pit.

The seasons, they are a’changin’.

Shades of green at Green Turtle Pond. Taken two weeks ago.

And so it begins. The slow slipping down of summer. At first it’s the little things you notice.

The sun. It’s lower in the sky and rises later and sets earlier. It seemed like just the other day we were swimming at dusk which happened around 8:45 p.m. Now it’s around 8:00 p.m. It’s strange that you don’t notice at first, then all of a sudden it hits you: the change of seasons has begun.

There are other indicators. The pool temperature drops by about two degrees and becomes on the edge of swimmable. The cooler nighttime temperatures and the slight change in the angle of the sun are to blame.

The hummingbirds are feeding voraciously at the feeder stocking up for their big flight home. They haven’t been bothering with the feeder and have left it to the bees for the past month and half. Not now.

The other birds seem to be feeding a lot too. More so than usual. I’ve had to fill the bird feeder every other day.

The turkey with her two babies has started showing up every day at the bird feeding area in the front yard. Soon the hens and the toms will all band together and instead of three I’ll have twelve or fifteen turkeys coming.

And they aren’t the only ones. This cute little fox showed up the other day.

My garden spider is still around. I check up on it every morning. I’ve never known a spider to have a web in the same spot for so long! Don’t you think it’s strange? I call this photo Dance with Death.

It’s been a real summer this year. Very warm and humid. Not a lot of rain but enough to keep everything green without watering. The nasty storms over the past few days have pretty much passed us by, growing stronger as they move eastward, leaving us with only a little rain to show for it. We could use more.

I think I’m ready to embrace a different season. Although I hate to lose the pool, I am looking forward to autumn. To opening the windows wide instead of always having the air conditioning on and sleeping cool for a change. To cozy fires in the wood stove to take the chill off a damp day. To stews and chile bubbling away on the stove.

I have no idea if the trees will have good color this year or not. I kind of think they will. Last year was so disappointing with all that moisture we had because the trees just gave up and dropped their leaves without ever really changing. Will not quite normal moisture make for a poor showing as well?

The are predicting a very snowy winter for us which I am not quite ready to think about yet. After last year’s non-winter it could come as quite a shock!

Only time will tell what Mother Nature has in store for us!

We went to the New Jersey State Fair & Horse Show in Sussex County on Sunday. I’m not sure why they get to have the title “State Fair” because it isn’t. Not really. The big state fair has already taken place (in July I think) at the Meadowlands. This is more of a county fair.

I understand that the county of Sussex is all about horses (and agriculture) as you can tell by just driving through it, so it’s no wonder that the fair started as a horse show and grew from there.

It was cute and cozy and just the right size. Rick won me a little plush duck and we rode the ferris wheel.

We walked around all the livestock barns (which I already posted a few pics of in yesterday’s post) and watched a group of kids take their alpacas through a course much like a dog drafting test or temperament test.

We ate some fair food.

We looked through the photos entered in the photo contest, all the exhibits and entries in wine, beer, baked goods, crafts, and the vegetables.

Winners in the Great New Jersey Zucchini Contest resting on their laurels. (or would that be resting on their hay bale?)

Lots of garlic to judge!

These were exhibits in the creative flower arranging. This “cake” won first place. Pretty darned creative, I’d say! Would you like the whole cake?

Or just one slice?

I also loved this one but it didn’t win a ribbon.

There were a few attractions that we skipped. Like this one:

All in all, a good day at the fair!

It was kind of a strange weekend weather-wise. Saturday dawned murky and humid. The sky was a washed-out gray. We took Mia down to Wayne to the farm stand to buy the ingredients for our veggie-loaded menu. They have the best sweet corn and Jersey tomatoes. It was so humid and hazy that as we drove, drops of moisture collected on the windshield and it was not raining. The air was that dense.

We came home and took advantage of the pool for a little while, just sitting out there reading while Robby the Robot cleaned the pool. I looked at the radar and saw that a storm was headed our way, so we got the robot out of the pool and came inside. And just in time too. The heavens parted and rain poured down from the sky. And it just kept coming. We got over an inch of rain in very little time. It rained on and off for the rest of the day and was still drizzling when we went to bed.

Dinner was delicious! We tried a new recipe: Corn Fritters with Roasted Tomatoes.

The tomatoes were slow roasted in the oven for about an hour and half, melting them down to intensely flavored rounds. The fritters were light and fluffy. The recipe called for topping it with a slice of prosciutto, but we thought it was basically not necessary. In fact, next time we’d probably leave it off and also make a different aioli to dress it with.

Prosciutto is pretty though, isn’t it?

We had fritters leftover, so breakfast also featured fritters under our over-easy eggs. I can’t tell you how good this was!

Sunday morning kind of looked the same way that Saturday morning looked: hazy and gray. It didn’t stop us from taking Mia again, this time up to Warwick for the farmer’s market. We had originally thought to buy ingredients for a simple salad, but we realized that we had bought a watermelon at the farm stand that we needed to use up.

I had seen a recipe for a Watermelon Gazpacho but couldn’t remember exactly what went into it. Thank goodness for technology as Rick looked it up on his iPhone right then and there at the market. We bought bread, (not in the gazpacho recipe!) a gorgeous cucumber, a jalapeño pepper, flat leaf parsley and shallots. No red peppers were available at the market so we had to stop at the grocery to pick one up.

It was so refreshing! Delicious!

Half of the ingredients were pureed in the food processor, but some were kept out to stir in for texture.

We ate out by the pool and it was lovely. I cut a couple of hydrangea blossoms to put on the table and stuck them in one of my favorite little vases.

Just as we finished up our lunch it started to rain. At first it was just a light rain and we were under the umbrella so it didn’t bother us. Then it started to rain hard and the dogs didn’t all fit under the protection of the umbrella and they were getting soaked, so we packed up and came inside not trusting it to stop anytime soon.

It rained for a bit, then the sun came out. We went back to the pool and in the pool. Another round of clouds came by. We got out of the pool. The sun came out. We got back in the pool.

By that time it was time to start on guess what? More food! It does seem like all we do is eat!

I was mostly in charge of the risotto.

Rick was completely in charge of the chicken done on the grill with indirect heat. Chickens cook faster when they are spatchcocked. (I know it sounds a bit nasty but all it means is it’s split down the middle of the back and flattened.)

The weather cooperated and it was a nice evening complete with a swim. The cicadas started in as we completed our swim and nearly sang us to sleep as we sat and watched night fall more deeply around us.

Breakfast:

Bacon corn hash from Smitten Kitchen! We had this two days in a row. Really tasty. The corn added sweetness that was kind of unexpected.

On Saturday we dragged the Booster Bath out into the driveway and gave all three dogs a much needed bath. It was not too hot and overcast so it was perfect weather for dog bathing. None of them were really excited about it but I know they feel better when they are clean, and god knows they certainly smell better than they did!

We bobbed around the pool in the afternoon after running errands (pool store, grocery, liquor store) and the weather was beautiful by then. Not too hot; not too humid with a nice breeze. The pool had cooled off by four degrees with all the rain and cooler nighttime temps of the past few days, so we didn’t swim. Dinner was a very disappointing pizza that I had remembered was better the first time we tried it. Blech!

After walking the dogs on Sunday morning we headed to the Warwick Farmers Market per usual. We needed pesto and goat cheese but came back with beautiful orange beets, a french baguette and some beef jerky too.

Instead of buying ingredients for our lunch we opted to eat the Warwick Valley Winery instead. I still had not satisfied my pizza craving, so pizza it was! And a bottle of wine of course.

When we got home we realized we had had a visitor in our absence. One of the deck flower pots was off the railing, the potted petunias laying on their sides on the deck and the bird feeder hanger was bent all to heck. A bear. Nice. My Squirrel-Buster bird feeder held up pretty well, but the bear managed to poke a few holes in the heavy duty plastic … again. The iron hanger did not fare as well. It even bent the bolt! We haven’t had any bear activity since just before my sister’s visit, so we were kind of surprised. And all the way up on our deck!

A little more pooling (we both fell asleep on our floats) and grilled tequila-jalapeno shrimp for dinner and our weekend was done! The bear, by the way, did not make a return visit.