The long shadows of fall are upon us and we seem to be caught in-between the seasons.

Most of our trees are barren now and we are transitioning between fall and winter. Today we had snow/rain/sleet all at the same time. Mother Nature couldn’t seem to make up her mind. It’s time for wood fires and cozy nights.

The time change nudges us along, forcing us to take up our inside habits with the earlier setting of the sun. The dogs and cats are really confused about when they should be fed and when they should wake us up.

Only a few short months ago we were still swimming in the pool at 8:30 p.m. Now we can’t even imagine that scenario as we are tucked cozily inside, either watching television or sitting around the wood fire exchanging chats with each other about how our day went.

All but one of our trees in the back has now lost its leaves. Our mighty oak in the back yard is our last holdout. As is always the case.

I love having this majestic oak presiding over our back yard but it comes with its minuses too. Like a sea of acorns.

The squirrels can’t even keep up with the abundance of acorns. The dogs go outside and munch on the nuts all the time. Here is one big nut: Bella.

Johnny does not pick all of them up so some raking will need to be done. I think this year the acorn production has outdone itself! Both with our big oak in the front yard as well as our back yard giant.

I’m ready for the transition of seasons. At least I’d like to think I am.

P.S. This post is for my sister who called today wanting to know if I had keeled over from all the hard work I blogged about in the last post because I hadn’t posted in so long. It’s nice to know my health is measured by how often I blog. Thanks sis for keeping me current!

Yesterday was certainly my day for yard work. I am not quite sure what possessed me to finish stacking the cord of wood we had delivered several months ago. I was just going to stack a little bit of it to make more progress. (Last week I stacked about 1/3 of it.) It was a nice sunny day with temperatures in the low 40’s by the time I started. The dogs helped. Well, sort of. Alex and Hailey supervised from the deck and Bella was a huge help in moving the wood piece by piece. The only problem was she moved it out into the yard instead of over by where it was being stacked! She happily chewed on bark while I loaded the wheelbarrow up, wheeled it over to the wood stack and started stacking.

I got one more row done and thought to myself “just one more wheelbarrow-ful to just get the third row started ...” After each consecutive wheelbarrow-ful I vowed it to be the last. The stack kept shrinking and shrinking until I could not leave that little bit unstacked. My back was aching but I persevered and before I knew it — violá! — the job was finished!

The last two rows were done yesterday.

Such a pretty sight to my sore back! Now I don’t have to feel guilty any more when it rains since the wood can be tidily covered up now.

That was the morning’s work.

Just after noon our lawn tractor Johnny (as in John Deere) returned home from his spa trip to Goshen, New York where he underwent a transformation. His return home has been greatly anticipated. He was being fitted with a new bagging attachment so we can now pick up all our leaves. For the past few years we’ve just been mulching the leaves, but our grass was slowly being smothered. Plus, it would take hours of driving slowly over and over the leaves to break them up enough. Tedious.

And my oh my do we have leaves! I think in some spots they are over two inches thick! You see, we hadn’t done anything about our leaves because we were waiting on Johnny and it’s taken several weeks between the time we ordered the bagger and they came to pick Johnny up.

The guy who delivered Johnny stayed to make sure I knew what I was doing. He shook his head when he saw the amount of leaves on the ground and told me I wasn’t going to get very far before I would need to dump the bags. He was right. I took one tiny swipe and jammed up the whole blower and leaf chute. I’m glad he was around to show me how to un-jam it! Plus he told me I should probably go over the leaves without the bags attached to mulch them up a little so there wouldn’t be so much mass. He demonstrated and bits of leaves, dust and anything else the mower picked up flew crazily through the air. Oh boy.

I knew I needed to get as much done as I could since we were expecting rain (and it is indeed rainy and dark out there this morning), so after a brief visit with neighbor Kim I changed into my old yard shoes and shirt and got started. I first mulched both front yards and it went pretty fast. The regular mowing blades seemed to mulch the leaves up better than the mulching blades! I kicked up a lot of dust and I think most of it was coming from the mulched leaves. A haze hung over the whole street. Quite the mess without the bags attached! I didn’t realize just how dirty a job it was until I needed to add some gas. I looked down at myself and was horrified! I was covered from head to toe in a thick film of dusty dirt. These pants were once black ... yuck.

Once I had taken the sheer mass of the leaves down, I put the bags back on and proceeded to pick them up. It worked like a charm except for a few times when I didn’t dump the bags as soon as I should have and ended up jamming the blower attachment, but overall it went very smoothly. And the end result was very pleasing!

Here are the before and after shots of one side of our front yard:

I only got one side of the yard completely done but at least the dirty mulching part of the job is completely done (at least in front). I wish I could have finished the rest before today’s rain but it was not to be. At least we don’t have that heavy carpet of leaves covering the grass anymore. The rest of the job should be easier. Next year we can keep up with the leaves as they fall and it should be a real breeze!

A very satisfying day of work.

Today I do not plan to be covered in dirt. No sir. I am going shopping to Garden State Plaza (the biggest mall in our area) with neighbor Kim. I hope to come home with a new pair of boots (thanks to the generosity of my in-laws). A perfect way to spend a rainy day!

Today was my first pottery class that I am taking through the town’s adult education classes. I tried pottery once before way back in the late 80’s but I’ve pretty much forgotten everything I knew. If I really ever knew anything at all about it! All I remember is that for some reason our class time was cut short and the instructor ended up doing all our glazing and firing for us. One pot I did hand-building and the other one I threw on the wheel. It was my first experience with “throwing” and I quickly realized why they called it that when my would-be vase literally flew off the wheel and landed on the floor like I had thrown it there.

Today was different. After finding my way through the security gate (she lives in a really cool gated community where all the houses are sprinkled among the woods throughout a very large complex) me and another woman were were welcomed into Kathy’s home. She wanted to show us things she had made so we could get an idea that we weren’t limited to just making small pots or (god forbid) the dreaded school-project-ashtray. It was also a tour of her very large home as we peeked into each and every bedroom (including her own) to see the object d’art that she had crafted. After the house ceramic tour we marched down to her basement where her pottery studio is. A work bench, a wheel, and two kilns, (one large; one small) took up one room while the the other part housed glazes, forms and molds, and other tools of the trade.

She’s a very open and friendly person, and obviously a very talented one if her pieces are anything to go by.

There are only three of us in the class and both of the other women have had a lot more experience with this than I have. One woman who has already been taking the class for two weeks (she started early due to being gone for the next two weeks) was already on to making lovely wall plaques and leaf platters. She had imprinted the clay with a leaf from a water lily and some other exotic elephant ear leaf for a large platter. Gorgeous! She said she’s done it all before—only 30 years ago. She said she’s taking multiple art classes. I got the impression she was not there to learn but to have use of the tools, glazes, and kilns. The other woman who arrived with me has also had a lot of experience, plus she paints. Me? Well, I guess I feel a little inadequate right about then, but isn’t that what taking a class is all about? (The class was listed as Beginning/Intermediate.)

We did two things today. The first was a hand-built bowl. We took out our frustrations by throwing the ball of clay down onto the table to get all the bubbles out. When we reached the desired thickness we played around with different textures from Kathy’s basket of toys. I just grabbed what I thought looked interesting and started imprinting the clay with a variety of things. I think I took a coil of spring, some corrugated cardboard and a string of different sized beads. My bowl consisted of probably six or more slabs of clay, slightly overlapped and put into a plastic bowl lined with plastic wrap that served as a form. Once that was done we had to scrape, scrape scrape the inside until it was smooth with no sign of the overlapping pieces. I’m not sure my bowl is going to be very even in thickness, but c’est la vie!

The second thing we made was a ball shape. This time, we “bounced” the ball of clay on the table while trying not to flatten it until when we cut it in half we couldn’t see any bubbles. Then we hollowed out the center by pressing the clay down. We added some shards of some other kind of medium (not sure just what it was) in the middle of our ball so that it will rattle once fired. We could make our ball into anything we wanted. I made an apple with a stem and one leaf. It was pretty one dimensional, and I kept thinking it should somehow be more. But what? Apples don’t have a lot of texture to them ...

Meanwhile my co-class mate was whipping up a intricately carved pumpkin from her ball of clay. I was very impressed. Looking from one project to another, mine looked like a fifth grader had made it and hers looked like an artist had made it. Oh well.

Finally, when we were about to walk out the door, it occurred to me just what was wrong with my apple. What I had needed was an apple in front of me as a model. Apples go in at the top and slope slightly on the sides but mine was pretty much round all the way around. I wanted to grab it off the table and start over again but I didn’t. I did learn something though, so that’s good.

I think it’s going to be fun but I do wish everyone was starting on the same playing field. Why oh why do I have to be the only “beginner?”

I want to introduce you to my turkeys. My turkeys. Hah. Well, at least I think of them as mine since they are constantly in my yard! The babies (or poults) are all grown up now and hard to discern from the adult hens. Meet the girls. Say hello girls ...

*gobble gobble gobble*

Gobble up all the food, that is!

What do you call a bunch of turkeys? There’s a gaggle of geese, a bevy or herd of swans, a pod of whales. Who comes up with this stuff and why? I have always referred to them as a flock of turkeys, which is a correct word. They can also be known as a brood; a bale; and a rafter. Hmm…where did bale and rafter come from? Did they sit on bales of hay and in the rafters of barns?

Yes, I feed the turkeys. Right now I am trying to train this brood of nine that visit two or three times a day. A few years ago I had a rafter of four or five that would come running over to me when I called them with food. They were so cute!! This bale is a little more skittish. (See, I am trying to decide which word I like best to call them by.) The minute I open the door they start running—the opposite direction. Except for one. She stands a short distance off, cocks her head while I tap the bucket with food and croon softly to her in turkinese. (Turkinese is my own little made up language of clucks and cooing noises.) She is taking my measure and I’m not sure she trusts me quite yet. I’m not sure the rest of them get it, but this one brave girl is really trying. She came really close to me the other day. I want them to realize that the crazy human that talks funny = FOOD.

Not the most attractive birds on the planet yet I find them endearing.

Not the most intelligent either. Do you remember the saying back in the—what was it, 70’s?— “dumb turkey?” It meant a stupid person. Poor turkeys. Such a bad rap! If Benjamin Franklin had had his way wild turkeys would be our national symbol instead of the bald eagle. He thought they were majestic and would make a fine symbol for the new country. Probably better than a bald eagle which is pretty much a lazy bird that would rather steal another bird’s kill than make its own kill. Sad, but true.

Mostly the turkeys stay in the front yard but occasionally they hop over the fence to visit the back yard. This has been happening more and more. Here they are running across the back yard.

This afternoon I was upstairs and one window was open. I heard strange noises and stuck my head out the window to figure it out. It was the turkeys making all kinds of vocalizations I hadn’t heard before. (Not your typical gobble gobble.) Not fifteen minutes after I heard all this, I looked out to see that they had all gathered around the feeding area again. But wait ... there were more! Thirteen instead of the normal nine! Makes me wonder if they were chatting about joining up and creating one flock instead of two. Makes sense, since the other rafter was a mother hen and three poults remember them?

Just now as I sat typing this entry I looked out and they were back again. So, I went and got some more ground corn and took it out. They skittered away as usual, but this time four of them stopped and just stood there watching me. Not running away! Two hens started running toward me, then stopped. Still, I am making progress!

Maybe they are not such “dumb turkeys” after all. Dumb or smart I love having them visit my yard.

P.S. Good fertilizer too!

The truck w/canoe in our driveway.

Sunday morning we loaded up the canoe and headed to our five-minute-away destination: Monksville Reservoir. The morning was crisp, but calm. We had originally planned our canoe outing for Saturday but it was a bit too breezy for paddling around. We thought we would need light jackets but once we go there we realized it had warmed up enough to go without them.

When we first started out the lake was like a mirror. The colors are just now slightly past peak, but still pretty. The light was typical for a fall day with the sun in and out of the clouds.

Monksville Reservoir was filled in 1987. There were a few houses that were of historical significance that were moved elsewhere, but the majority of the 15 homes that once existed here were demolished. The reservoir is huge but so far we have only paddled in the shallower section near the Wanaque river feed.

We like it because of all the dead standing trees. It’s eerie and pretty all at the same time. It’s challenging too (at least for Rick who steers) because there are many submerged tree stumps and fallen trees that can snag you if you don’t see them lurking under the water. It’s like a cemetary for trees and many of them have met with a watery grave.

The bleached dead wood makes for a stark contrast against the vibrantly colored trees.

We disturbed a cormorant resting on a rock. Until I took these photos I had no idea they had blue eyes!

Finally airborne and away from those people in that canoe! Whew!

The cemetary of dead trees.

We (or should I say Rick) navigated through the dead trees while I stopped paddling to be on the lookout for submerged stumps. It’s a strange feeling floating among the watery forest.

The colors here were interesting to me ... muted greens and pinks from the green scum on the water and the burning bushes; reminiscent of a Monet painting I thought.

We got back in the channel and paddled up to the end where the Wanaque river feeds the reservoir.

There was some kind of foam in the water but to us it looked like a galaxy spinning around on the surface.

A captive maple leaf.

And somehow plants find a way to survive.

On our way back to the dock the wind kicked up and the sun was becoming obscured behind clouds. We were glad we had chosen the time we did to come. And, all the more glad when we saw lots of people unloading canoes at the dock. A canoeing club was about to take over the waters! After accepting many compliments on how beautiful our canoe was (and an invitation from one man to join the Hackensack Canoe Club) we were on our way home.

Whew! That’s a lot of photos! I know my sweet hubbie would tell me “edit, Lynne!” but I’ve had a hard enough time just getting this posted. I kept looking at the photos and deciding which ones to leave out and never came to a good conclusion. So, since this post has been waiting to be published now for two days, I just decided to go with all of them.

I hope you enjoyed the paddle!