The biggest ending is of course the loss of our sweet cat Sam. I still have not done a tribute to him here on the blog. Soon.

Assorted leaves hanging out before the pool was closed.

The pool is closed for the season. Its winter cover keeping it tidy for the autumn and winter seasons to come. It’s sad, but it was time. Next year we are looking to install a heater to add several weeks on to the beginning and the end of pool season.

Yesterday also was the end of my photography classes. I wish they offered a more in-depth class to hone the skills I learned but they don’t. So for now I’ll just have to take what I did learn and practice on my own. I was amazed how so many people can talk the talk but can’t walk the walk. They can go on and on about this and that about their camera, throwing all kinds of terms around, but when it comes to actually taking photos they aren’t very good! Yesterday we had to go out into the parking lot and take photos of textures, reflections, patterns, lines and etc. and then come in and do a slideshow. It was enlightening for sure. One girl who claims to have a job in a photography studio didn’t even know what the hot shoe was! She also did not share her photos with the class. (It was optional to share.)

It’s also the end of summer. Even when the days get up in to the 70’s the air is different and you can tell the heat has lost its punch.

My neighbor’s tree.

Little mushrooms are popping up in the yard.

Apples and fall fruits take over the farmer’s market.

In other news, Sam’s death kind of took away the excitement and pleasure of seeing my photo/s in print in two local newspapers. They actually did use them!

The Trends reaches has a large distribution and reaches our whole county. They used their staff photographer’s photo on the front page (boohoo, but hey they have to pay him!) but used my photo on the inside.

I was also surprised and pleased to see that their affiliated paper, Aim West Milford, that is local just to our township used both photos I submitted. (Also on on inside page.)

I was very pleased. And proud. I am thinking they had a lot of photo submissions for the fire and yet they chose to use mine.

So, that’s it for today. Kind of a mish-mash, but there you have it.

It would seem we don’t get much sleep around here. Fireworks. Sirens of twenty different fire companies. An owl.

We haven’t had any owls around since we moved to New Jersey. We always wondered why we never heard one given all the woods that surround our house.

We can’t say that anymore. We’ve heard this owl a couple of times over the past month. The hoo-hoo-hooing of some kind of owl we were not familiar with. It’s always around the same time in the wee hours of the morning, right around 4:00 to 4:30 a.m. Sometimes it sounds like it’s right outside our window, and since we have huge trees in the front yard, it probably is!

Last night the owl outdid itself. When it first woke me it was pretty close, then it settled in further away in the woods and kept hoo-hooing for a good fifteen minutes. Then another one joined in that was very close and it was a very strange noise. Even Rick woke up for that one!

This morning I looked it up and given I only had three choices of owl species to choose from it wasn’t hard to figure it out. Our choices where we live are Great Horned (which we knew it was not by the voice), Barred, and Eastern Screech Owl. No screeching, so I got out my bird song CD and played the voice of the Barred Owl. Bingo!

Here is our culprit, the Barred Owl. The link kindly provides sound!

I don’t mind being woken by Mr. Barred. It’s kind of nice to have an owl around.

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.

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!