Has it really been one whole week since I last blogged? It doesn’t seem that long. I guess I have some catching up to do. It’s going to be a long one, so please bear with me as I wade through the goings-on of the past week +.

We had a good Labor Day weekend and the weather was glorious. We didn’t do much of anything, just some yard work such as emptying the deck flower boxes of their past-their-prime petunias, one of the signs of a winding down of summer.

The petunias may have been done with in the flower boxes but they managed to seat themselves in various places, such as the potted palm that has been spending the summer outside

and also poolside.

The weather has taken a turn since my last post. Nights are cooler and every day we have less sunlight. The sun has a hard time getting above the trees for the better part of the day. The pool deck is covered with bits and pieces of acorns that continually drop from the big oak tree at the far corner, making loud thonks! whenever they hit. Fall is in the air.

Earl completely missed us and all we got was a bit of wind on Saturday. Since he passed by our weather has been just beautiful: blue skies and cool days. Perfect for throwing the windows wide open and letting the breeze blow through the house. I have to admit though that we needed to close up the house on Sunday night because it was too darned cold! 47 degrees F overnight!

The heat wave of last week did allow the pool to recover slightly in temperature (74 F) and we went for what we believe was the last swim on Friday night. With the past few nights dipping down into the 50’s and high 40’s, the temperature has tanked back down to 70 F again. I don’t think it’s going to recover this time.

We’ve had this visitor several times in the front yard. Eating acorns I’m thinking since it is always in the same spot: under the oak tree.

The only thing really left blooming in my yard is the overgrown morning glory vine that is threatening to take over the deck and Rick’s weather station. It got a late start this year.

Another sad thing on the winding down side of things is that we had to euthanize our old kitty, Vincent van “Goatee” last week. He was our little “Frenchman” kitty that came with us when we moved back from France. He was 18 1/2 years old and failing in health. It was hard to make the decision to let him go but when friend Carolyn visited and she sat down and talked to him, the end result was that she agreed it was time. Over the past year we’ve known that he probably had cancer from the results of his blood test and he had to live in an x-large doggie airline crate because of his lack of bathroom habits. He stopped taking care of his fur and it became matted, fell out and never regrew. We nursed him along but his quality of life confined to a crate was poor.

Over the past month or so he started looking very gaunt and was really nothing but skin and bones. With our three week vacation looming, we knew we could not leave him with a cat sitter coming in once a day, and feared that he would pass while we were gone. Here he is with eBay in better days, and getting a treat on Christmas three years ago. It’s hard to remember that he ever looked that good; he’d been failing for so long. Sleep well, sweet Vinnie.

And the gearing up, you ask? Well, I was gifted this gorgeous fig tree by a neighbor.

It came complete with instructions for its care.

And figs!!!!

Some of which we’ve already harvested and eaten!

And the biggest “gearing up” is of course for our westward trek to our cabin back in Colorado. Next week this time we’ll be somewhere in Indiana! Lists are being made. Piles of things to take are starting to accumulate in the spare bedroom.  Recipes are being poured over and rated (or not) as cabin meal candidates. The Suburban got washed and awaits its interior cleaning this weekend and the donning of its roof rack and storage pod. Soon, I tell the dogs. Soon you’ll be running free over the high prairie—and Bella—you’ll be swimming in the beaver pond. And your Dad and I will be sitting on the screened-in porch after dinner listening to the coyotes sing.

Very soon.

Thanks for slogging through this week with me!

Unlike that old 60’s song that goes ...
Hey 98.6, it’s good to have you back again…

It’s NOT good to have you back. Again. Just when you think summer is over (like last week with all the rain and temps in the 60’s) it comes back to slap you right in the face. WHACK! Not over yet, thank you very much. ouch. That hurts. I am so done with summer. Especially since the pool has not gone above 71 degrees in spite of the hot temperatures. Not fair! Look at yesterday’s weather stats taken from our weather station.

Maybe Earl will have something to say about that this weekend. Will he impact us or or not?

And for those of you who are too young to remember the song, go here to hear it. For some reason I am having trouble inbedding videos into my blog.

I leave you today with a few early morning shots of Green Turtle pond from our Sunday canoe paddle-around.

The mist was still rising from the surface when we first go there.

After the mist cleared the surface was like a piece of glass.

Last night just as we were preparing dinner, Hailey started barking and looking out the sliding screen door in the sun room. We looked out and didn’t see anything and told her to be quiet. A few minutes later she was barking again. This time I stepped outside on the deck to take a look. Sure enough, I saw a big black object down by the back fence in the woods. I went to get the binoculars to take a better look and when I got back the object had moved. Yes, for sure: a bear. A big one. It was on the inside of the fence, in our yard and seemed very intent on eating or digging something up. It must have heard us talking, but didn’t even raise its head.

Rick pulled out the grill and we continued with our dinner plans, all the while having a bear in our woodsy yard munching away on his dinner. Life here is so weird sometimes and what is even stranger is that it doesn’t seem all that strange to us to have it include bears at close range.

Today would have been my mom’s 84th birthday. Happy Birthday Mom wherever you are. We still miss you like crazy. It hardly seems possible you’ve been gone from us for three years now.

Bella, sweet Bella, turned two years old yesterday. She got toys and bones. She was like a little kid going from one to the other.

My friend Carolyn arrives later today to spend the weekend with us. Included in our plans are the Renaissance Faire tomorrow (so I am airing out my wench costume), canoeing on Green Turtle Pond, attending our neighborhood block party for a while on Sunday and hopefully taking a dip in the pool since it’s supposed to be hot again. A full and fun weekend!

We’ve had four days of rain in a row this week with yesterday finally clearing up and being lovely and should continue to be so through most of next week. It’s supposed to be back in the mid 80’s again. The difference is that instead of getting in to the high 60’s at night, it now dips down to the 50’s. The pool does not like 50 degree nights. No sireee. It didn’t like all that lovely rain either. So, it remains to be seen if we are brave enough (and hot enough) to get into 72 degree water; a full ten degrees off from where it was.

I’m starting to think about what we need to take with us to the cabin and gathering stuff up and putting it in the spare bedroom. Trying to decide what our meal will be. We’re looking forward to it! If you want to read the cabin blog entries from past years, I’ve now created a category called “Cabin” over on the right hand side of the blog. Clicking on that link will bring them all up. Enjoy!

Tuesdays are trash days around here. Since we’ve moved here we’ve had a trash carrier that came at or after 7:00 a.m. Starting this year they switched carriers and our trash pick-up is now at 6:00 a.m. instead of 7:00 a.m. For us this is a huge difference since we are not early morning risers. We are doing good to shush the dogs when they start stirring at 5:30 to appease them until we really want to get up at 6:30.

So, that being said we have started to put our trash out the night before because we are
a) still asleep when they pick the trash up
b) too lazy get up before they come

So be it.

All has been well until two weeks ago when we looked out the window after the trash had been picked up to see that there was trash strewn all over the street. Crap. Bear(s). We picked up what we could and thought that was the extent of it. My neighbor Kim informed me that there was still trash in their woods across from our driveway. Sure enough, when I went over there with gloved hands, our trash was everywhere.

What I picked up might just prompt all of you out there reading this to think about just what you discard in your trash. You toss it away in the hopes that no one ever sees it, but let me tell you when you pick it up after it being strewn all over the neighbors’ woods, you just might want to give it a second thought. Really, How embarrassing! Gross. The bear obviously took all the good stuff and left the rest.

But, once again, I regress.

Tonight when Rick got home I had collected all the household trash, which he so sweetly took out as his weekly household chore. Not more than one hour after he did so, I happened to look out to see our trash cans toppled over and trash bags out in the street. I said “Rick, crap. Looks like the bear got into our trash already.” He went out and started up the driveway to pick it up. I heard him saying “shoo” (kind of of like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa) rather loudly and “leave that alone!”

Gosh. I didn’t see anything.

Turns out, the bear was right there and he didn’t see it until he got up closer to the trash. He was clapping his hands and yelling, saying things like “shoo” and I was panicked. Heck ... he was pretty close to a bear eating garbage and he was afraid for me while we were washing the car? I think this posed a more dangerous position, given that this bear (according to Rick) was about 300+ pounds and not a homeless cub. Yikes.

The bear took off into the woods and we gathered up the trash bags, loaded them back into the trash cans and carried them back down the long driveway and into the garage.

Guess the alarm will be set early tomorrow.

Sigh. Life with bears in the wilds of New Jersey.

(Not trading this rural-bear-dense-life! even if it means a little less sleep!)

This is what my shoes looked like the other morning after walking through my dew-laden grass.

Fall-ish leaves stuck to my shoes. Not something you would expect in the middle of August now is it? With our dry conditions this summer some of our trees are showing stress and dropping leaves early. I am not sure what this means for our fall colors this year. Hopefully the colors will still be good, although I am anticipating them to be earlier than usual. Normally they are at their peak around October 17. Since we will be taking our annual trip to our cabin in Colorado in a few weeks and returning the first week of October, I hope we don’t miss the show. We are hoping to catch the aspens changing at the cabin and then our New Jersey fall when we return.

I think we’ve broken the dry spell. Since yesterday morning when we shopped in the pouring rain at the farmer’s market to right now we’ve had a little over 4 inches of rain! And it’s still raining. It rained pretty much all day yesterday and it’s been raining since I got up. Any more and we are going to have to let water out of the pool! Our thirsty grass and plants have got to be happy. Drowned by now probably. I can hear the rush of water in our little creek behind our house from the deck. When this stops I am going to walk down and see just how much water it is carrying.

The wildlife is feeling fall in the air too I think. We hardly ever have deer in our yard although they frequent our neighbor’s yard quite a bit. When I looked out the other day in the late afternoon I saw this little family group in my front yard. A young buck with nubs for antlers, two does and a fawn. Please forgive the bad photos—they were taken through the screen and window.

They were flighty and hard to capture with the camera. I just love the color of our deer. They are not brown; more like a rich butterscotch color.

Not ten minutes after the deer were in my yard the turkeys came.

We see turkeys pretty much every day. We have three little groups that visit. One hen by herself, one with three babies and a larger grouping of hens and assorted size babies. They seem to be everywhere this year! HAH! I just looked out to see what the rain was doing and the same group of turkeys is out in front! Pretty wet turkeys I might add.

August is a funny month here. You would think that August would be the hottest month, but it’s not. July is. Right about mid-August it starts to change. The pool starts to tank on us seemingly overnight. Before we left for the shore last weekend we were swimming every night in luscious 82 degree water. When we returned four days later the temperature had dropped to 76/78 at best. Even though we’ve had warm days and nights this past week the temperature hasn’t budged. Now with all this rain it’s sure to bring it down even further. The sun is just not hitting it for the better part of the day. It’s sad but we’ve had a good run with the pool this year. In fact, probably the best pool year we’ve had. It’s beautiful at night, isn’t it?

In fact the whole summer has been wonderful. A little hot maybe, and we’ve certainly had our fair share of humidity; but it was all good. Given that, I am ready for cooler sleeping weather and the crisp air and golden light of fall. Instead of sitting around the pool with the tiki torches glowing at night, soon we’ll be sitting around the wood stove watching the glowing coals of wood.

Let the seasonal shift begin!