Tiki torch and cabana lights taken with HNS.

You all probably don’t want to hear this but too bad.

If you have never skinny-dipped you don’t know what you are missing.

Tonight marks the first skinny-dip of the season for me. The water temperature is still a touch chilly at 78F degrees, but the warm evening helped.

Silken water against bare skin.

Tiki torches casting a warm glow.

Three bats (Hurrah!) circling overhead, catching bugs.

Frogs singing in the background.

The occasional lost firefly. (Their season is about over.)

Laps in the pool: the ultimate sleeping aid.

Heaven! Sheer. Naked. Heaven.

Lawn shadows.

Last night as I lay in bed my head was spinning with a great idea for a blog post. I was literally writing it in my head. I should have gotten up there and then and written it all down because now I have no idea what the idea was. PooF! Dust to dust. Kind of like my brain. Maybe it will come back to me.

This morning it’s only 58 degrees with a chilly breeze and it feels like fall out there! It’s supposed to heat up mid-week (which I hope it does for the pool’s sake) but for now it’s blessedly cool. Yesterday we had a rainy start to the morning with a little over a quarter of an inch of rain and then a few little squalls in the afternoon. I didn’t even bother to close up the house it was so nice.

Back yard with a peek at the pool.

One day this week I am going to try and go to Skylands and see what’s blooming there with my camera and gear. I recently unearthed a macro lens that I didn’t know I had that must be over ten years old. It still works on my new Canon so I want to give it a whirl and see what I can do with it. (I was looking at a beautiful macro lens this weekend at Unique Photo.)

I am a macro girl at heart. I guess since I started out that way taking photos of flowers with a set of screw-on close-up lenses.

Anyway, I am rambling this morning. Sorry!

Here is our dinner on Sunday night: grilled Calamari salad.

It was fresh, bright and delicious. We fried the tentacle bits after dusting them with cornmeal, flour, a pinch of cayenne pepper and some salt. I had some marinara sauce I had made in the freezer, so we thawed that out and used it as a dip.

I can see many of you out there wrinkling up your noses at the crunchy tentacles, but hey, honestly you should give it a try. They are the best part!

I can’t wait for dinner tonight as we bought a big bag of fresh peas at the farmer’s market this weekend. Peas! A seasonal treat that I thought we had missed out on this year. We’re adding them to a lemon-sauced fettuccine.

Good grief, it’s too early to have food on the brain!

But maybe my brain needs food so it can remember what I was really going to blog about this morning!

Pool water with the sun’s reflection.

Yesterday was perfect. Truly perfection. The temperature was perfect: 81 degrees with low humidity and a gentle breeze.

We had some shopping to do early in the day such as a new umbrella since the one we’ve had for four years broke and refused to go up anymore. The new one is striped for a change.

We also had to buy another solar cover for the pool. We replaced our old worn-out cover last year but the new cover was so heavy and thick we had trouble reeling it up (and I certainly could not do it by myself), plus it did not fit on our current reel and we had to purchase a new one. It just was not working so we decided to ditch it. The new cover is much lighter and fits on our old reel, so we will try and put the other one on Craig’s List or something to try and sell it.

I got a new pair of sunglasses to replace those that were stolen off our table at the get-together at Rio’s in Ft. Collins. I hope that college kid who cleared our table is enjoying my Revo’s! I hate dishonest people.

We also dropped by the huge and great camera store in our area, Unique Photo, because they were having an Expo with lots of different camera reps and all kinds of things going on. I wanted to talk to the rep about my new Canon T4i since I was not happy with the photos it was taking in Auto Intelligent mode. The shots were always over-exposed. (Okay, I admit I set my camera to “auto” quite a bit. Bad me. But sometimes you just don’t want to mess with settings.)

I had the same difficulty with the very first Rebel I had, but my most recent Rebel (the XSi) did not have that problem. It took pretty decent photos in that mode. Now “Program” mode was another story: there the photos were always under exposed! No camera is perfect I guess.

Anyway, I talked to him and he told me to completely ditch Auto Intelligent mode! Hmmm. Makes you wonder why they even have it as a selection, doesn’t it? He suggested I use the Program mode instead since it gives you a couple of different options, such as adjusting the aperture down or up a few stops.

He also told me about a class called “Canon EOS Discovery Day” that he teaches where they go through your camera and all its features (and how to use them). It sounded like something I need, so I signed up for the next one taking place July 20th. I can’t wait!

While we were there I somehow ended up talking to the Canon rep for photo printers, which I have been telling Rick we need for quite a while, and he had a deal that we just could not refuse. Not something we had planned to buy yesterday, but there you go.

Once home the afternoon was spent installing the new solar cover and setting up all the furniture around the pool. We are getting such a late start to pool time this year! I don’t know what we did before we had the cabana.

We swam a bit and the water was delicious!

And speaking of delicious: our meal shown two different ways. (It’s’ a veal chop.)

Back to the pool to sit and enjoy (I took another dip).

I tried out a new setting on my camera Handheld Night Scene which takes 4 consecutive shots and combines them all together (like HDR). These are the cabana lights that we forgot to put up and Rick just brought them out in a pile and plugged them in. There was no other light except for them.

Cool, eh? I have a lot to learn about this new camera!

Whew. Summer arrived right on time. The past two days have been in the 90’s with high humidity, taking the heat index right over 100 degrees! It’s good for the pool (which was opened last week right before we got back) since it needs to come up a bit in temperature, but it’s not good for much else. I need to get some more weeding done but it’s too muggy out there for me.

The ferns are going crazy.

The bee balm is starting to bloom.

And the day lilies poolside are blooming too.

Last night after dinner Rick couldn’t stand looking at the pool any longer and he had the first swim of the season. 77 degrees isn’t too bad for the water temperature, but it’s still pretty chilly. I watched and cheered him on from the sidelines.

Bella was out with us as usual but Alex and Hailey preferred to stay in the air conditioned house. Can’t blame them.

Rick had just gotten out of the water when I heard a noise and Bella took off down into the yard and into the woods barking. Uh oh. I know what that kind of bark means. I ran to see what it was and saw a bear climbing up a tree. We grabbed Bella and bless her heart she listened and came with us.

I walked back down to the edge of the yard to take a closer look. I’ve learned over the years we’ve lived here to look up, way up in the tree. Sure enough, this bear had three cubs with her! I was so excited I was jumping up and down with joy! This is the first time in two years since they initiated the bear hunt again that we’ve had a momma bear! So great to see her and the cubbies!

It was getting dark so trying to get photos was challenging. This was the best I could do.

The three little monkeys!

Pretty momma!

Another one of the three cubs. I love the little guy sitting astride in the crook of the branch! They are so darling when they’re little. Three cubs is quite a lot. Two is pretty normal, but nothing like Fertile Myrtle’s Five. Do you remember them? Here’s a link to a video of them.

Here’s a pic so you can see how far apart the cubs were from the mother bear.

She was inside the perimeter of our fence which means the cubs had to crawl over it. We have several low spots in the fence from the bears climbing over so it’s not a big surprise. Still, it’s always a little unnerving to have them in your yard!

I don’t know if she’ll be back after all the ruckus or not. She didn’t seem too worried. I’m just so excited to have bears again. They are such interesting animals.

Can you feel it? The changing of the seasons, that is. Over the past few days suddenly the days are getting shorter. The nights are becoming cooler. In the mornings I run around the house closing windows to stem the flow of cool damp air into the house.  The sun is rising later and last night we barely got through with dinner and walking the dogs before it started getting dark. How did this happen so quickly?

The hummingbirds feel it too. They are hitting the feeder at a frenetic pace.  Whirring and chittering around it, fighting over whose “flower” it is. I see it as a last final sugar charge before starting their long journey south. I haven’t seen this many hummingbirds all summer, so maybe we have a few visiting interlopers that have already started their migration from points further north.

The pool, of course, is done for the year. It’s closing is scheduled for the 13th of September. It might be swimmable this weekend. Maybe. But, right now it’s full of leaves from good old Irene. And of course, all the pool furniture was put away and most of the cabana was taken down last weekend in preparation for Irene. Somehow I can’t see us bringing it all back out again only to put it all up again in a few weeks.

I’m not sad. I don’t mind seeing summer end. Especially this one when it’s been so hot and humid. I’m ready for the change, are you?

In other news, the flooding “down the mountain” (as they say around here) is at epic proportions. Rick can make it to work but it takes twice as long. His company has adopted a shorter day work week (9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.) to allow people more travel time. The gas station where he normally gets gas has sunk into the ground and there is standing water 6 feet deep around it. I feel so badly for all of the people who have been forced to leave their homes in the advancing flood waters. We were so lucky not to lose power or any trees. Lots of tree limbs down, some very large, and lots of stripped leaves everywhere, but that’s about the extent of our damage. It’s going to take some time for things to return to normal again.