Autumn's Glorious Perfection

On a tree near our mailbox, taken Sept 27, 2010
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First Signs of This Year's Beautiful Autumn

These cell phone photos only give a semblance of the rich color and beauty

Icicles!

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This is new to us, having spent all our married lives in New Mexico. Very pretty.

Interesting Animal Tracks in the Snow

Lots of neat animal prints in the snow in the back yard yesterday. The next five appear to me to be rabbit or hare tracks. A friend suggests they are squirrel tracks -- he may well be right.

This serpentine trail must be from a mouse. The other, shallower marks in the next photo branch off from the mouse trail and I'm not sure what to make of them.

This one shows the mouse trail crossing the "freeway" of back-and-forth tracks of a larger animal crossing our property and going into the woods behind the old grange next door:

The last five images show what I think must be woodchuck tracks; we have one around here, we've seen him several times; though a friend says these look like possum tracks, and I hear there are possums in these woods. You can easily see how the claws are dragged backhand, forward, then the paw is placed down in front. Really interesting tracks. Click on the images for a better view.

All of these are animal tracks. They look to be the same animal, going back and forth.

Winter snow over Pittsfield pond

Contrast this photo of the frozen pond with the two photos taken from the same spot earlier this year during the autumn colors http://tinyurl.com/frozen-pond

A New Hampshireman's Prayer

Well, it didn't take long for snow to move from being beautiful, to being a LOT OF WORK!

It's still beautiful, though I do have some thoughts for the Good Lord, on improving on snow.



The trees in our back yard are now really showing the signs of winter. On a clear day we can see through them to the very top of Mount Washington, 60 miles due north. In the 1930's my father walked up it one day. It's pleasant to reflect on that -- that Dad was out there 70-some years ago.

This photo was taken of our back deck from the upstairs window. That big pile of snow is 4 feet of snow heaped on top of our barbecue grill! And since that grill is our emergency cooking source -- our house is completely electric except for that grill, and New Hampshire has power outages when ice storms come -- I have now cleared a path to it. And for the first time since I was a kid, icicles off of the roof!

This shows that having snow isn't all fun. And it brings me to my comments to the Good Lord, on improvements He might consider making to snow:

That pathway through the snow -- which is only a foot of snow at present, and is likely to become 4 feet before long -- so that Vickie can get out to where her fabrics are kept in the shop out back -- that thing was hard to cut, because the snowblower can't get traction on wet snowy grassy ground, and I had to muscle the thing all the way. (Sound of violins.)

So, Lord, I wanted to make a comment. Because, You're really, really good at some things. Sunsets at the beach-- you just can't improve on them.

And rain -- you did a good job on that. We need the rain, and you have arranged it so that when it rains on cars, and sidewalks, and driveways -- it flows down off of them, and into the ground. Which I think is just a terrific arrangement.

Now we come to the snow, which is a different arrangement, because the snow does not fall off of the cars, and the lawns, and the driveways. And, I know You can do it! Because it just doesn't seem fair for me to have to move all that snow. I didn't put it there.

If You catch my drift.

One of God's Little Creatures Lives Under Our House

Last night we had our first snow. I injured my leg so this time Vickie had snow duty.


One of God's little creatures crawled out from the basement of the house next door, walked under our back stairs and over to the barn, and back again and left a really interesting trail. Can anyone guess what it is? We've seen an animal that looks sort of like a big gopher or beaver but with a small tail and big back haunches. I've thought it was a marmot, but the local residents don't think we have marmots around here, and the New Hampshire wildlife website doesn't mention them. Do these tracks identify this fellow? Click the images for a better look.

This photo shows that porcupine tracks in the snow look pretty much like this, so maybe that's what it is: http://tinyurl.com/porcupine-tracks

This is a photo of blueberry hill about 5 miles away:

First light snow on trees in our back yard