Thanksgiving Day 2011

It was a quiet TG for us this year, with Mrs. SR013 and I cooking for ourselves and watching football. A couple of the highlights:

Violet ate the recipe for turkey that I had cut out of the newspaper and carefully saved since 2008. I’m still not sure how she got ‘hold of it.

We took the dogs for a walk down the road at midday in crisp weather, and got to pet the neighbor’s horses, who trotted up to the fence as we passed by.

We tried a new potato dish, a gratin with Sicilian influences, that was quite tasty. It’s made with chicken broth and no cream, so it’s a little lighter than most TG potato dishes.

He's a good boy

We have a lot to be thankful for, but it’s particularly heartening to see how well GusGus is doing at the age of 12+. He scarfs his food, is quite spry around the yard and really seems to be enjoying life here in the country.

Fall Colors

Most of our fall colors are gone now, so this post is a little tardy. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that we had excellent fall colors this year, with large stands of trees turning countless shades of red, yellow and orange. Some of my favorites were the maples — many of which turned brilliant gold — and oaks — which turned a brick red.

A maple behind our house was one of the first trees to turn

One thing we’ve learned is that the fall colors depend on late-summer rainfall to happen. In a dry year, like last year, the leaves simply wither and turn brown, and then fall off. This year we had sufficient rainfall in September to allow the leaves to turn color slowly once the weather turned cold. In places, it was spectacular.