11-25-22 SHORT HILLS: The feast at Anna and Gardner’s was great. I took some pix, as did many others and will post some on the blog. The trip in and out was the easiest ever. Anna and Gardner gave me a bird feeder that takes pictures of the bird customers and ID’s them and sends the pix to your phone. I have been trying to get it set up. Biggest Thanks to A and G.
11-23-22 SHORT HILLS: The trip back to NJ was wet and snowy until we got out of VT, and it was fine after that. Here in NJ there was a cold wave for a few days, but now it’s in the fifties.
We went to Loantaka to walk the dogs this morning, and it was almost deserted. The pond was bird free, which is unusual. The feeders here are getting the usual winter suspects. Finches, woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, Carolina wren, sparrows, juncos, titmouse, doves, cardinals and occasional transients are mobbing the feeders. The grackles are gone until spring—I think.
I still have a few chores to do outside, but they’ll wait until T-day is over. Judy and I are not hosting this year, Anna and Gardner have taken up the gauntlet, and they’re hosting about 20 of us at their new place in Greenwich Village. Judy did a lot of hors d’oeuvres, and I baked two pecan pies—actually maple bourbon pecan pies. We’ll bring it all in in the morning.
11-15-22 VERMONT: Addie was here today and finished the clean up, so we are ready for winter, and just in time. This morning was another cold one with the temp in the lower twenties, and there was ice on the end of the big pond, and the upper pond was completely ice covered.
We had planed to go back to NJ tomorrow, but the forecast is for some combination of winter precip, so we will stay over another night and travel on Thursday.
The game cams caught many fox pix. There are at least two foxes, one is lighter in color and the other has darker markings.
11/14/22 VERMONT: We came north on Friday, racing ahead of TS Nicole, who arrived in VT a few hours after we did. She brought lots of rain and warm air, almost in the seventies, for a day or so before it dropped into the forties and on down to the twenties today. Now it’s partly sunny with a north wind and a few snowflakes in the air—very seasonal.
We are lending the house to cousin John’s family for T-day, so Judy is madly cleaning, I’ll help if I can. I have been busy. I emptied and re-baited all the mouse traps, put up the dryer vent cover on the deck, changed and/or cleaned the furnace filters and dehumidifier filters, and did other things that I forgot.
The ponds that were very low are now partly full. There is no ice. Addie has almost finished the garden clean up.
I filled one bird feeder, and we are getting chickadees and nuthatches. I still bring it in at night, assuming that the bears are still active.
It's hunting season here, but there's very little activity on our road, many properties are now posted. When we were first here, in the nineties, November weekends sounded like a war zone with shots being fired all around us, and strange cars parked on the road.
Several plants are still putting out flowers here in mid-November so I took pix.
11-6-22 BOULDER, CO: We started the day at Lucille’s, a Creole breakfast place that Jon found, and then Eoin drove us to the UC campus. We walked around most of the morning and saw lots of sandstone buildings and the stadium where the Buffalos play, that seats 50,000. The campus is home to 30,000 plus students. We saw a lot of it, and I feel like an honorary Buff. The flatirons are visible from most of the campus.
We spent the late afternoon in the hotel lobby with Jon. He left for the airport with Eoin driving at about six. We want to dinner, and then I updated the blog.
The problem I had was that the computer couldn’t get hotel WiFi, so I couldn’t do the posts while in Boulder from the hotel. It turned out, after a few hours on the phone with Apple back in NJ, that the software needed a few tweaks.
Incidentally, we flew back in a United 787 Polaris, in the front of the plane. The seats can fold down flat into a bed, and each passenger is in their own nest—very nice.
11-6-22 BOULDER, CO: This is our second night here. We flew into Denver International Friday afternoon. The airport is spread over thousands of acres with huge empty spaces between the structures. After deplaning we walked, walked on people movers, walked, took a train shuttle, walked more to the buses to the rental car center and picked up a Budget car, and drove to Boulder and found our hotel. The flight was uneventful.
At one point during the flight, I was looking out the window at dry, dusty farmland with a lot of circular fields. I fell asleep for an hour or so, and then looked out the window at the same dry, dusty farmland. There were a few ponds and lakes, all nearly empty.
Jonathan showed up at the hotel a couple hours later, followed by Eoin, who came from his job at a tire place, where he's working when not being a math and engineering student at UC Boulder. Siobhan had to stay home to care for Juno, their rambunctious dog.
The Boulderado Hotel dates from 1909 and has an original elevator from Otis. Our room has a knee wall, flowered wallpaper and adequate facilities and heat. There was snow the day before we arrived and patches of it are still present in the shadows. Today was cold and very windy with gusts that blew leaves and dust all around, first in one direction and then in the other. We stopped at Eoin’s house, in the morning, and saw his car and the truck he is building.
We hiked a trail near the Flat Irons, large, upended sandstone formations at the front of the mountains. They have eroded to triangular shapes, hence the name. We hiked on a trail that parallels the rock formation, and saw a magpie and a Steller's jay. Many pix were taken. There were lots of people hiking. To the east there are the plains and to the west the mountains with Boulder at the cusp. Tomorrow we plan to see the University with Eoin as guide.
