Monthly Archives: November 2017

Post stuffing

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Leah and I had a modest Thanksgiving dinner at home on Thursday, with turkey and store-bought dressing and gravy. It sounds sad, but it’s just me and Leah here, so it’s kind of hard for us to justify the effort to make a real spread.

Then on Friday we drove up to Chattanooga to have real Thanksgiving dinner with my brother Henry and his wife Terry. Her son and daughter-in-law came along with their two small kids. My brother’s son Thomas came as well.

I don’t have pictures of the dinner. Terry started cooking Wednesday and was still at it when we got there around 1 pm. The pictures would have been great, but not nearly as great as the food. If you have frozen dressing and canned gravy in the absence of anything to compare it to, you can almost convince yourself that it’s just about as good as home-made. And then when you have the real thing, you realize that no, it’s not.

We had turkey, dressing and gravy again, along with green beans with bacon, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, macaroni and cheese and something else I’m sure I’m forgetting. And then a carrot cake for dessert. There was also pumpkin pie with home-made whipped cream but try as I might, I could not force myself to have pie. Curses!

Before we ate my brother showed me his newly finished garage/woodworking shop, all 600-plus square feet of it, almost all of which he did himself. That was after he showed me the sideboard he had made for Terry. My brother does some nice work. I was embarrassed to show him what I had been working on.

This is the stone stove surround I completed on Thursday. It’s real stone cut to regular sizes so it fits together easily. The edging is 12-inch slate tile cut to size. I had originally planned and started building a surround that was somewhat smaller, which is the recessed area you can see here. Leah asked if I thought it would look better if it were a little larger. I agreed, but said the addition had to look like it was done intentionally and wasn’t a mistake. That’s why the side and top borders extend somewhat proud of the original surround. That looks intentional, doesn’t it?

I think it turned out well enough, but it hardly compares to the things my brother does. At least it’s functional.

We came back home Friday night and woke up Saturday morning to a mild, dry cold front passing over.

I missed the peak of the color by about a minute.

More fall

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Some time within the last 10 days the mountain finally arrived at fall. When I took the dogs for their walk on Sunday, there was actually some color. Not as much as in the best years, but at least enough to make me feel like it was actually fall.

The smaller maples had the best color.

There was a nice view down Fouche Gap Road towards the first hairpin curve going into Texas Valley.

It was hard to capture the slight haze in the shadows.

This is looking up from the second hairpin curve, near the bottom of the mountain.

The leaves seemed to glow from the backlighting.

When I went down to get some mortar (I’m making a stone fireplace surround), I thought about making a video as I drove down, but I decided not to; the color is nice compared to what it was a week ago, but it’s still drab compared to some of the past falls up on the mountain.

Deer season

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It’s deer season in Georgia. I know that deer season for regular firearms starts sometime in  late fall and lasts into early the next year. I checked online for the exact dates (Oct 21 through Jan 14), but that’s not how I figured it out.

We have heard one loud gunshot. I heard it when I was walking the dogs and Leah heard it at home. It came from the woods on the other side of Fouche Gap Road, where there is a large tract of land used for hunting, plus the Berry College campus, which also allows hunting. But it wasn’t gunfire that made me aware of deer season.

I have seen a couple of pickup trucks parked along Fouche Gap Road that had the look of a deer hunter’s truck. But that wasn’t what made me aware of deer season.

No, it wasn’t those things. It was the stink of rotting deer carcasses thrown off the side of the road. That unpleasant aroma has been strong at several places along the road for several weeks. The dogs are very interested in what’s causing that smell, but I don’t let them investigate. A few days ago Zeke escaped and ran immediately to one of the carcasses, where he rolled and rolled. When we found him he had an overcoat of something black and stinking. It was all around his neck. Of course he had to have a bath before he could come back inside.

Sometimes the carcass is not visible. Sometimes the remains have been stuffed into plastic bags. Sometimes you can see ribs where apparently some portion of the edible meat has been cut away. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. A couple of days ago I saw one deer where it was obvious what the hunter wanted. The entire, intact deer was lying in the leaves, minus the head.

I wonder what portion of deer hunters our carcass dumpers represent.

Fall 2017

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It seemed that fall was never going to come this year. Atlanta has had record or record-tying high temperatures three times in the last week or so. On Wednesday, Nov 1, there was very little color (other than green) in the trees.

There was fog in Texas Valley. What looks like trees that have lost their leaves for fall are actually trees that died over last winter as a result of the drought in the summer of 2016.

Leah and I were both wondering if there would be any color. At least one fall color prediction map showed our area of Georgia as reaching peak color in late October. We didn’t make it, but by Saturday, Nov 4, there was a hint of color.

On Sunday there was more color on the other side of the mountain.

By Tuesday the maple trees were beginning to show their best color.

Even then there was still a lot of green.

The temperature had dropped on Wednesday and by Thursday it felt a lot more like fall, or possibly even a mild winter day because of the clouds and drizzle. We may miss this wet weather before long. The long-range forecast for the Southeast this winter is warmer and dryer than normal.