But how about some color? The aspen season is predicted to be very short this year, so we decided to take the day and drive the Peak to Peak highway and spend the afternoon in Estes Park. We were rewarded for our efforts:
But that meant no time for recipes. There are more photos of the fall foliage here and a bonus photo of Bixby (and me) here.
I love the Colorado aspen, but nothing has ever compared to New Hampshire in the fall. How about you, where do you find the best colors? If you have photos, I’d love to see them. Consider this an open thread.
I’ll do better next week. I think we’ll go vegetarian. – TaMara
Dolly Llama
@raven: Ort. Spill.
JPL
When we moved to GA from TX, when fall arrived, he thought something was wrong with the trees.
JPL
@JPL: When we moved to GA from TX, when fall arrived my younger son thought something was wrong with the trees. The colors in the Ga mountains are beautiful.
Obviously, I lost the ability to multitask years ago.
schrodinger's cat
New England has beautiful fall colors. Its the maples.
redshirt
Fall is beautiful and wonderful but it makes me so sad.
Everything is dying, and the snow and ice is coming, and I won’t see green again for 6 months.
There’s a sound of the wind through the leaves. That sound is gone for 6 months.
raven
@Dolly Llama: How Ort got out.
J R in WV
We enjoy the central Appalachians in fall. It has been a very dry summer here, if you subtracted out the two monster flood-producing rains we had in the spring, probably record breaking dry, which makes many trees change early.
We have big oak trees around the house, and you can hear the big acorns hit the roof and bounce:
bonk……………bonk…………bonk………bonk……bonk… bonk bonk
and then you can hear them roll around a little bit.
When there’s a gust of wind, though, there’s an amazing drumming of nutty sounds. I have to go up before winter and shovel them off one side.
The eastern ridges of West Virginia and western ridges of Virginia are so beautiful when the trees turn all the colors, yellows and reds and purples, close up they’re all different, and from a mountain away they blend into a color you can only call fall.
Aspens are pretty too, but kind of a One Note Samba, The eastern mountains are more like a Miles Davis solo. We toured a little in Colorado one fall and saw the brilliant yellows, and hiked up to Marble,
it was shirt sleeve weather at the bottom of the trail, and 20 inches of snow at the quarry. We put on more and more layers going up, and took them off coming back down. No idea how much altitude we gained, but it was uphill steep all the way.
raven
@JPL: Except all them fucking leaf peepers from Florida come up here.
Redshift
The GW Parkway near DC is the place I most frequently get to see fall colors. Their better in the mountains, but I’ve only gone out to see them a few times in recent years.
beltane
@redshirt: I know what you mean. People drive up here to gawk at the foliage but to me it’s just depressing. From October to May everything is just dead and monotoned. Blech.
Pogonip
Hello, it’s me again, seeking advice. We have fleas all of a sudden but no pets. I went to our wonderful mom-and-pop hardware store to buy a flea bomb. The lady said the store had had fleas in the second-floor office and instead of the bug bomb she recommended a spray called Enforcer, on the rreasonable grounds that the mist from the bomb goes where it will but you can aim the spray in every little crevice. I didn’t want to use it in my room so I tried it in the hall and the gymnastics do seem to have ceased abruptly. She said it cleared out the hardware store office in one application. Have any of you tried this and if so with what results?
Also, will the fleas be able to reproduce with just me to feed on? The ever-reliable Internet has conflicting information on this. We boarded a friend’s cat once, in the pre-Frontline days, and she got out and came home with fleas. After she went back to her real home the fleas were gone in a couple of weeks with no real effort on our part other than vacuuming every day, and we figured that was because they had no cat on which to lay their eggs, but many sites say that is not so. Please, pet owners, give me the benefit of your hard-earned expertise and I promise to vote Democrat in every election for the rest of my life.
Fleas delenda est!
redshirt
Wow what an end for that Sox game.
ThresherK
“Jeebus!”, my wife said, when I showed her the photos of Bixby from August last year to now.
First semi-autumnal hike in the park showed lots of golden birch leaves, as above, and plenty of acorns.
Pogonip
P. S. the cat was gone for a couple of days and returned just jumping with fleas. She had a flea collar but maybe it had expired. The fleas certainly hadn’t!
It’s funny… when those people had kids they never asked us to babysit… Fleas delenda est!
beltane
@Pogonip: I wonder if it depends on the human involved. In my house, the fleas have always been drawn to one of my sons while leaving the other ones alone.
JPL
@Pogonip: It’s been awhile but I used flea bombs. You have to leave the home for a certain amount of time though.
Pogonip
@beltane: I’m the only one here, and will be till they’re gone, but they either find me pretty tasty or are too hungry to care. How long did it take you to get rid of yours?
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: Its the lack of sunlight that gets to me. I don’t mind the cold as much.
Mike J
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover — Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — to life.
PurpleGirl
The colors of the Hudson Valley are gorgeous. A friend and I used to drive north on the Taconic Parkway and the vistas of the valley and the river are so beautiful to see.
ETA: Funny, in all the years we drove north we never stopped at Fahnestock State Park. A great uncle of hers gave the land to the state after a family member killed himself after surviving WWI. (Said person was a survivor of the Lost Battalion — he was in hospital in Paris when the unit went out.)
Thoughtful Today
Wonderful photo.
Thank you for sharing.
DanR2
@Pogonip: Are you sure you have fleas? Where do you live, and do you have pin oak trees in your neighborhood? There is a mite infestation across the midwest causing mysterious bites.
beltane
@Pogonip: We have a dog and three cats and this year was particularly bad. Two rounds of flea bombing and carpet/mattress/cushion cleaning finally seems to have done the trick. I really hate fleas. Whenever I see one of the detested things I thank the FSM that at least it’s not carrying Bubonic Plague.
DanR2
Also… Beautiful photos, TaMara (BHF).
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: The lack of sunlight is intolerable, like being locked in a dimly lit attic. Plus, with my Mediterranean skin tone my vitamin D levels are always an issue.
TaMara (BHF)
@ThresherK: That made me laugh. My neighbors lost their beautiful Dane earlier this summer and yesterday they surprised us by knocking on the door and introducing us to a beautiful Bluequin (blue Harlequin) puppy. He was all of 15lbs (Bixby was 22 lb when I brought him home). Like Bixby he is 1/2 European and 1/2 American Dane – and will be as big as Bixby.
I looked at him, looked at Bixby, looked back at him and said, nah, Bixby was never that small. Denial, not just a river in Egypt.
Pogonip
@DanR2: No pin oaks, and the perps have been positively identified as fleas with a magnifying glass.
Fleas delenda est!
Pin oak mites delenda est!
benw
I grew up in So Cal, so I find these “seasons” of yours strange and fearsome.
Dolly Llama
@raven: Damn. Judging from the photo, the place is remedied enough for the city now, correct? That house doesn’t look bad.
Dolly Llama
I presume that photo of him with the rake amongst all the junk was from the back? That looked bad. I guess it depends how visible all that shit was to his neighbors.
Ruckus
A friend has a dane about as big as Bixby. And a pug. Strangest combination of dogs I’ve ever seen. The dane is the gentlest dog I think I’ve ever seen, the pug about the most excitable. Friend worked in her small shop making dog coats with both of them. Small as in about 10×12 feet.
Ruckus
@benw:
We have seasons. Two of them, hot and less so.
NotMax
Was always partial to the fall foliage in the Poconos.
rikyrah
Those colors are why I love Fall
benw
@Ruckus: Or, as I like to call them, the dry one, and the one where it might rain once.
redshirt
I wished I lived in Santa Barbara.
I posit Santa Barbara is the most perfect place on earth. Maybe Dana Point excepting.
srv
I’ll let you know in two weeks when I’m in the Great Smoky.
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: Email message has been sent to you.
Mary G
Bixby is huge! Does he eat a lot? Beautiful tree pics.
Mike E
@Pogonip: 20 Mule Team Borax. Non toxic, and it really knocks them down…they are fleas after all, persistent, so it’ll take a couple of weeks. Sorry.
Pogonip
@Mike E: Oh, that explains why it didn’t seem to be working. This just started Tuesday and that was the first time I boraxed.
I’m encouraged by the Enforcer spray. I sprayed all up and down the hallway and then when it dried I walked up and down. No fleas jumped onto my socks. Has anyone else tried this product?
Fleas delenda est!
Amir Khalid
When i saw the post headline, I thought for a moment you were channeling the Soup Nazi.
burnspbesq
@schrodinger’s cat:
For me, from now until the end of daylight savings time is a horror-show. Dark in the morning makes me extremely slow to get moving.
NotMax
Devastating statement on the carnage at the hajj.
From the site of the organization referenced in the snippet:In The Republic, Plato says, “All great things stand in peril.” None perhaps more so at this moment than the land that is the very cradle of Islam. Recently, modernity has cut a swathe of destruction through the Islamic monuments of the Holy Land of Islam, the Hijaz. Much has been destroyed, perhaps beyond recovery, whilst the world turns a blind eye to the monuments’ plight, and what remains may soon disappear unless we act promptly and decisively by bringing what is going on to the attention of the international community. Concerned parties – architects, art historians, conservationists, indeed anyone concerned for the future of the Islamic environment – have come together to launch an appeal that the Saudi authorities will find difficult to ignore, if only on account of the prestige of those who have courageously raised their voices in protest. Our intention is bring our anxiety for the future, indeed survival of these historic sites to the attention of responsible parties within and without Saudi Arabia before the last vestiges of Islamic civilization succumb to a reckless pursuit of modernity fuelled by religious fanaticism and commercial greed. If we do not act now, future generations, Muslim and non-Muslim, may ask, “Why did they remain silent?”Related, about what fundamentalism, Wahhabism and overarching greed have wrought.
NotMax
Ragga-fragga. No edit functiion. Blockquote fix.
Devastating statement on the carnage at the hajj.
From the site of the organization referenced in the snippet:
Related, about what fundamentalism, Wahhabism and overarching greed have wrought.
burnspbesq
I love the seasons in Upstate New York: Winter, Lacrosse in the Mud, Fourth of July Weekend, and Soccer in the Mud.
Mike J
@NotMax:
The Koran is written in Arabic, and by tradition, can’t be accurately translated. You would think everyone on Hajj would have some sort of minimal Arabic.
TaMara (BHF)
@Amir Khalid: Winner!
Morzer
@Mike J:
Koranic Arabic is very different from the various forms of Modern Arabic. Trying to communicate using Koranic Arabic would be somewhat like going to Italy and speaking Latin to the natives.
Morzer
Fall leaves recommendation: Nakajima koen in Sapporo.
Mike J
@Morzer:
Worked ok for me. Not ideal, but concepts were communicated. 9th grade Latin was actually useful.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: How well do you think that would work in an emergency?
Amir Khalid
@Mike J:
The Arabic of the Quran is not modern standard Arabic. It’s classical Arabic, roughly as useful in modern Saudi Arabia as the English of Robin Hood’s day is in modern Nottingham.
I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the authorities in KSA from my relatives who have done the Haj. Their cops don’t speak anything but Arabic, and they aren’t the gentlest or or most understanding of people.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: @Omnes Omnibus: If we do English/Old English, we get things like this: Stop/oþstillaþ.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: If I needed to say, “You go that way?” Not great, but ok.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Just what I would expect a corporate stooge to say! j/k
Morzer
@Mike J:
“For alas, my iron chariot is – amazing to say – without resources in respect to a wheel.”
Aleta
@NotMax: I’ve been wondering — are there thought to be many sites around yet to be discovered ? It’s a good environment for preservation, isn’t it? Or has there been a lot of disruption /shuffling of the strata down to the bedrock due to environmental conditions ?
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: Meus currum fractus est.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
O tempora, o mores! Sentio enim Obamum causam horum malorum omnium esse.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: Je reproche à Obama aussi.
piratedan
since I’m late to the great political news of the day, I’m just wondering why everyone thinks that this is a win for the Dems. We still have the same bleeping media in place and they will sound bite, take out of context and do everything in their power to promote the teahadists as a sane, responsible group of folks who deserve to have their POV listened to and evaluated.
These guys lie their asses off now, granted this will be more difficult to pass off to anyone with firing synapses, but they’ve been in the bag to their horse race narrative for so long, I certainly don’t expect them to abandon the model now.
NotMax
@Aleta
No idea. However, remember from some years ago seeing some photos achieved from space with ground-penetrating radar which showed any number of intriguing possibilities there.
J.
GORGEOUS! Wow.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I grew up in Michigan, and they get pretty spectacular fall color throughout the State. Here in MD I usually start in the mountains of VA and MD when the colors peak first, and then enjoy them here in the DC area before heading east to the Chesapeake where they peak last. They don’t get as vibrant here as they do back in Michigan though – they’re OK but the colors don’t pop quite like they do further North.
Uncle Ebeneezer
We are actually heading up to June Lake this Thurs for my first taste of Autumn colors in the Sierras. According to the excellent site Californiacolors.com and the Mono County Tourism FB page our timing might be just right for peak color. I’ll just be happy to get out of this goddamn oven of LA to enjoy some cool weather. Based on all the pix I’ve seen, the combination of the amazing Sierras with fall color looks pretty great. But I doubt anything can top New England (where I grew up.) New England seems to have much more of that crazy-bright red. And the color out West seems like it is much more clustered whereas in New England it’s just Everywhere!