Happy Halloween ... Just a Little Early

The first thing I've got today is a little Halloween graphic you can use on your site, or your FB page even in your email if you want.

And the next is a life-thought. So many people waste time. Some say all we have is time, but the truth is, nobody really knows how much time they have.

Celebrate Autumn with Landscapes

I already published some fall landscapes (around the middle of September), but I have a LOT of fall landscapes. I love the brilliant colours and just the glory of the view when the season changes. Every season has it's own beauty, and although I really hate the cold winter months, there are times when the beauty of a fresh snowfall cannot be ignored! I'll publish some of those as the season gets closer, but for now, it's still fall and the world here is still full of it's autumn clothing.

All it takes to lose that is a heavy rainfall and lots of wind, and that happen so quickly here. The fall has been so much drearier than usual - overcast skies for weeks on end, colder than normal temperatures and just a general misery that after a couple of steady weeks of that, you begin to feel a malaise that makes you wish it were over.

What you need at that point is just one day - only a single day of wonderful, brilliant sunshine, a camera, a car, and a good healthy walk around the country roads. Here, doing that is pretty easy since we're less than 5 minutes from all that delicious countryside. One of my favourite things to do in the fall is visit the wildlife sanctuary - here, it is mostly varieties of birds and fowl (like ducks, and swans), but if you're really lucky you can catch a snake warming itself on a rock in the late season sun, or a turtle that's yet to dig into the mud for the winter sleep.

Sometimes you'll find a hare or jackrabbit (hard to chase those), and lots of chipmunks and squirrels still gathering their winter stock.

Thanksgiving and Halloween

Are you ready? I'm not. We're never ready for holidays any more. I used to be a lot more organized when it came to holiday times, but the older I get, the less important it is to do all the decorating and gearing up.

We used to "do" Halloween to "the nines" when my children and grandchildren were small, but not so much anymore. We get all the goodies to hand out, but there's very little in the way of decorating. A jack-lantern here and there but that's about the extent of it.

The same for Thanksgiving. Sometimes I'll have a bunch of small fall gourds in a big wooden bowl, and there's usually a small outdoor wreath, and uncut pumpkins outside on the porch, and in the front entryway of the house two fall floral arrangements. That's pretty much it.

Since our kids married and started their own families (families who are now grown up - the grandbabies are all between 18 and 20!) the only holiday I really take time to decorate for is Christmas. For most of the other holidays our small family is somewhat split up and it's rare for all of them to be here for Thanksgiving.

That happens to be the big racing weekend in our area (usually in Peterborough - "Fall Colours") to end the official race season and sometimes one or both of our kids families are at the races, leaving us to do our own thing.

Fall/Autumn Landscapes

It's that time of year again. Right now, it's technically still summer (we won't hit fall until a few days from now), but the evenings have gotten cooler, even if our daytime temps are still very summer like (today's weather is calling for highs of 83 degrees today, and 81 tomorrow ... that isn't very fall like for Canada!) so to herald in the upcoming autumn, here's a bunch of fall landscapes to decorate your blog posts with.

The photo above is from an area about 15 minutes away from my house. A little village area in Ontario called Hawkestone. It's about halfway between the city of Barrie, and Orillia. A very sought after location for those wanting to escape the city, but not be so far away that it's too far to travel in winter.

The image below is another shot of the shoreline at Hawkestone, but a little further away from the roadway shown in the one above. In fall, the Hawkestone area is gorgeous, and a great place for photographers, because it has areas that look like wilderness, but also areas with waterfront, and areas with quaint houses and farms.