News and pictures from this summer

New doggie! (again) We got her from the Huntingdon SPCA, and we had a surprisingly good experience with them. The approval process took only as long as it took to get our landlord's approval, and they spayed her, microchipped her, played with her and gave us a bag of dog treats, toys and food to start out with. How nice!

She's a little black lab mix- maybe with hound of some kind, or collie? I don't know. She's little, though, only forty pounds (soaking wet) and she has a little white strip on her chest, with a very narrow face. Very cute. She's maybe 8 months old, and bounces and chases her tail and LOVES to play. She seems to be housebroken, by some miracle, but that's about the extent of her training. Her name's Shasta (like the daisy).

She really wants to play with Gemmy. It's a shame that the two of them speak completely different languages- when Gemmy says "Go away and leave me alone", Shasta hears "Play with me!" and when Gemmy smacks her upside the head, Shasta gets frustrated and very confused. She leaves the bunny mostly alone though, which is great.

There are lots of things going on- we thought we'd share some images from this crazy summer, and we'll post some of the new house/doggie soon.

We took this in May after visiting our friends T. and M... I love the way that you can see how good Jim is at skipping stones!

We went to Delaware this summer- to Cape Henlopen, to be exact- for 2 blissful days at the beach. Wonderful. The other two pics are from birding with my dad, and it was a beautiful morning in Central Pennsylvania.

After our lease ended, we housesat for a little more than a week at a house with 8 dogs and 2 cats. One of the cats (not pictured) is beautiful. The other, well, he's very sweet.

After housesitting, we moved to our friends' E and A's house for 2 months- which was a blast. (Thanks again!) We did some canning, some chicken-coop building, and ate leeks.

Here's the finished chicken coop. Of course we couldn't leave well enough alone, so we added ears and a tail when E and A were out of town...

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Then I went out to sea to do some field work for my lab for a few weeks in September - so here's a couple pics... the Gulf of Mexico is beautiful, when there aren't hurricanes.

Our new house- it doesn't look a lot like this anymore- the shutters came off, and the ivy's down now (as per our landlord's request). Moving in was... fun... we had to take a zillion boxes out of the basement and unpack them. It exhausted poor little kitty, who was a big help. Really. We also spent some time cleaning up outside, starting some planting, rebuilding a stone wall, and getting ready for winter. That's when Jim ran across his new (not so) Little Friend, who is a long horned beetle larvae, and is now living in an enclosure in the basement, where he's busy pupating.

We also managed to get up to Ithaca a couple of weekends ago, and go apple picking! I love apple picking! And there's lots of milkweed around, which is one of the most beautiful plants...

Anyway, more later...