We are having absolutely spectacular fall weather here in northwest lower Michigan; warm, sunny days and cool nights which have brought out equally spectacular fall colors. We are nowhere near peak color yet, but it's a good color year with the brilliant oranges and reds of the maples contrasted against the dark evergreens and golden yellows of our beech trees and poplars. It's been a bumper year for beechnuts, so the squirrels are again busy bounding about in our yard gathering their harvest for the winter.
Thankfully, we have no apples, so that means no deer to browse on my perennials and shrubs. On the other hand, that also means no apples for us, which means I had to buy some for the first time in three years!
Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the house looking out while continuing to work on gathering financial information for our advisor guy; made all the more urgent by the financial crisis in our world. Ugh! I've been adding up our monthly expenses and wondering how everything got so much more expensive so quickly.
In spite of also nursing a sore throat and headache, I did manage to get outside yesterday to give my car a very overdue interior cleaning. I felt a little sad while doing it because I was washing the last of Bo's muddy paw prints off the back seat and vacuuming up his hairs from the cargo area. We lost him two years ago this month, and yes, it's been that long since the car had a good cleaning!
I still miss Bo. I remember the joy this small Lab mix pooch brought to the family for nearly 16 years after we rescued him on a freezing December night from a household that had banished him to the yard with no shelter from the cold and wind and very little human contact. We were just going to take a look at him that night in response to the ad in the paper, but when my husband saw the conditions he was living in; tied to a tree and shivering; there was no way he was going to let that dog spend another cold and miserable night in that place. Bo eagerly hopped in our car with not even a look back as our kids showered him with attention.
In the first 24 hours we had him, he had to be shoved out the door to go potty because he was so afraid that he couldn't come back in. We got him as a companion for our German Shepherd, and they bonded immediately. Bo thought he was in Heaven and showed us every day how grateful he was. He and Daisy became best friends and spent hours playing in the big dog yard until Daisy became too old and crippled to enjoy the rough housing.
Bo had a habit of tuning you out when his attention was focused on something. If he got loose, he would take off on a dead run out the gate and into the road. Most likely it was this propensity that caused him to end up a stray on the doorstep of the family that took him in, so one of his nicknames became Hobo Joe. More often we called him Bobo. We could never trust him to be on the loose, but around the house he wanted nothing more than to be at your side - or Daisy's.
Bo never did get over his dislike of the cold or isolation, and after Daisy died he became strictly an inside dog.
Well, now I've digressed. The two photos at the top are views from my studio. Our lake is quite narrow and long, and on a still morning like this one, the fall colors are reflected in the water, adding to the brilliance of the scene. I love the view from my studio window, and one of these days I'm going to paint it.
Speaking of the studio, poor Bard is languishing on the easel as I work on these financial figures. It will take two or three days in a row that I can dedicate to painting in order to finish him up, and so far I haven't been able to put them together. I'm determined to finish him by month's end, however.
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