The Larches are Turning

I repeat this every year, but the last stage of autumn for us is the colouring of the larch trees. Larches are coniferous trees but not evergreen. They turn colour and drop their needles, and so they are also deciduous trees.

There are several larches in our local park, and I will undoubtedly post their progress over the next few weeks.

I think it is correct to call these trees tamaracks, and I usually prefer that name. All tamaracks are larches but not all larches are tamaracks.

The bench is nestled between two tamaracks. One of the trees has turned colour, but there are just tinges of yellow in the tree to the right of the bench.

From the bench there is another larch tree on the other side of the pond.

There are a few others in the park, and I am sure that I'll be back for more photos.

From the park we continued along the trail on a very nice day. As is the usual case, Jake met dogs. As is not the usual case, we spied a cat coming out of the background bush. I don't think we need to worry about it appearing form the wild bush, for it seems very well taken care of. Despite the wild background, there are houses that back onto the park just behind me as I snap this photo, and I am pretty confident that it belongs to one of them.

Now that I think about it, this may very well be the same cat that we met on the trail more that a year ago.

Caring and Sharing

It was Danica's reading week, so she spent it back home but mostly working with not much reading. She booked a little time to visit her grandparents who due to age and diminished capacity neglected to take any photos.

One thing we did do was to share our grocery card with her. If you recall, we won a $250 grocery card from our winter plow guys. What better use than sharing it with a college kid to help her stock up. There were also instructions to buy brother some treats too.

She hit the grocery store on her way out of town and sent the pictures that I asked for.

That left a hundred dollars for our use. We think that would make a nice donation to the food bank.

Oddly enough, on the same day Amazon Photos sent me a link of a slideshow of me and my girl. After much rigmarole, I think that I have embedded it here, but I did not find the process easy. I hope it actually plays for you, but I won't know until I press Publish.

Halloween Busyness

On Halloween Day, I looked out my den window and seemed to see neighbour’s garage open. The yard was full to overflowing, but were there more Halloween creatures inside? I had to go out and look. By golly there were.

the very busy yard and into the garage

I don’t think it would be possible to fit one more piece into that space.

the new garage addition this year

At the end of the Eve, he posted this photo of people milling around his display even after they had run out of treats, having only 234 pieces to offer, which is most neglectful.

Another local house said they ran out after giving out 300 treats. Meanwhile, others in town had few treaters; Shauna only has 12 come by her place  

For our first few years here, we tried our best for Halloween, but so many non-neighbours came to our townhouse street for a treat-grab that we gave up. We’d shutter the house and sit tight. When the grands came along, we would hand out treats at their place while the parents took the kids out. Then, it was back to being shuttered.

This year, I did purchase a box of 40 chip bags, of which we put 38 outside after commandeering 2 bags to accompany a sandwich lunch. The youngest kids were coming around before 6, so we rushed to get the box out. I don’t know exactly at what time the box became chip-less, but it didn’t last too long, so we shuttered again.

The next day, yesterday, neighbour already had most of the display down and was muttering something about his wife not allowing him to start on the Christmas display yet.

The Colour is Draining Away

On a recent walk along the bridge trail, this ↓ was the most colourful section. If this was most colourful, just imagine the rest of the trail. Dog managed to get into the photo. I'll leave him there and give a little update at the end.

You may recall that  I have already posted this park tree twice when it was in its glory, but by October 27, it has lost many leaves although it was still looking pretty wonderful. I shot wide angle which shows how bare most of the surrounding trees were.

Four days later, however, on October 31, it was so bereft of leaves that I could only see a few of them  from one of the angles, and they did not show up at all from the other side. Sigh.

Happily, there was another tree farther down the path that was still resplendent.

Back to Dog: We are halfway there now, and I can report that the nights are finally beginning to be better. We have been feeding him ~8, and he has been quiet until~6. Figuring he wasn't doing well in the dark downstairs, we had been keeping him up here, but as previously reported, it wasn't going well. He prefers to sleep downstairs, but previously had barking spells. Sue figured that a dog with dim vision may require some night light, so we have since kept some lights on down there, and it has gone much better. We shall see how it goes with the time change, but it is after 5am now, and he is still quiet down there.

Help Yourself if You Dare

All Hallows Eve has finally arrived, or at least the daytime part before the actual Eve is here. This will be my final Halloween post, for which Barbara R will be very grateful.

My neighbour finally completed his very busy display, from which I was able to extract two more subjects to set in different scenes. I tried something different with the ghost, and you shall see anon what Gemini gave me. BTW I do a little more processing of my AI results, darkening or lighting them to suit my taste, but AI sets the scene. Some ideas and requests work better than others, but it is really a one-shot deal unless one wishes to pay your way for extra, which I don’t  

In the first image, the ghost and two tombstones are from an original photo, the rest is AI's interpretation of a slummy, industrial area. As slummy as the case may be, it is a sacred site to Mr Ghost, for his corporeal days expired right there many years ago. As usual, I extracted the subject from the original photo and sent it to AI, in this case Gemini.

Place the subject in a bleak and dingy industrial scene at night with several overturned garbage cans and black cats on either side of the subject.

Neighbour also moved the clown to a spot where I could get a photo. I had the top half of the clown to work with. These were my instructions to ChatGPT.

Complete the bottom half of the subject clown and show it standing threateningly over a scared student in an old-fashioned, dimly-lit schoolroom in black and white, but keep the subject in colour. 

Finally, there must be treats on this day, so I ordered AI to fill the container which I found empty in D&D. Of course, in addition to the candy, everything else in the image, aside from the skull-like container itself, is AI-generated.

Take one if you dare, little darling.

For a personal record, I have uploaded to Facebook here most of the images that I have published on this blog in the past month or so.

It's been fun. After tonight, Bleak November begins and finding photos becomes more challenging, but there will still be small pockets of colour for just a little while longer, and, eventually, but hopefully not too soon, there will be snow. Oh yes, there will be snow and cold: much snow and cold.

The Greeter and the Altar

Yesterday, we followed the Lady in Red from one haunt to another. As I mentioned, she is one of the characters in the Dark and Deadly Cafe. There is another character who wanted to get out of the coffee shop for awhile, so I took him to the haunted house that actually exists on the lake just outside of town where he found temporary employment as a greeter.

Yes, both the house  and the character exist; this was not an AI set.

Also from D&D, a sweet lil doll.

I also previously showed you the devilish altar outside of neighbours house, but I did not show this version of it that I relocated to just outside the gates of heck.

Relax. That is most certainly AI, except for the actual altar, of course.

We're almost there to the Eve, folks, and I am afraid that the good times will have to stop after tomorrow.

But we do have tomorrow, and I'll see you then for a final Halloween Hurrah

Lady in Red

The Lady in Red usually looms inside the Dark & Deadly Cafe, but she likes to get out every now and then, and I like to help her 

Sometime ago, I took her to an old residence to meet her former friends, and I got a shot of her standing by the door and looking very pretty. Apparently, there was a lot more red inside before the night was over.

On one recent night, and I went for a walk with Dog. Red Lady met us outside her cafe in her usual, cheerful and friendly manner. She invited us inside but Dog had more bushes to visit, so we demurred.

On another late walk with Dog, the lady was strolling along the path in the park. She waved for us to join her, but Dog turned tail, and I don't understand why. I was certainly ready to meet her and maybe even have a little dance.

I could have brought her forward in that last photo, but it wasn't worth the extra effort.