Get Thee To the Woods, Vol. 12: There's No Place Like Home

Vacations are over. School is starting. We've had a great summer, and I realized as I was going through some past blog posts that my "Get Thee To the Woods" series (thanks again to Lisa from 5 Orange Potatoes for inspiring them!) have recently been about fun we've had away from home: at the Outer Banks, in Ohio, camping in the mountains--pretty much hither and yon. Now that we're finished traveling for a while, our outdoor adventures are much closer to home these days.

I can enjoy the sunrise on the lake,

and we can watch the ducks diving for their dinner .
Growing up, I had a favorite poem:

All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!

Ducks' tails, drakes' tails,
Yellow feet a-quiver,
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!

Slushy green undergrowth
Where the roach swim--
Here we keep our larder,
Cool and full and dim.

Everyone for what he likes!
WE like to be
Heads down, tails up,
Dabbling free!

High in the blue above
Swifts whirl and call--
WE are down a-dabbling
Up tails all!
--Kenneth Grahame

(I suppose it's high time I finally read The Wind in the Willows.)

Moe is still finding frogs...

...and the cats still think they own our little plot of land, even though they're not ours. They pretty much think they own the whole neighborhood, actually.

Over the weekend we managed to take in a baseball game...

...and attend a friend's fiftieth birthday party.

On Saturday, Joe took a trip to the hardware store to buy light bulbs, and he came home with this:

The boys have reported seeing hummingbirds visiting these last few days. Now if we can get them to stay still long enough to take their picture...

In my last post, I talked about possibly changing the look of my blog (again) and maybe starting a second one; as you can see, it looks the same as ever, and I still have only this one. Labor Day weekend is coming up, though. We'll see what happens.