The Heat Is On, The Heat Is Off

The temperatures FINALLY dropped, as of last week we were still in the 80's - it's hard to enjoy your Pumpkin Spice Latte wearing shorts with the air conditioner blasting, isn't it? Everyone has been speaking about it being October next week with nothing short of amazement, but here it is. I froze the last of the zucchini, my plants have a few small specimens but they aren't getting any bigger. My tomato plants are beyond huge, but not one tomato!! Not one this summer, I have no idea why. David's started clearing the pasture, with all the rain we've been getting a lot of huge old dead trees  falling and snapping in half. One of the neighbors has been here twice and I think we have a couple more coming next week to collect the wood to use in their wood furnaces. And yes we could sell it - if we collected, split, stacked and advertised it. It's just easier to give it away and honestly - free firewood makes WONDERFUL neighbors. 

 The neighbors share with us too - our neighbor Jane is the one that has been putting the word out about our free wood and she also gave us a jar of her homemade zucchini relish. I wasn't here and David asked her for the recipe - I laughed when he told me that! Around here most people would rather cut out their heart and hand it to you than give up an old family recipe. David told his friend Bobby he'd asked for it and he said Bobby responded with "so, how'd that go for you?" and he laughed! David will not be asking for any more recipes.

So, I took Molly and Reuben's Halloween pictures the other day, I thought they came out pretty good. And for the record I do NOT "make" them sit for the pictures, I actually have to gate it off until I'm ready or they both come up and start posing(as you can see in the two pictures above)

I've done these holiday pictures for about 5 years now - it started off with them sitting on the couch with bows on - to this. The secret to getting your dog to want to pose for pictures is one word - cheese. They picked up the association pretty quickly and understand if they sit for 3 to 5 minutes they get a a large amount of cheese. When I start putting up the background there's a huge amount of excitement with running up and down the stairs, etc... When I call them they come up and just sit while we get them ready - they understand when David puts his hand up to stay, they sit til I remove everything (usually there's long ribbons and I'm always afraid they'll break their long skinny legs running down the stairs), when I say "ok" they take off. Everyone assembles in front of the fridge where there's a Cheese Ruckus for about 5 minutes. I get my pictures, they get their cheese - everyone wins!