A Scrappy weekend

Lotsa stuff to show y'all here.  Start with Thursday evening:

Here's the first deer I spotted.  No matter what I did, Scrappy refused to look.

Here the little bugger is peeking around a tree to spy on us!

This is the middle path out of the woods that leads towards the barn.  More impressive when the trees were still alive, but cool on halloween.

I turned to my right, and here's deer #2, way down by the creek.  After she split, I saw the buck a few steps down, but he split before I could get him.

If you turn right at the edge of "fields 15-17" rather than going straight to the barn, you get to follow this pretty path.

Friday looked like a good day to scout the field between the river and the hotel for the bunny rabbits I knew lived there.  Our first year here, we had a bunny who would go out in the back yard and just sit there because it drove Scrappy nuts.  That first winter was a hard one, and Mr. Fox got that bunny one moonlit night and I haven't seen one in the back yard since.  So getting a bunny picture was a goal and I knew this was the only place around to get one.  It was a neat morning, and I was watching a bunch of goldfinches at play.  One finally posed, but when I tried to oblige, the camera informed me it was time for its first recharge.  Of course we saw bunnies immediately after.

So Saturday we set out early, as we had plans to visit New Haven Canal Days later on.

We saw the moon...

...the sun rising over the river...

...and a lot of red-wing blackbirds, but that was about it.

The reason for that was some dude was out with his big black puppy (at least double Scrappy's size) whom we ran into on both sides of the swamp.  Dude doesn't believe in a leash, apparently, but thankfully he and Scrappy hit it off.

So it was off to New Haven Days.  Now, for me, three things made NHCD great.  The first was the rat roulette, where you placed bets on a rat being put on a roulette wheel with holes and won if he chose yours.  Haven't seen that in a while, probably somebody bitched about the gambling aspect.  The second is when the adopt-a-greyhound people were there, and you got to make friends with these sweet dogs.  I believe they still show up, but we were early.  The third was all the food being cooked out away from the midway, with my favorite being the NH Lions Club's philly steaks.  Others like Laurie loved the one stand which always brought in the nearly world-famous Casa salads.   In the last few years though, the food lines have contracted until there was only one grilling stand, and it weren't either of those.  In other words, the whole visit would have blown- except we got there for the tail end of the parade.

This is the Subway "Sub-Man".

New Haven Alumni Band.

I decided we should go out to Triangle Park for lunch, which is one of the Fort's classiest affordable restaurants.

They have a dining porch on a pond, where you are encouraged to through morsels to the duck, swans, and fish.

Ol' boy here gave me fits- his head was above water about 2 seconds out of every ten.

And here are the "welfare ducks" lying around doing nothing until their daily handout comes along.  Bobby G. knows the type.

Little did we know that the floor show here was going to be better than the one at Canal Days.  We ate inside, and during the meal, a chipmunk, hotly pursued by waitresses, ran up the walkway and into the next room.   Minutes later, they had him cornered across the room with trash cans and serving trays, until he ran over our waitress' feet.  She began panicking and waving her arms as if a spider was snapping at her feet, and the 'munk took off again. Later, I told her that they might want to make the announcement, "Show your Health Department badge, get a free meal!"  She said that the morning cleaning staff propped the door to the porch open, and they'd been chasing the little shit ever since.

Late Saturday, Boogle and I went out again, this time to IPFW.

First thing I saw was a bunch of barn swallows!  They've been getting rarer, so I love watching them as the dive across the fields snapping up bugs.

They are a bit hard to capture on film, though.

Then we ran into Mr. Ground hog.  Scrappy about took me into the river chasing him.

Kildeer getting a drink.

Click on this one to enlarge, and you'll see Scrappy's new buddy.  We met him both on our way across the bridge to IPFW and on the IPFW trails coming back.

And then on the way home, we finally got Mr. Bunny Rabbit...

You'll have to click on this one.

Finally, we went out into the heat of Sunday morning as well. And we saw...

...Mr. Squirrel...

Mrs. Dove...

...and one pooped pup.