A weekend of skunks, pumpkins and friends

 This week has been an interesting one. Midweek we awoke at 4am to screaming chickens. Brandon wandered down (in a rainstorm!) and checking in on the chicken coop and found himself faced with a skunk coming out of the coop with the second of his chicken prizes. We'd forgotten to close up the chicken shed that night - to be honest, we'd got complacent, because we'd never seen any evidence anything had been getting past the larger fenced in area. Lesson learned. We lost the two frizzles, which were Brandon't favorites, so he's been a little sad. More than that though we ended up with a skunk living under the compost pile...

The skunk....tucked way under there.....

After 2 days of not letting the dogs out, we called a pest control guy. He came and set two traps, which I thought odd, but okay. The next morning two traps were shut, not one, but two skunks! 

The rest of the week went well, busy at work, but a great weekend to look forward to. Our friend Kathy and her daughter Laura came to visit from Cape Cod! 

Fall has brought the beautiful colors! 

On saturday we decided to go to Camden, had lunch in town, wandered and then came to the top of Mt Batty to see the colors, so pretty and peaceful. 

Kathy discovered her new passion....photo bombing....

Kathy and Laura with Camden in the distance. 

Laura is quite the animal whisperer, so the animals were in heaven, and way too spoiled for the weekend....

Sunday we went to my favorite festival of the year....Pumpkinfest at Damariscotta! The pumpkins are enormous, and beautifully decorated. This year the largest pumpkin was 1695lbs! The Darling Marine Center students also made a great pumpkin! 

The DMC pumpkin! 

Creepy spider! 

Hedgehog, possibly my favorite of the festival

Medusa

Anglerfish!

Laura and Kathy for scale! 

Fishing net. 

Tardy

I've been a little tardy in updating the blog, but finally tonight downloaded photos. Things have been busy with the semester, and a short trip to Connecticut for work (which I was lucky enough to have Brandon come with me!). We finally hit fall about a week ago - the temperature dropped (though it's still pretty warm) and the leaves have started to fall. Amazingly we still haven't turned on the heating, last year I think we had to turn it on by the end of September - not bad!

The critters are all well, Miss Barkley has perked up with the cooler weather, showing her puppy side more often. We went apple picking a few weekends ago, which led to about 40 lbs of apples! I've been dehydrating and canning apple sauce and apple pie mix since - yum!

Brandon also finished his firepit! 

So we shared sausages and smores with friends! 

One wind storm and suddenly it is fall! This time of year is treacherous with two dogs....it's hard to tell where the poop is around all the leaves.....

Brandon's new toy! Cleaned up the yard in a few hours, rather than a few days like usual! 

Barkley getting to the last of the long grass at the back of the Blueberry patch. 

Tomatoes still going strong. Despite some neglect, the garden has been great this year. So far we've frozen a ton of zucchini, canned 8 jars of chopped tomatoes, frozen 6 jars of pesto and frozen 3 meals of squash soup. Not bad! 

The last of the squash. These are two small to eat!