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Spare parts arrived for the remote-controlled helicopter (my x-mas gift from Jen’s mother), so we put it back together and took it for a spin.  Sarah was skeptical that it would fly — but it did.  Although, once again, I sent it into a tree.  No harm done. On Saturday it was 61 degrees, which would […]

We arrived at the farm for our Christmas vacation and found a deranged squirrel in the family room, hopping from bookshelf to bookshelf.  In the process, he knocked my ukulele to the ground, destroying it.  The squirrel had gotten in through the chimney in the mud room.  We chased him out the front door. Other […]

Saturday evening, Sarah played with her Legos by the hearth as we had our first fire of the season. Later, she duplicated the scene – in Lego!

We had a very happy Thanksgiving, and quite a feast — roast turkey, mushroom and hickory nut stuffing, sweet potatoes, strawberry jello mold, green beans with almonds, and, a last-minute addition, Jen’s flash-pickled daikon radishes, broccoli stems, red radishes and carrots, all from the garden. We had a 2:1 person-to-pie ratio, which in many circles […]

We were not expecting to have the season’s first blizzard before Halloween. It started innocently enough. Then it snowed harder and harder. By late afternoon we had a full-blown Nor’Easter.  It’s awful to have wet, heavy snow while the trees still have their leaves, particularly given how wet the ground has been — there’s just […]

For Sarah, possibly the best part of soccer is the post-practice ice pop with her friends and teammates Sophie and Michaela. Back at home, the supposedly wild animals are getting entirely too comfortable.  On Saturday we found two deer napping on the lawn. And on Sunday we found these two squirrels hanging out on the […]

We haven’t had a frost yet, and flowers continue to bloom in Jen’s garden. Yet it is peak leaf-peeping season. On Saturday we cleaned out our car, now officially totaled. Before soccer practice, Sarah gathered some of the prettier leaves from the yard.

Our biennial hickory nut harvest is upon us. We’ve gotten a bit smarter: we now know which trees produce the biggest nuts with the thinnest shells, and we’ve also learned that gathering two bushels of nuts is useful only if your goal is to have mice that look like Alex Rodriguez. Sarah maintains a laser-like […]

It was an old Colgate joke that upstate New York might not have much of a climate, but at least it had plenty of weather. That’s what we had this weekend: Sarah’s soccer game was rained out on Saturday, and it also rained on Sunday, but in between we had flashes of beautiful fall weather. […]

Today we hosted the Landsman Kill Trail Association’s Fall Trail Ride.  About fifty horses and riders took part. Sarah fed a peppermint to Tequila Sunrise (“Sunny”), a 19 year-old who, as a two and three year-old, ran at Belmont and Saratoga, with a couple of second-place finishes.