Well, well, well. Greetings and salutations by friends. I’m usually a pretty happy camper, but right now I am unusually happy. Why, you might ask? Well it is a combination of factors. One factor is that we are currently in one of my favorite times of the year. Smack dab in the middle of autumn. The leaves are peaking in color, the days are cool, the nights are crisp and the skies are a special shade of blue. Gone is the atmospheric humidity that causes the sky to be a less vibrant color of blue in the summer time.

Secondly, all of the Dee’s are gradually starting to feel like the new home is our home. I think we all needed some time to make the adjustment. I know I still don’t feel like it is 100 percent our home, but certainly higher than it was just a few weeks ago. We still have quite a bit of decorating to do, things like pictures other items that will sit on tables and other pieces of furniture. Hard to believe in a little over a month, we will be getting ready to decorate it for the holiday season!

The final, but not the smallest reason why I am in particularly good spirits is that I am free from the neck brace I had to wear for the past 4 weeks. I never complained about having to wear it, as it was a small burden to have to bear, compared to what could have been the case. I met several persons who said they had to wear theirs for many months. There is also the possibility that I could have needed surgery and worn a “crown”, the device where bolts go into your skull to keep the neck stabilized, of course there was also the possibility that I could have bought the farm, so to speak.  

I will say that the brace was not too much of a deal for me. The biggest downside was that I could not drive, so I always need to have someone drive me to things I needed to go to. I could also tell that I was not getting as restful a sleep at night that I was accustomed to. I did sleep, but I felt tired when waking up and many days could not shake the tiredness I had when I started the day. Friday was my first night without the brace and I awoke on Saturday to feel quite rested and felt pretty good the entire day.

So I don’t have a ton of stories to tell or pictures to share, as I laid pretty low the past few weeks. I can say that the colors between Houghton and Jake are not quite yet at full peak. They are getting closer and closer to it and my guess would be in another 2-4 days they will be. Here is a shot of Jacobsville Road a few miles from our house. I did swing by White City Beach to snap a picture of the lower entry light, the blue skies and shimmering surface of Lake Superior. The crazy days of summer have gone and taken the sun worshipers and swimmers with them. The beach is largely quiet now and will remain that way until the warm temps and summer break comes next year.

We have not yet had any snow fall up here, but there was a pretty good hailstorm in Calumet Thursday afternoon. Enough to sprinkle the ground in white. I also do not see any snow in our forecast, which is all fine by me. Snow in October is pretty useless, does not last and can also be followed by a less than average snowier winter. It can also be a real pain in the rear to try and get the before-winter chores done!

We did have some kind of frozen precip fall last night. Nora snapped this shot of the top of our grill, with some frozen pellets on it. So I would suspect that we had some ice pellets fall overnight. There were some lake effect rain showers that happened in the central UP yesterday, plus our overnight low temp was 33 degrees.

It was a pretty healthy apple crop down here in Jake. I cannot say how it was in other areas, but we also have quite a few still hanging in the trees. I wish that such occurrences foretold a snowy winter, but I have never observed that connection to play out. We also have our golden raspberries ripening up. They are just amazingly good. They taste like raspberry sugar cubes. There are several varieties in the patch. One ripens in late August and early September, another a few weeks later and the final one here in the early to middle part of October. They seem to be unaffected by cold temps, as the the leaves remain green and the fruit ripens even after a hard freeze. It’s a nice ritual to stop and eat a few right off the vine when traveling to and from the the shop and house. We are not the only ones that are enjoying them!

So that covers it for this one. Hope you all have a wonderful next week or two, or three as might be the case!

Good Night From the Keweenaw..
–JD