Fall Decorations

Since the yard work we did in the spring makes the front of our house visible (though the newly-small tree makes it a little more visible than would have been ideal), Billie finally got to fulfill her lifelong dream of decorating the front of a house with cornstalks. In order to experience that dream she also got to carry the cornstalks, straw, and pumpkins in her car!

For Comparison's Sake

This is a view of our street on November 13 of last year:


And this is a view of our street on October 29 of this year:

Powerless

The last time we posted something it was about the fact that Hurricane Irene hadn't done us much damage. Unfortunately, that wasn't our last storm of the year. Our snow started accumulating on Saturday, October 29 around 11 am and Dad called in the early afternoon to see if we still had power. At that point, we did, but it didn't last much longer.

Our power went out at about 1:25 on Saturday afternoon and stayed out until 9:55 on Sunday night (32.5 hours). As of Friday evening there are still almost 8,000 people in the area without power, so I guess we were relatively lucky. The maple tree in our front yard, which had not lost any of its leaves when the snow hit, was relatively unlucky. It turns out that leaves provide a lot more surface area for snow to pile up on than branches alone. After the power went out we could hear cracks from all directions as branches broke under the weight of the snow. In the end, our tree lost major limbs from three sides, including several near the top of the tree. It has been trimmed back to a fraction of its former size in the hope that it will one day return to its former 15-year-old glory.

The newspaper says that our official accumulation was 5.5 inches. While it might not sound like much, the total accumulation of all known October snowfalls since 1869 was 3.5 inches.
The pictures below will give you a sense of what our weather looked like.

Note how many limbs are touching the ground. They're not supposed to do that.

The view from the front porch a bit earlier.

The view from our bedroom window.

The view from our bedroom window this afternoon.

And finally, some candlelight Yahtzee (at 6:30 pm).

Autumn in Suburbia

Most of the trees here went from green to brown without much color in between, apparently because of the dry summer. There are some trees, though, that had some color, such as this one in our front yard.


The neighbors' trees are similarly red:


While I appreciate the fall colors, I would also appreciate the leaves falling off of this tree before it gets too cold outside to rake them. Whenever they decide to give up, we have the benefit of being able to rake them into the street to be vacuumed up, which is a lot better than dragging them out to the backyard!

Fall in Reading

Despite the weather during our trip to Jim Thorpe, not every fall day has included clouds and rain. Here is a view that you might recognize from our Pennsylvanian Sunset post: