Lesser Goldfinch, young male

It has been a weird 'looking' week due to the fires in California, Washington and Oregon, which are burning out of control. 
High winds are not helping and huge areas, houses and even whole villages, have been lost to the flames.
We're OK around here, there are still 2 fires around McCall and Grangeville, but they're not coming any closer and are getting more and more contained.

What we still do have is smog, or better, real smoke, from the ones in Oregon.
The sun rises rather spooky-ly ..

                                                       

And it stays gloomy all day long ..

 

                                         The inside of the RV has an 'orange-y' glow..
                                                        

And although these fires are hundreds of miles away, ash is falling down on everything ...


             I must say, it has a little bit of an apocalyptic feel to it ..

But, life goes on, and so do we, as well as nature. On my walks I can see Fall slowly emerging ..

      

The nights are staying cooler and some leaves are now turning red:

                            

The deer are still around and besides the group of three does, and the single mom with her twin babies, this cute family showed up the other night!

It's the first male we've seen in a long time, and apparently he was allowed to join 'his' family (does stay away from the herd for a while after giving birth):






I guess the grass is OK, but if you can sneak a little bit of warm milk before going to bed you'll grab your chance!

Talking about food, it is still too warm in the evening to eat outside, (85F, go figure), so we had these hamburgers inside .. but I grilled them outside .. does that count? 
I wanted to take a picture of it though, since it looks so nice and colorful .. it tasted great too! 
(I especially liked the spiciness of the arugula, a 'green' a usually overlook, but I'll definitely going to get it more often. It pairs with everything!)

 

Of course I baked something too .. since James had eaten everything else .. and also because a can of crescent roll dough had exploded in the fridge, and I had to do 'something' with it!

                           

So I googled 'crescent roll dough' and 'plums' (since I have a whole tree of them!) and came up with a delicious little plum pie. 
Very easy to make, and like I said .. very good!

 

The house is still progressing, but I don't have many more different looking pics, so I leave that for next week when there's (hopefully) more to show.

O, and by the way, Doug's house in Arizona is a go! 
There's also enough to do for James to justify the drive down there, so we'll be going to Arizona for a couple of months after this. 
It looks like we'll be leaving somewhere around the middle or end of next month. 
Like I said, I'm not so happy to go back to warmer temps (I was looking forward to a real cold fall), but there are worse things than having to spend the winter in Arizona I guess ..