Just like last year, the maples are starting to show their amazing fall colors all over town. These are the ones on the road to the golf course. Just stunning!

I've been looking for mushrooms, which usually shoot up immediately in the fall after some rain, but haven't found too many yet .. here's a few I detected on my walk this week:

The Thistles are always at their most decorative in the fall I think:

                                 

And the Snowberries and Rosehips have appeared. Favorite winter-food for Robins .. and bears!
I once had a dog that went nuts for rose-hips, they were a nice incentive for getting her to speed up when she tried to stall our walks, just by picking them at the side of the road and rolling them ahead of us one by one ..

Once again the air around Newberg is filled with dust clouds, not from harvesting grass or corn this time around but for picking up the hazelnuts (filberts) from the orchards where they have fallen from the trees!



They use huge harvesters to sweep and suck them up in one go-through .. very efficient. 
But dusty!

I've found a 'wild' tree on one of the paths I walk and have been picking up a handful every time I pass. I'm drying and storing them in a paper bag. It takes about 6 weeks for them to dry and cure.They're going to be so good in all kind of baking!

A lot of our (mostly James') time this week has been taken up by working on our new RV site.
I took some pictures but forgot to take one from the house up above, where our landlords live, looking down the hill to what's going to be 'our' site, but here's an old picture of a couple of years ago when we visited them ..

The RV is going to be to the right of that silver barn, just down and at the back of that slight slope in between the trees. They probably won't see us from up above.
This is looking back at that slope standing at the site:

And this is looking at the pond just below us (which is hard to see in this pic since it's covered in green algae) towards the other side, which is going to be part of our view out of the side windows:

The back windows will have a distant view of the mountain range, like this ..

James went over to Sheridan by himself for a couple of days to create a pathway to our pad and level it, and I helped a day compressing it all by driving a heavy forklift back and forth for a couple of hours:

That's all the work being done on the path towards the RV in the picture above and this is where our RV is going to be:



And this is a picture after James started to go to town on it ...

We're now waiting for a few rainy days to pass before we'll be able to spread some gravel on top!
There's still a lot more to do, digging trenches for water/sewer and electric, but it's a start!

After a summer's break I'm back to puzzling again. I just finished this beautiful desert scene from CharlesWysocki:

And with some leftover pumpkin puree, from when I made that delicious pumpkin cobbler the week before, I made pumpkin/spice donuts.
These are not fried but baked. Much healthier ... if you forget about the melted butter and sugar they're dunked in when they're done!

                                                 

We had a few beautiful warm days this week with temperatures back in the 80s. Which meant we could still eat outside in October!

                  

The menu was more appropriate for the season .. meatloaf and mashed potatoes ..
yumm!