WANISAN

On a recent walk I saw a small animal dart into the trail, then back off again. I thought it was a cat at first.

There are many feral cats in the parks here. People regularly dump them I guess, and other people regularly feed them. They have their little places along the pathway where they wait for those kind folks to drop by and leave them food. So, I thought that was what I saw, but it turned out this was another Japanese raccoon. It was so fluffy compared to the ones I had seen earlier that I didn’t recognise it at first.

This one looked very healthy.

It wandered a short way up a side trail and then stood statue still for quite a while. I tried to get close enough to photograph it clearly but I also didn’t want to scare it away. I took some short videos hoping to see it better, but it didn’t move while I was watching it. I gave up after a while rather than disturb his day more.

Here are a few photos so maybe you can see. If you click on the photo you can see it more clearly. Go ahead and click the next photo as well to enlarge it.

We have our tradition of putting up our Christmas decorations and tree the weekend after the US holiday of Thanksgiving. It is usually a little late, Sunday or even Monday before it’s all finished.

Now that my sons are bigger, they are a lot of help and usually it’s the three of us putting up the outside lights and getting the inside decorations and tree out of storage. (yes, there are a lot of boxes of these things! ;-))

We usually have a few old decorations that no longer work and one or two new decorations. This year is no different. Our train is about to die, and we have added a very cool (I think, and the neighbours seem to agree) LED laser.

I have some solar powered lights and all the outside electric lights are connected to a timer now, so I can see the lights already on when I’m coming up the street on my way home, and I don’t have to go out in the cold late at night to turn them off before going to bed. It’s been the best part of our set up 😉

Here are a few pictures. You might notice the small differences from last year’s set up. I also included a short video clip so you can see the effect of the laser lights.

Last week I was commenting about how that fall was here, but there weren’t a lot of leaves on the ground. I did get some pretty nice photos from some bright coloured leaves I saw on one of my regular walks, but there weren’t many leaves falling.

Fall means the leaves should fall, right?

Today while walking I had a nice cushion of fallen leaves as carpet on my walk. I love that feel, the sound, the smell.

Here’s a quick shot of one of the pathways I walked today.

The weather is really turning towards winter, bypassing Fall in the process, and it looks like though there were some leaves changing and falling, it’s pretty much the edge of winter.

One of the things I’m always watching on my walks at night are the fish in the small river. These days we hardly see any, maybe one or two.

A short time ago I didn’t have time for my regular long walk through the park, so I walked the night course we usually walk together. The weather was nice and still day time, so I was looking forward to checking for the fish. I was not disappointed. The water was teeming with them!

They’re also quite large.

Here are a couple of shots from the bridge and short video clips:

This fall seems to have almost slipped by without seeing much change in the color of the leaves, but this past week while I was walking in the park near my home I saw some very bright red and more fallen leaves than I’ve seen for a bit.

I remember well when I would walk those paths and the smell of the sun-dried leaves was heavy in the air, and the ground was soft from the plush piles of leaves.

This fall the weather has been unusually warm until the past week, and there didn’t really seem to be much of a change or many leaves falling. I guess we’re about to get back on track now though.

Here are a few pictures from this week: