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For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday. Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges throughDown the rabbit hole….

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We had a big ice storm rip through The 716 the night before, and it had the usual effects of ice storms: thick coatings of ice on everything, resulting in tons of power outages from lines collapsing, or tree branches collapsing onto lines, and so on. We were without power at home for thirteen hours, starting about 1am Thursday morning. Luckily I slept through a chunk of that, and then I went to work, so when I got home the power was back on. Oh, and that modification I made a few months back to our back-up sump pump? ItDown the rabbit hole….

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Our next-door neighbors have taken to feeding the local deer from the woods behind our neighborhood. It’s nice to see them over there in their yard, eating away. Our Carla, of course, thinks they are Big! Scary! Beasts! that need to be shooed away with much barking, but I think they’re getting used to her because where she used to be able to scare them all off, now only a few go when she goes running out there. (Our yard is fenced, so she can’t actually get at the deer.) (The photo’s resolution isn’t great because I used the 10xDown the rabbit hole….

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No, not a new weekly feature, but for lack of anything else to post, here’s a nature video I saw on Twitter earlier, about a beast I’d never heard of before: the grasshopper mouse. These little guys are…scary. Warning: some of this is kind of disturbing, in that “unvarnished look at nature” way.   Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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Last Sunday, Cane (the Dee-oh-gee) and I went out for a Sunday walk in the park for the first time since December. Why no outings since then? Well, we got back from Oahu just in time for the weather to shift into a much colder and snowier pattern; where the WNY winter until the end of December had been very mild, it pivoted hard in January to being snowy enough and cold enough for Buffalo to take this year’s title as Snowiest City In America. Oof. Plus, there’s the fact that Cane isn’t a spring chicken anymore. He’s 9-and-a-half as IDown the rabbit hole….

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Here are some photos from Knox Farm State Park several days ago. We’ve been enjoying a warmer and dryer than usual fall so far, but according to the Weather Gurus, we’re about to have a significant shift to the colder weather we’re more accustomed to here in November. While fall foliage is now well “past peak” in terms of color (and this year was kind of an odd one in terms of colors, as we never really even had that glorious peak of fall color when it looks like all the hills are singing in fiery pigments), but that doesn’t meanDown the rabbit hole….

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 I’ve long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don’t like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takesDown the rabbit hole….

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The anniversary is something of a misnomer. Mt. St. Helens, a mountain in the volcanic Cascade Range in southwestern Washington State, was always thought to be on the verge of significant volcanic activity, and one day when I was in school in March, 1980, my fourth-grade teacher wheeled a teevee cart into the classroom. She plugged it in and started tuning to one of the local stations, which was carrying the event live. An earthquake had jolted Mt. St. Helens, and the mountain was now venting steam from its summit. If it seems odd that this was on local news,Down the rabbit hole….