I’m not a big baseball fan, so I didn’t even realize that the world series was already in play. This morning, I learned that the Red Sox had won yet another series (many Vermonters are big SOX fans) but the really big news this morning was that Lucy, a Holstein from Derby, Vermont, was crowned the “top female Holstein on the planet at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WIsconsin. “On the planet”!

Here’s the big news with a cute picture of Lucy.

Many of us in Northern Vermont have been living the fantasy of a never ending summer. I was still picking beans and tomatoes from my garden earlier this week. This morning when I woke up the thermomter registered 32.9 and said it had been down to 32.7 overnight. There was frost on the ground. I haven’t checked the garden. It certainly wasn’t a hard frost so we’ll see.

Now of course it is a glorious (though chilly) day with sunshine, blue skies and fall color and nearing 50 degrees. I’m thinking about a bike ride. I’ll have to see if my warm weather cycling clothes still fit.:-)

And I missed it!

I was at a board meeting for www.vtsda.org, when Rich came home on Wednesday evening and saw a big male moose with BIG antlers sauntering up our road. When Rich got to our driveway he saw another moose… a girl.

The stage was set and luckily nobody got in the male’s way. It is pretty dangerous to get in the way of a male during rutting season; he will knock you down and trample you. Eventually the girl wandered off into our woods and the boy followed her. Luckily they were moving slowly,so most of our neighbors got a chance to see them.

Nobody got a picture.

We are really looking forward to this talk by Mark Mullin tonight at VTdotNET!

We also have some great WCF books to give away: Learning WCF by Michele Leroux Bustamante (thanks OReilly and INETA) and Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation from APress.

Thanks to Infragistics, we will be raffling off two licenses to NetAdvantage for .NET. One of the raffles will actually be a fund-raising raffle.

We also have shirts and swag courtesy of CodeZone and piles of CoDe Magazine and aspnetPRO to give away.

And thanks to Verio’s sponsorship of INETA, I am able to offer Verio’s free webhosting to Vermont .NET members who show up at the meeting tonight.

Since it’s such a nice day (and I have just absolutely NO work to do ;-)), and Mark is being so generous with his time (driving up from New Hampshire) and cash (there’s gas $ and hotel involved), I am going to take him on a 1.5 hour cruise on Lake Champlain aboard the Spirit of the Ethan Allen this afternoon. Hey, running a user group is HARD work, y’know?

Mom and the kids (who I first saw in July) have been hanging around the neighborhood most of the summer. They didn’t do too much damage to my flowers or veggie garden.

Today I saw them all under the apple trees. There are about 10 old trees by our driveway and this year all of the apple trees around here are filled with billions of apples. Ours are not great – since we don’t spray them, though I might make some applesauce.

There are already lots on the ground, so the deer were having a mini-feast. Unfortunately it also attracts Porcupines and we HATE porcupines. (They hurt our curious pets.)

While looking for the porcupine post, I came across one entitled “G.B.s big night out” from almost two years ago. Sadly, G.B. had his last big night out about a month ago. We haven’t seen him since.

Sept 12 at 6 PM meeting: Deployment Issues with Rails

Posted: 11 Sep 2007 07:07 AM CDT

We are going to have a User Group meeting on Sept 12 at 6 PM. The meeting is at Draker Solar Design, 22 North Street,Burlington, Vermont 05401.

www.vtrails.org

It has been an amazing summer for growing. there are still lots and lots of tomatoes in my garden. I’ve been picking the tomatoes before they are ripe and letting them finish in the sun. I decided that this will help the rest of the tomatoes that are still growing on the vines. I have a whole bunch in the dining room ready to be processed but waiting for this batch so I can do them all at once. There are a few different varieties.

On Saturday, Rich and I hiked up the Jersusalem trail which is only a short drive from our house. It is one of the many trails that take you up to the Long Trail. This one lands about half way between the App Gap and Mt. Abe.

Alongo the way there were lots of berries growing, none which looked the least bit appetizing. So I took their pics and came home to find out what they were. i’ve only got one id’d so far. And I’m STILL trying to figure out what the flowers were that I saw on an early summer hike that are here. I think I saw them on a wildflower poster somewhere and tried to memorize the name, but forgot by the time I got home. uggh.

The first turns out to be a White Baneberry, aka “Doll’s eyes”, which I identified thanks George Africa’s blog post. George is one of those fairytale gardeners. You’ll see what I mean if you poke around his blog.

Here is a really unpalatable blue berry which really is probably just a dried up seed pod from whatever flower was here. The leaves are reminiscent of a bleeding heart.

This last one looks like maybe it’s some type of viburnum and it’s something I’ve seen frequently. I’ve just looked at pictures of many varieties, but can’t find one quite like this. So maybe it’s something else. but the most important thing is not to eat the darned things.

Speaking of eatingi things in the woods, the chanterelles have finally arrived! They were much later this year than the past few years. I’ve only had one sumptuous batch so far – about 2 pounds that I picked and brought to a recent party and cooked up in pounds of butter. Over the past few years, my skill as a chanterelle cook have definitely improved. High heat, loads of butter and lots of salt & pepper. Very French, just don’t tell my doctor. 😉

When John Canning showed us his iPhone a few weeks ago and explained that he bought it in Boston after walking by the AT&T store too many times, we were all surprised at his risk-taking. AT&T doesn’t provide service in Vermont and therefore we can’t get iPhones here and certainly can’t get an iPhone with an 802 area code. His has a Boston phone #.

You could tell he was in love with this phone. I had just gotten a Treo the day before so we were both showing off our phones to the small group we were with. I almost blogged about John’s without naming names of course, but didn’t want to get John in trouble. (Me, the paranoid rule-follower.)

So I had a good laugh today when I saw John’s picture on the home page of Burlington’s local paper, brandishing his iPhone. Hey, he outed himself; I had nothing to do with it. You can read about John and some of our wireless woes in the article.

So, I’m curious to see if (or is it “how quickly”) John gets his service cancelled. The whole notion of AT&T having exclusive access to the iPhone seems wrong anyway. I understand it as a competitive marketing advantage, but it doesn’t seem like good marketing to refuse entry to entire populations of your potential market. (Okay, i know Vermont is not a huge market, but…) I thought a key mantra for sales was about making it easy for people to give you money. But with the case of iPhones (it’s the iPhone that John covets, not the AT&T service) users have to be wiling to use em and lose em.

I love that one of the comments on the article that”Vermont needs to get its head out of the sand.” I don’t know how these things work, but did Vermont explicitly ban AT&T?

Oh, and I traded my Treo in for a Blackberry yesterday (with a GSM chip). More on that later…

Gotta love it!