The leaves are wierd this year, so if you plan to come to Vermont to see them, definitely check out the official website to get you in the right place at the right time.

http://www.vermontvacation.com/seasons/fall.asp?bfp090601

When I first moved to Vermont in Sept 1999, there were 3 or 4 highway moose accidents reported within a few weeks. I have fretted about them ever since when I am driving at night. I don’t recall any bad accidents locally until seeing a news report today in the local paper. Some poor man was killed in a car accident on the highway near midnight last night.

I was driving home earlier this week on Route 17, facing the green mountains in the late afternoon. There is a section of the road where you see a sweeping view of the mountains that is like a big bowl. In the afternoon, the sun is hitting this wall of mountains. The afternoon glow combined with the colors of the changing leaves made the range radiate from foot to peak, north to south – completely red.

I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station to take a picture although a good chunk of the view is chopped off from that vantage point. So imagine seeing about the same as this mirrored on the left. Additionally, by the time I stepped out of my car and turned my camera on, the cloud cover had impacted the astonishing effect I had been looking at as I drove up the road. Still, this is pretty, even if it doesn’t begin to capture what I was hoping to share. Most of this is Mount Abe, where we have gone hiking a few times recently.

We don’t have to worry about stuff like that around here because we shop at our nearby farmstands.

Many benefits of course, but the one that is highlighted this week is knowing where your food comes from.

Though we did not do the localvore challenge (here’s an example of one), I know it was inspiration to many!

Some teens in Brattleboro (southern part of the state) have decided that 1970’s style flashing wasn’t quite rebellious enough. So they are just hanging around in the middle of town buck naked. Egad. It’s a little ridiculous (easy to say now that I’m so far past those rebellious years) and to make it worse – CNN had it on the home page today.

The town is waiting for the weather to get cold enough for them to give up this particular form of expression of freedom. “As soon as winter comes, there won’t be a story anymore”.

This little guy was curled up in a bed of ferns about 3.5 ft off the ground. I saw him while I was picking berries and no girly shrieks this time. He was sitting quite still and didn’t surprise me at all. It was just funny that I noticed a shape that didn’t fit in and took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. Much much smaller than his great grand-daddy that startled me in the compost bin recently. I do need to learn how to use my camera better though. I couldn’t get a good closeup and the zoom was too fuzzy. His head is at the top left. He was watching me carefully!

Interesting that CNN’s headline refers to Essex as a “rural” Vermont town. It’s actually very suburban and one of the most densely populated communities in Vermont -just outside of Burlington. This is where IBM’s Vermont chip mfg plat is. Rich was at our dentist in Essex Jct when this was beginning to unfold about a mile away. Nobody ever expects things like to happen in their back yard. But they happen everywhere.

Rich and I went to this classic Vermont country summer fair last week. Below is a photo of the tractor pull. There were so many garden tractors lined up, this event went on for hours and hours and hours. One event that I wish I had known about (before it happened, rather than hearing about it after the fact!) was a hand-mowing competition (using scythes). I have an old scythe and use it ocassionaly (not for the lawn but for clearing tall weeds) and would have loved to see how it’s really done.

While wandering through the booths, I came around a corner and saw a well-known Vermont actor/comedian/writer named Rusty Dewees. This is a guy you can’t avoid if you live in Vermont. He’s got a column in the local paper (which is very personal like a blog), does radio spots for lots of businesses, gets written about and highlighted on the news all of the time and does shows (which I have never attended) all over the state. Without thinking, I greeted him like an old friend, only to remember in the next moment that I didn’t really know him, and of course, I was a complete stranger t him. Just another fan, I guess. I was pretty embarrassed (how unlike me!).

It made me think a lot about how much I expose my own life on my otherwise “technical” blog. When I meet developers at conferences around the country and the world, and they know personal things about me, it takes me a moment to realize it’s because I write about it all the time. But I love this aspect of meeting people who don’t feel like strangers for long. Somehow, I wasn’t able to project that Dewees might feel the same way even though he was being perfectly nice. Additionally, it’s only a more narrow community of programmers that know me, so I already have lot in common with these people, as opposed to anyone that might accost this poor guy. It would probably have been a little better if I had bought one of his dvds or calendars or something (the guy is pretty talented and also a marketing machine), but though I enjoy reading his column and have been impressed to watch what he has done with his career, I’m not sure if I really want a calendar of him on my wall (though he’s awfully good looking! ;-))

The tractor pull. Click on photo to see full size

http://redleafsoft.com/word/?p=45

VTFUG is celebrating it’s 10th Anniversary! Congratulations Kurt.

Meeting info at www.vtfug.org