Ashley caught the vole living by our front door yet again. This time the vole did not survive.
The picture below is of a dead vole. Sorry not to be able to hide it behind a content warning. Just move along if you don’t want to see it.
Ashley caught a vole! I wouldn’t let her eat it, because who knows what parasites she’d get from eating a raw wild animal, but she took it very well when I made her drop the vole.
It seemed to have survived being in Ashley’s mouth for several seconds. So Ashley will get to try to catch it again!
Have I mentioned lately how jealous I am of Ashley’s lean, muscly physique?
In Central Illinois fall colors are often a bit diffuse: the early trees turning brown and losing their leaves while the later trees are still green, with only a few trees showing their full autumn colors.
This year is something of an exception.
At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens. #dogsofmastodon
The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.
Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.
Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.
Most years about this time I’ll see a couple praying mantises, like this one I saw yesterday.
To celebrate voting (and because the dog is at her Canine Academy) we’re having lunch out. I’ve got a Three Floyd’s Zombie Dust (yummy—I’ve had it before), and Jackie has a Big Grove Old Fashioned.
Jackie and I have exercised the franchise.
You can’t really see it in this photo, but there are a wide range of diverse, multi-ethnic “I voted” stickers this year.
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
Frua je Esperanto kunveno, Do tempo por sipi mian bieron.
