The view from Paradise...

The view from Paradise...  Just a couple of photos to give you a flavor for what this season is like here.  The photo at right is looking east from the second floor of our barn.  You can make out the red of maples in fall color on the sides of the mountains.  In places there are also stands of quaking aspen that are like splotches of bright yellow paint.  The line of yellowing trees in the foreground are along an irrigation canal.  There's a mixture of planted and naturally occurring plants there, but the canal sides are dominated by box elder and rose bushes (both naturally occurring).

The land to the left of the white fence belongs to my neighbor Tim D.  He ran oats there last year, but killed them a few weeks ago (which is why it's all brown) and is planning to plow it and plant alfalfa next year.  The small white building in the right foreground is ours, but we're going to have it taken down in a couple of weeks.  We found someone who would like to turn it into a boat house, and he's going to do all the removal work for us in exchange for the carcass.  We're going to replace it with a roof on posts, under which we'll have a diesel backup generator and a couple of fuel tanks.  Peeking through the trees at right you can see the roof of my neighbor's barn.  I was here for a couple of weeks before I realized it was a barn – the building is so fancy that I mistook it for an especially nice home!  Two gorgeous black horses live there, so I guess you could say it's a home after all :)

At left is the arbor in our garden.  The green leaves are a grape vine; the red leaves are the fall color of a vine I haven't identified yet.  It appears to grow at about three times the rate of the grape, so unless I do something about it, I think it's going to win the war for photons...