Our buddy Tucker is visiting for the weekend and, as a good friend will do, he brought along his toys to share. Zeke steals all of his toys from Tucker, his favorite being the great albino sheepskin dinosaur.

You may think it's a pretty poor photographer who has to hold the subject's head in place in order to snap a shot. Not to defend my photography skills (I have none) but Tucker always has a hand stuck to his head. More precisely, Tucker is always stuck to someone's hand. While Zeke prefers inanimate, better yet airborne, objects, Tucker is a lover and wants nothing more than to lean on someone while they pat his head and croon how sweet he is, at least until it's time to eat or sleep.

Tucker, Zeke, Faith, and I went on a hike this morning. We went on the trails near our house, initially in search of Elderberries (I wanted to try to make some Elderberry Wine). While waiting for Faith to boot up I walked around the yard and found oodles of what I thought were Elderberry so we didn't spend any time on the hike searching for more. Turns out that what I found oodles of were Service Berries.

Fall is in full swing. I took the camera along but the batteries have been dying quickly and, I think, influencing how the pictures come out (a poor workman always blames his tools). The seedpods are drying out and soon these clusters will be dispersing into the air on brief flights of species perpetuation. I should have taken a picture of the acorns littering the ground. Must be the acorn bumper crop of all time, there's not enough squirrels in a thousand miles to pack away all of the nuts laying about. Luckily acorns are slightly irregular spheres or we'd be slip sliding like keystone cops near a broken gumball machine.

So now I need to wander the woods in search of Elderberries again. Poor dogs, they'll just have to go with me.

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