Winter is Here

Well they threatened snow a few times this last month but it always melted from the forecast before the day came around. But after lunch yesterday it really arrived. Slow and steady, no blizzard, but between 2.30 pm Saturday and waking up this morning it left us this. And it'll likely be here until the spring now with more to come. I'll be off to start my snow blower now and clear the drive.

It'll be 15f at noon Thursday and Friday and over night it'll be -2 or 3. That's degrees F, so it's about 35f below freezing.

Colourful When Wet

We took a trip out the Western part of the state this weekend, to our old vacation stomping ground of Bethel. It's just about 20 miles from the New Hampshire border. It's leaf peeper season up there right now and the colours really are spectacular. It wasn't too spectacular weather-wise, being the first weekend in a couple of months when it mostly rained its ass off, but it still looked great. We took a 120 mile round trip leaf colour and moose spotting tour. We didn't see too many moose, well ANY moose, but a lot of colour. 

We also stopped in a little town called Rangely which is, bizarrely, home of the Wilhelm Reich museum

.

https://youtu.be/x4Ve4rrnfz0

Ice Age 5 - Day of the Triffids

We went out to the Bangor City Forest and Orono Bog on Sunday. The forest is a nice wander through mixed woodland with some very nice dragonflies at this time of year. Particularly numerous were the White Faced Meadowhawks seen here happily mating.

And then the rarely resting Canadian Darner honoured me with a lengthy rest and pose.

The bog is not at all what I was expecting. You step out of the forest on a nicely maintained boardwalk and the whole vista just opens up. It's amazing, this is a remnant of the last ice age; largely unchanged since the glaciers retreated.

And they made a big deal of the fact that they have Pitcher plants. So I set out determined to track down these elusive things. I was surprised when I stepped into the boardwalk that about half the plants making up the bog were the very thing I was looking for. And they are BIG with flower stems about 18 inches tall. Triffids indeed!

Amazement

The Banished family trip to Treworgy's Family Orchard was great fun Saturday. There first and foremost for pick-your-own blueberries we had great diversion in the most astonishing cornmaze we had ever seen. Halloween cornmazes are made up of the remains of the now dried cornstalk and full of scares. But Treworgy's is a work of art made of living growing 10 foot high corn. 4 acres and about 60,000 corn plants.

 But you really have to see it from the air.

From with it is solid walls of corn to match any classic country house maze you've ever wandered in.
And this is designed, planted and made afresh every year with a new design.

Astonishing work I think. And the artist is a fruit farmer by profession. A veritable annual Facteur Cheval
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval

Starting Afresh

OK, so Banished's Bugs rather ground to a halt back in January 2016. The job at City of Portsmouth was so appallingly depressing that I just couldn't get the enthusiasm to post a damned thing. But now here we all are me, Mrs B and Banished Jr. , decamped to the north as we had planned for years. Sold the house in Virginia, that mosquito infested hurricane magnet and found ourselves a new down sized place just outside of Bangor Maine.

And so I thought it was time to start again with new bugs and beasts and a whole new enthusiasm. It might take a little while to get up to speed as we still not quite done with the house closing and moving and we are still in our rental.

All should be completed within the next week though and peace will reign once more. Just in time for me to start getting g the new place ready for a Maine winter. Still, it's easier to keep warm than it is to keep cool.

Incidentally, the rental place has a little pond. And the little pond has...

Beavers!

 And after several vacations-worth of attempts I finally have my Twelve-Spotted Skimmer.

 There are lots of Calico Pennants

 Tiger Beetles on the shores of Moosehead Lake.

 The best population of Harris's Checkerspot anywhere in the country.

 And within 2 hours of Moosehead Lake

 And the rocky shores of Acadia.