I'm mirroring Jeri's recent post title with mine. Up until this year when I started going to the watershed coalition office with the regularity of a full-time employee, holiday weekends weren't anything special for us, except we usually had cabin guests more likely to stay three nights instead of two. Now, like many other working folks, the extra day off is a nice break from meetings, emails, and phone calls.

There was recently an earthquake in the southern part of my state, near Trinidad CO - 3.9 magnitude. It's four hours away from here, so we didn't feel it.

The tree squirrels are getting ready for winter, involving climbing high into the trees and throwing down green pine cones, hundreds of them. Then, they come down to the ground and carry the cones to their stash somewhere in the forest. The cones hitting the roof sound like little bombs, and even the ones that land on the lawn make thudding sounds.

The cat escaped from the house this afternoon and I was worried she'd kill one of those squirrels because I have nothing against that particular species. But no danger - it doesn't look like she managed to capture anything. She's been doing a good job catching the mice who come into our house, so she's doing her job well enough.

We have a live trap at the cabin next door, and caught 11 mice in 7 days. When nobody is staying there, it's tempting to not put out the trap and let the mice do what they want, but it's too hard to get caught up when we have guests again, so I have to keep at it on a daily basis. We dump them out of the trap into the river and they can try to swim for shore before the current carries them away. Mice can really swim quite well and sometimes they do make it to dry land, no doubt to return to our trap sometime soon.