Literally. We now live in a house with a wood burning stove, so we’ve started collecting wood we can burn. Today, we split some rounds for the first time in a few years.

We took turns to get back into the swing of things (haHA!).

Here’s my sumo-style chopping technique!

Homer is at sea level, and gradually rises to a couple hundred feet above sea level as you head away from the ocean. And then, there’s a big hill. It just sort of shoots straight up, towering over the town at about 1400 feet.

Next week, we’ll be moving to the top of that hill, when Skippy takes over a doggie bed n’ biscuit business for the winter, called Tails by the Bay. This will mark the…third? Yeah, third time we’ve moved since April. Gosh, I just love moving! But, the house is awesome, and so is the view. It faces the hills behind Homer, and a sea of spruce. Walk 2 minutes down the road, and here’s the view from the hilltop:

So begins Chapter 3 of our Alaskan Adventure. Maybe this will be the part of the story where we become fabulously wealthy and spend the rest of our lives creating art and doing charity work!

Every year in Homer (as of 6 years ago, anyway), a group of artists gets together and creates a basket on the Homer Spit. A really big basket. After decorating it with art, photos, ribbons, lists of thoughts/wishes/memories/slogans/etc. and having a meal, they burn it to the ground and have a party.

Welcome to Homer’s Burning Basket celebration. BYOD (bring your own drum), BYOFDE (bring your own fire dancing equipment), no dogs or alcohol allowed.

One of my pictures even made it on the front of the Tribune this past week: Fire Dance

So it begins. Again.

I’ll try to do a daily shot of this, so you can see how quickly our autumn comes and goes.

It was a cold and rainy day. Fall has arrived.

We combated the dreariness by going to an Indian dinner fundraiser. The food was good, and we arrived early enough to sample everything.

Then, in a fit of “hey, why not?” we drove down to the end of the Spit. I got out to take pictures, in the rain. It was so dreary, that I’ve converted most of the images to black and white!

This one had enough color that I left it alone:

Here’s a full color look at what it was like out there. The picture would have worked better without the giant blurry raindrops all over it.