Winter Too Early?

On Friday, we had our windows cleaned by a local service. One man using our well water, processed through a "deionizer" on the company truck pumped through a very long hose, stood at ground level and reached all the way to the peak - all told close to four stories up. I didn't get a picture of him working on the top windows. The whole job took him maybe two hours at the most.  He was assisted for the interior washing - he had to use a ladder inside since the deionized water can't just run down the walls inside. 

We think we're happy with the job they did - it must be an improvement - but we haven't been able to tell how clean and streak-free the glass is because on Friday, we did not have much sunshine. I took a few photos of our fall views.

 

 We really do enjoy our tree-top windows.

The leaf colors were pretty on Friday, but it rained all afternoon.  I took the pictures because, as predicted, sometime after midnight, the rain changed to snow.  Norris took these yesterday morning -

 

Please note the birds on the feeder in the picture just above, because on Friday evening, while we were in the studio with Moki, we heard a very strange noise.  We went outside with a flashlight and found this (photo taken yesterday morning)

That's our other bird feeder hook, minus a very nice (and rather expensive) squirrel proof feeder, bent over to the ground.  The squirrel baffle is actually visible - its the smooth gray mass sticking out of the snow in the upper left corner.  Norris went out looking for the feeder, but the bear (and it had to be a bear to bend the pole like that) had removed it somewhere else to break into the sunflower seeds.  We had stopped feeding the birds the last few years because of the bears, but this  year we had not seen a single one. There's a house under construction on our side of the ridge that had discouraged them. 

Norris came in and said that's the end of our feeding the birds.  But then he saw all the birds frantically looking around in the snow for food, so the second feeder went back on its hook.

We remembered to bring it in last night. We were evidently revisited by the bear - that hook was also found bent like the first, but there was nothing tasty at the top this time.  Norris' footprints from his missing feeder search yesterday along with all the clumps of snow falling from the trees have obscurred the bear's tracks from last night's visit that might give us a hint where to look for that feeder.  One that was stolen a couple of years ago disappeared without a trace.