October travel and a lil' girl's birthday

First, a little pretty before the blog storm...The beautiful fruits on the shrub above are those of the aptly named American beautyberry, a native plant very common in our area.

It has been a while since my last blog post...I blame my busy travel schedule!  This is largely true--I will be "in the office" less that a week total this month (October), but more on that later.  Before September ended, we enjoyed watching the UAM forestry club at a demonstration of some competitive "forestry" events, such as two-man log bucking:

And the every popular burling:

While this event was going on, Hope and Beth spent some time watching the infant daughter of some friends of ours:

October 1 I started on one of my epic business trips, this time to Ohio and Pennsylvania.  On the way to my first meeting in Columbus, Ohio, I stopped in Cincinnati to visit our friend, Father Chet.  Some of you have met Father Chet--he was the priest in Monticello when we first moved to town, and departed in 2007 when his missionary order (Glenmary) moved him to southeastern Oklahoma.  Well, a few years later, Father Chet is now the president of the Glenmary Order, which has its headquarters in Cincinnati.  As you can see, Father Chet is doing well:

The meeting I attended in Columbus, the EcoSummit, was interesting, and I met a number of interesting individuals.  On one day, I joined a number of colleagues (including scientists from England, Germany, China, India, and a bunch of other countries) on a field trip to southeastern Ohio:

The small nature center we spent most of our time at had a number of interesting aspects to it, including this whimsical owl carved into the trunk of an oak tree:

Some carvings weren't so whimsical, such as this graffiti carved into the smooth bark of this big beech tree:

Our final stop on this field trip was to Serpent Mound, a large earthwork constructed about 1,000 years ago:

Unfortunately, this picture doesn't do this mound justice, as you can only see a portion of its long, coiled body.  After most of the week in Columbus, I drove to Rich and Ann Prudens' home near Ann Arbor, where I spent Columbus Day weekend.  It made more sense for me to stay in the midwest, rather than returning to Arkansas, as I had a meeting in Pennsylvania the next week.  We had a nice visit, with some adventures, including a trip to Eastern Market

This farmer's market is different than most, as it is in a warehouse district near downtown Detroit, as you can see in the background of the picture below:

We also made a trip to Spicer Orchards north of the Pruden home to get some fresh cider, pumpkin spice donuts, and some decorative gourds:

Rich has been working on his firewood piles a lot this fall:

As you can see, he spends a lot of time carefully splitting and stacking his seasoned oak firewood:

After several days in Michigan, I drove about 6 hours to Warren, Pennsylvania, a scenic small town on the banks of the Alleghany River:

Below is a picture of a Union Civil War monument in downtown Warren:

Here is one of the many beautiful churches in this area:

This part of northwestern Pennsylvania is world-famous for its extensive stands of large, high quality black cherry:

Black cherry is turned into furniture, cabinets, paneling, and other high value products.  We had black cherry in the woods in northern Wisconsin, but nothing like the trees in the pictures below:

Sometimes it is curious what you see on the highways of this country, such as this long convoy of military vehicles headed for training:

After I returned from this trip, I was only home for a couple days before I traveled to Hot Springs to get some training on heritage resources (I'll write more on this later).  Basically, it involved helping test an archeological site a few hours from Monticello on the Ouachita National Forest.  One of the artifacts we found--a novaculite dart point:

This weekend, we attended a group baptism at our church.  The little girl in the flowing baptismal gown (right side of the picture) is the same infant Beth was holding in the earlier picture:

Hope has been watching this little sweetie a lot during the last few weeks--in fact, we are keeping her for a couple days while her parents are out of town.  This brings me back to our little girl, who just got a little less little--Beth turned 8 today!  Below, Beth's birthday party last Friday, which involved decorating cupcakes:

We let Beth have two of her little friends stay over that night (her first hosted sleep-over), but they couldn't stay long, as we had the baptism to go to, then we hosted our Octoberfest (fall) social at our house.

I'll end with this final picture of Beth, deep in thought on her 8th birthday party.  While I'd like to think her contemplative look is her reflecting on her adventures to date, or perhaps the significance of her future, I think it is probably closer to reality that she's trying to figure out how to put more candy on top of her birthday cupcake...  Oh, for the simplicity of being 8!!