Smoke- or Ghost mushrooms. When they look like this they are quite tasty. But as soon as they start to change from pure whitr one better leave them alone.

It´s not cold outside, but it´s not warm either. The sky is very evenly gray and it´s slowly getting darker now. Even if autumn sort of made a halt these last days, the daylight says otherwise. Now I have to light the lamps when I get up in the morning and it´s pitch black outside. Not to far away we will have darkness most of the twety four hours we have to spend every day, awake or asleep. This year I have to get dog collars with inbuilt lights in them. Imagine how it is to walk with three black dogs when it´s black outside :-)

I like this pictyre of these sort of fleshy mushrooms. I wonder if they are edible?

When I was younger I and two friends rented an old croft in the dark forests of Dalsland, a wonderful county in Sweden. My friend Christer (it´s not that an uncommon name) had to go to the outhouse late one evening. When he walked back he could hear my dog run around outside. He thought he might have let her out by misstake, so he started to talk to her to bring her inside again. For some reasom she showed grate reluctans to follow him, wich was very odd. If she listened to any one else than me it was him. So he stopped and continued to talk to her. She got really close, but didn´t want to follow him at all. So he opened the door to tell me that she was outside. When opening the front door the light came out on the yard. To his surprise my dog stood by the door waiving her tail. Behind him however stood the big male badger we had living under a barn beside our yard :-) :-)

There are a lot of superstition around badgers. Some say for instance that they bite until they hear bones brake and that one always should have coal in ones rubber boots so the cracking sound comes early. They also say that they are really aggressive. But to be honest, badgers are really friendly animals. I once had a cat that spend every summer living beside a family of badgers, in their burrow ( the same that the male badger that followed my friend in the beginning of this blog). I have another friend that when young played with the badgers cubs every summer and the older badgers just laid and watched it. A couple of years ago they had foxtraps (big boxes that doesn´t hurt the animal) placed by the big creek. They had it to catch foxes with fox scabies. It is terrible for a fox to get and it dies slowly and painfully when getting it.

A Maple of some kind, I´m not sure wich one though. Even if this one really has autumn colors, the autumn has come to a halt it seemes. But I don´t mind if we get a longer period with some warm weather.

I passed the trap every day during my vacation and every morning there was a little female badger in it :-) She loved to greate my dogs and showed no signs of agression at all. She had learned that there were nice ,and easy getting, food in the trap. So she went there every night and ate what she found. She understood very well that she would be trapped, but didn´t mind since she also understood that she would get released every morning :-) :-) The only trouble one can have with badgers if they make a burrow beside ones house is that they after a while undermines the foundation to the house. Not something one wants :-) :-) Otherwise they are, if not surprised ofcourse, rather nice animals.

Have a great day now!

There it just stood in the middle of a field I pass every day. I didn´t notice it until the bud opened. When seeing this sunflower I suddenly saw a couple of others too. We feed our birds all winter long with mostly sunflower seeds, so this one comes from my neighbours birdfeeding place.

I have a little lantern just above the entrance to my garden. Nowdays it´s rusty and the paint is falling of, but I do like it perhaps evenb more then. I light a little candle there in winter but especially every Christmas eve.