Summer is drawing to a close

Still, we're having day after day of beautiful weather.  But the evenings and, especially, the mornings have a definite chill these last few days.

We're proposing to do the "river trail" tomorrow which is impassable at all times except when the ground is very very dry.  Like now.

We had a preview of what it will be like this morning when we joined the Search for Gracie in the woods of North Billerica.  Gracie is a Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog) who's been missing since May when she was chased out of her own yard by a coyote.  Her "mom" has worked incredibly hard to try to find her and to begin with there were many sightings (although one wonders how reliable some of these were).  But nobody has seen her now for about a month.  Today, ten of us met at the McDonalds in North Billerica to comb through the woods on the East side of the Concord River between the Boston Road bridge and the River St. bridge.  See below for our track.  We covered about 2 miles in as many hours.  We weren't in a hurry: we were looking for possible dens and/or paw prints.  We didn't see anything and neither did any of our fellow searchers.  But it was certainly an interesting way to spend a morning!  We are very sad for Gracie and her family -- we just wish that they could get her back.



View Search for Gracie in a larger map

Meanwhile, football season is upon us!  The Patriots will host the Cincinnati Bengals tomorrow, one of last season's surprise contenders.  Tom Brady has a new contract worth $18 million annually.  You'd think that with all that money he'd be able to buy himself a really fancy car.  But no.  Some charity he works with bought him a really fancy car so he doesn't need to.  This all came out earlier this week when he was involved in a crash in Boston (not his fault).

And, today being the anniversary of 9/11, we've been threatened all week with a completely outrageous act of racial intolerance down in Florida.  Let's hope that cool heads prevail.