Autumn is here! Pic heavy!

It's that time of year again: fall fairs, harvest festivals, apples bright red on the trees, and leaves quickly beginning to turn brilliant shades of orange, copper, gold, and red. The nights are quite chilly now and I can't go outside without a jacket, and the days aren't much warmer any more. It's the time for pumpkin spice lattes, hot apple cider, and hot chili cooking for dinner. It's two weeks until Canadian Thanksgiving, and little over a month until my beloved Halloween. It's soon time to walk through tons of fallen leaves and smell their dry, pleasant scent.

Happy Fall, y'all!!

I forgot to post about the Thornhill Village Festival on the 15th, so here are some photos from this event that I greatly look forward to every year!

My MIL and I went very early to help set up Urban Cat Relief's booth.

Then I had Esther, our resident face-painting goddess, do up my face for the day!

Can't say I can sit in the middle of Yonge Street every day! :) A chunk of it was closed off for the festival and the parade.

One of the festival themes this year was the Diamond Jubilee, so that was pretty cool to witness and be a part of.

The festival always has reenactors for the Battle of York.

Trevor showed up and got his face zapped by Esther! :)

Our face-painting queen hard at work at the end of the day!

For people who live in this area, the Thornhill Village Festival is more of an official end to summer than the CNE. The very next day I hauled out all the autumn decorations and did up our apartment in beautiful leaves, cute scarecrows, and gourds and pumpkins. And this past Saturday, we went to a fall fair down in Ancaster, a small town near Hamilton.

The reason we were down there in the first place was because we wanted to go to the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, which is a bit of a drive but our family friend Jeff loves to drive and have weekend adventures, so we were all for it! We'd decided to hit up one of the many fall fairs taking place that weekend, so when we randomly saw a sign pointing to the one in Ancaster, we went for it.

Looking down on Milton from the Niagara Escarpment.

Escarpment! The leaves are quickly changing now, so quickly that I think they will reach their peak by Thanksgiving.

I love seeing Ontario countryside!

This was my first REAL fall fair, with prize-winning crafts, crops, critters, and more.

This lady was a two-year-old Haflinger filly named Sparkle. Her mother was in the pen with her and her hooves were painted with glitter. Sparkle was very curious and happy, snuffling and rubbing on everyone with half-lidded eyes as they stroked her muzzle and soft neck. After I took this pic, she started rubbing her chin back and forth on the sleeve of my sweater as though enjoying the feeling, then she nipped. I now have a big black bruise on my forearm from her teeth. I think she really liked my sweater! LOL.

Sheep being herded out into a trailer.

It started getting very chilly, and because we weren't wearing jackets, we decided it was time to leave. We grabbed a bite to eat and some candy apples first, though! So we didn't get to stay for the horse show or the demolition derby, but we had a lot of fun all the same!

Besides, the sky went from pure blue to this:

The drive home was long. Jeff started going the wrong way and we nearly ended up going to Niagara Falls, but then we got back on the right track and headed back to Toronto :)

And there you have my weekend adventures for the past two weeks. There will hopefully be more this week and next, my friends, so stay tuned! I will post again before then, however ;) I've got a hankering to do another fashion accessory post and maybe outfit inspiration. Woohooo!

So until then, have a great day! <3

Damselflies and Geocaching

Have you guys heard of Geocaching? If you haven't, why not? It's a worldwide, real-life, outdoor treasure hunt game. Sign up, plug in coordinates to your GPS-enabled device, and off you go to find all the hidden containers--called geocaches--in your area and beyond.

My MIL and I got into geocaching about two weeks ago thanks to our friend Jeff. So far, she's logged three geocaches and I've logged two. There are so many in our area, I can't believe it! I want to find them all!

We found a small, basic cache at Oak Bank Park two weeks ago...
It contained a tiny log, which we signed, then we logged our find online and left a comment!

Yesterday we went walking with a family friend, Carol, to Pomona Mills Park here in Thornhill. It's one of our favourite spots, and it stays nice and cool from the blazing June sun. We knew there was a geocache at the entrance of the park, so we began hunting for it. After my MIL got attacked by stinging nettles, she retrieved the cache and we took it to a bench where nobody could see us (in geocaching, you have to be VERY careful that people don't see you retrieving or placing caches, because they run a high risk of getting stolen and countless numbers of them have).

Like most geocaches, this one contained small trinkets. It also contained a travel bug, which I'm very excited about! A travel bug is a small item that has a code on it, and it can be tracked online. It's not a trinket that a cacher can keep; they have to move it to another cache as soon as possible. This one originated in New Hampshire. I would love to move it north to Lake Simcoe or Muskoka or something, but I might place it closer than that since it needs to happen ASAP. It may just wind up in the cache at the end of the Leslie Spit in Toronto this weekend!

Besides the excitement of geocaching, we also came across some gorgeous ebony jewelwing damselflies fluttering all over the riverbanks. I had never seen these before. It was like we had come across faeryland.

The brightly coloured males were aggressively pursuing the paler females; I learned later (thanks, Wikipedia!) that they mate in the summertime.

Here's a shot of the Don River and one of several beaver dams :)

I hope you all have a lovely Monday and don't melt in this heat! I'll update in the next couple of days with how my container garden is progressing, and then again on the weekend after we hit the St. Lawrence Market and the Leslie Spit! :)

Spring in Ontario

Pictures I've taken ranging from our back yard to Kensington Market and Front Street. The very last photo I took on my husband's phone with Instagram. There are so many of these gorgeous pink trees around here of varying species. One thing on my bucket list is to one day own property where I can have loads of flowering trees!