Today was the annual Trick or Treat at Bat­sto Vil­lage, NJ.

In album Bat­sto Trick or Treat (12 photos)

In front of the Bat­sto chicken coop.

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Michael Oliv­eras is a long-time union car­pen­ter mak­ing the entre­pre­neur­ial jump and start­ing his own busi­ness: Mike’s Pre­ci­sion Car­pen­try, serv­ing the New Jer­sey, Penn­syl­va­nia and Delaware from his shop in Ham­mon­ton, NJ. He came to me look­ing for a web­page to adver­tise his new enter­prise.
It’s a sim­ple design, a typ­i­cal small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his busi­ness cards for a bit of brand­ing. Oliv­eras faced a prob­lem typ­i­cal for new busi­nesses: a lack of good pho­tos. The work he’s done for many years is not tech­ni­cally his own (per the employ­ment con­tracts) so for now the pic­tures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded port­fo­lio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the mean­times, he added a cou­ple of great pic­tures of him and his fam­ily on the “About Us” page to give it that per­sonal touch.
See it live: www​.mike​s​pre​ci​sion​car​pen​try​.com

Yes­ter­day the kids and I took a road trip to Apple Pie Hill, a sum­mit of loose gravel that tow­ers over the South Jer­sey pinelands from a dizzy­ing height of 209 feet above sea level. A fire watch tower on the sum­mit adds another few dozen feet, enough to get a vis­i­tor over the tree­tops. On a clear day it’s said you can see the sky­lines of Atlantic City and Philadel­phia. For­tu­nately for me it was an quin­tes­sen­tially beau­ti­fully fall day–clear and crisp. It was easy to spot the cities, both thirty-two miles away (mostly to the south and mostly to the west respec­tively) and here’s blowups of the two resul­tant pho­tos:


More pic­tures, from left: Sand road to the hill, the fire tower, the view down through the steps of the tower (the kids were left in the car), two year old Fran­cis eager but thwarted attempt to repeat Papa’s climb up tower. Click indi­vid­ual pho­tos for enlarged and geo­t­agged ver­sions. More pho­tos of this and out stopover at Atsion later in the day on yesterday’s Flickr page.

For those inter­ested in repeat­ing our jour­ney, here’s a map show­ing our route up and back. I was mostly wing­ing it, depend­ing on these direc­tions from NJPines​land​sand​Down​Jer​sey​.com start­ing from nearby Chatsworth NJ, self-styled “Cap­i­tal of the Pine Barrens.”

Other map views: View Larger Map | Satel­lite with Route Map