Cox Farms

Kim has had a bee in her bonnet to head out to Cox Farms for a while, now that the leaves are finally changing and fall is in the air. I came home from work a little early on Friday, and even though the website said it closed at 6, we thought we'd be ok to leave at 3:30 and spend a few hours there. After battling some ridiculous traffic, we rolled up to the gates at 5:06, willing to still pay the $9 per person in order to enjoy at least an hour, making our painful journey there worth it in some small way. Instead, the 15 year old running the front booth informed us that we could not enter.

"Why not?"

"Because we close at 6."

"Yeah, but it's 5."

"We stop letting people enter at 5, because they won't have time to do the hay ride."

"We don't care about the hay ride, we just want to walk around and let our kids play. Come on, it took us an hour and a half to get here, please just let us pay and go in."

"Sorry, it's against the rules."

"What time is it right now?"

"5:06"

"So if we had gotten here 7 minutes ago, you would have let us in?"

"Yes"

It was at this point that we decided to stop talking to this teenager, and at least take a look around their country store. Conveniently for us, the back door of the country store opened into the farm, and with only a minimal amount of guilt and stealth, we were soon enjoying the wonder that Cox Farms had to offer our kids. We were the only ones walking around without wrist bands, but it didn't overly hamper us. Thanks, Cox Farms!

Happy family of thieves

Seneca Falls Hike, West Virginia

The End of an Era

This is our new house. This is the reason why we haven't been posting, since we've been busy moving. We like it.



If we ever get done unpacking and get around to cleaning inside, I'll post some pictures of that. For now, the important details are:

• It is a stand alone, actual house, not a basement, apartment, townhouse, duplex or any other kind of shared tenement. For the first time in 8 years of marriage, the space is entirely our own.
• There are 3 bedrooms. This is vital, since our baby is due in 6 weeks.
• There is a second bathroom!
• It is about two and a half times the size of our previous place.
• There is a GIGANTIC unfinished basement that is filled with our junk. I think we should just set it all on fire before we move again. As it is, we made 5 trips to the house with our friends' vans, then two more smaller trips with our 17 foot moving truck, and then an entirely full move with our moving truck that still nearly didn't fit everything.
• There is a sun room on the side of the house.
• The owner refinished the (all wooden) floors and painted for us. This led to a crisis of epic proportions as Kim tried to pick out paint colors while I was traveling in Ghana. I won't go into all the sordid details, but suffice it to say that she got her color (if not her sheen) in the end.

Despite all of these wonderful changes, the new house is sadly not on South Veitch St. We've loved our three years on Veitch, and will really miss our friends over there. We're still in the same ward and Megan is attending the same school, but it's sad to think we can't walk up the street for a donut from 7-11 and run into tons of friends on the way.

The new neighborhood is great -- we are still within walking distance of a couple of parks, there are a lot of kids, many of our neighbors have come by to welcome us, and it is not a through street, so there isn't much traffic. We're have reason to believe that even though it is not Veitch St., we might survive. Stay tuned to find out.