Note: I'll get to the title name in due time!
Okay, so this post is beyond a little old...but it should get me caught up to the present up until the holidays! I dumped all my pictures off my camera and went, 'Yikes! I'm am uber behind here!'...so here are a few trips down memory lane over the past months and some fun stories to go with it!
For starters: Here is our first snow that allowed me to go home early! It's not that great of a picture, but that's the point I suppose. Since then, we've had windchills in the -20's. With that being said, I would like to say, 'Thank You!' to all the nice friendly motorists that waved at me as they plowed past me on the highway...I never knew there were so many one fingered people in this town?
One joke I've had since we moved here was how we needed a 'Rupe Rock'! You know what I'm talking about, every house in this town has one. The limestone post/rock that has the family's last name etched in it and proudly displayed in the front lawn. I will assume this is the reason we never got a welcoming committee, or a homemade pie delivered to us...everyone just assumed we already knew them because all you have to do is read their rocks! It's a genius idea really, if you think about it! Well, since we don't have one yet...because of course I refuse to pay money for one and really think that making my own would 'rock'! (Tee hee!)...I made a temporary one for the season:
This is my friendly, cackling witch!
And also my friendly jack-o-'lantern' lights!
The highlight I have from Halloween night is finding out the reason that we only had 10 trick-or-treaters as opposed to the 80-100 our neighbors had. It was because the former tenants' of our house never 'hung around for very long'. (Insert note: As in they were huge druggies!) One little girl informed me that her friend had a cousin that lived here and that 'her mommy and daddy were really dirty!' She peeked in and then said, 'Wow! You have a beautiful dining room miss! It's prettier than ours even!' I proceeded to find out that high schoolers once rented it for a bit...real smart right? And the last occupants couldn't afford the gas bill so they heated attempted to heat the house with the stove in the kitchen! Niiiiice! Oh you just wait until next year all you princesses and goblins! Every kid in the neighborhood will want to come to our house...you just wait and see!
Moving right along and getting to the title of this post! I have a list of all the bijillion things I want to explore in my new town and the area's around it and finally got a chance to one weekend in the fall. We first went to Cain City Orchard in Bushton, KS! Love, Love, Love this place and want this to be my future some day!
This is the cute little house that they sell homemade jams, jellies, and some produce from!
These are the fabulous apples we picked!
That bag is an 'official' apple-pickers bag that goes around your chest kinda like a backwards backpack! I refused the offer of it from the nice man because I didn't wanna run around looking all dumb...and later discovered that perhaps I should have taken it. My scrawny canvas bag got full, heavy, and annoying QUICKLY!
Ah! 'True Love Self-Portrait' (Can't you just feel my happiness in this pic!)
Ginormous apple orchard!
Once you pick your hear out of apples (15 pounds to be exact!) you take them into this cute little shed where they dump them in this polisher to make your apples shiny and pretty!
You can also pay a $1.00 to shoot old apples that have fallen on the ground from a slingshot!
If only you could have seen the look on my face when I found out about this!
Conversation:
(Me reading a sign in the shed: 'Apple Shooting: 6 for $1.00' and having already eyed the slingshot and bull's eye...knew exactly what they were talking about!)
Me: OMG...can I do that J...please, please, please!
J: (Not having noticed the slingshot or the bull's eye and literally thinking they meant allowing me a real gun to shoot up apples with.) Uh, no.
Me: Oh come on...it's not like we'll be back this year! Let loose and have some good ol' fashioned fun for once!
J: We don't have time!
Me: Yeah we do! (I then promptly bought one bucket of apples with a huge grin on my face!)
I got pretty close with my second apple. Then I decided that since I was having so much fun, I should let J in on it (since now he has figured out they didn't mean apple 'shooting'). He didn't seem amused and I think was really just humoring me more than anything. Until...
Check out that look on his face! He was so getting into it! Best quote of the day from him at the orchard:
'Man, I could so sit here and do this all day while drinking some beers!'
Needless to say it was 'little kid' fun and those times are the best!
After that, we headed over to Dozier Winery to sample some of their homemade wines!
This is the sampling room / gift shop / old train depot!
This is inside the old train depot and the 'Santa Fe' sign up top is the original one!
This is another original 'Santa Fe' sign for the depot and was taken from the gift shop side. The window there is the window where passengers would buy their tickets.
Mmmmm! These are all the wines we sampled! The one on the end is a Jalapeno Wine that they created for cooking / marinades...they had us sample just a swig...and yes...it was definitely made with peppers!!!
After all our sampling and purchasing of Sandhill Plum Wine and Concord Grape Wine (tasted just like grape jelly...so much so that I went home, made a peanut butter sandwich, and dipped it in a glass of the wine...shhh...don't tell anyone!) we decided to go for a stroll thru their forest! How beautiful it was with the pretty leaves, a nice buzz (as noted in my smile!), my lovely man, and a perfectly crisp autumn day!
Well, that should get me caught up to December...and I might just skip right over that and move on to 2010!
Oh crap...SCHMAPPLES!...I forgot to get to that. Well, needless to say we were getting pretty creative with our 15 pounds of apples. We used a lot of them for making homemade wine (which we finally finished up last weekend!). We then decided to slice a lot of them up in rings and throw 'em in the dehydrator. Oh YUM! The result was a crisp apple chip almost! I got so excited and crazed over them, I started calling them 'schmapples' except I would say it in a loud, high pitched voice over and over and over like the big dork I am! And so then every time I saw an apple...I started calling them schmapples...then J picked up on it...and now all apples in our house are 'scccchhhhhmapples!' There you have it!
