October 3, 2010

Goodbye, Minnesota Harvest Apple Orchard! Shortarmguy Diary Update for October 3, 2010



Goodbye, Minnesota Harvest Apple Orchard!

October 3, 2010


I had an interesting sale at Nor-Tech this week.  I sold a high end visualization system to an oil company in Dubai.  It features two nVidia Quadroplex video servers and one of our high end Voyageur workstations.  A similar system is what's used to drive the big video screens inside Dallas Stadium.  If anyone has $30,000 to blow on a killer home theater system, give me a call at work!  I'll hook you up!


Long time followers of Shortarmguy.com will remember me telling stories about the albino squirrels that have been around us since Luke and Avery have been born.  We consider them to be Guardian Angels for our family because they'd always seem to show up whenever we had to deal with something stressful like a surgery for one of the boys.  Well, we still see them from time to time and this week we were delighted when a baby albino squirrel showed up in our back yard.  I took a bunch of pictures of this little guy, then had a momentary lapse of reason when I told Avery it was OK to let our Golden Retriver, Sunny, outside.  The dog is a bit slow and has never come close to catching a squirrel before, but apparently this little guy didn't have a lot of experience evading big, slobbering dogs.    He ran towards our porch and then turned around and tried to make it back to a tree.  Sunny stood between him and his destination and hit the little guy with his paw.  Luckily, he missed catching him in his mouth, though, and the baby squirrel made it to the tree unharmed (we hope!)  We haven't seen the little guy since this happened and are hoping he's recovering well.  We're guessing he won't be coming in our backyard any time soon, though!


On Saturday, we went to the wedding reception of an old friend of ours, Tony Jelenik.  He married a nice lady named Deb that he met about a year ago.  It was our first time to meet her and she seemed like quite the catch for our man, Tony!



Congratulations, Tony and Deb!!



On a sadder note, on Sunday we went to visit our favorite Apple Orchard, Minnesota Harvest, and discovered they're closing down permanently!  Apparently it's been sold to some developer who's going to turn it into a bunch of houses.  Whoever lives there better invite us over every autumn to eat some apples or we're going to be pissed!




This parking lot used to be overflowing with pumpkins!  Now it's just full of sad memories of October's in the past when we used to come here and do pony rides and eat apple pie and take tractor rides through the fields where people go to pick apples, but we just went for rides because we didn't really have the desire to pick apples!


We still hopped on the tractor trailer and took a free hay ride, but it just didn't feel the same since they told us we could buy any tree we wanted for only $100 each.  We don't want any stinking trees!!  We want our free hay rides through the apple orchard to continue forever!



We have pictures going back for years with the boys holding apples in the middle of the apple orchard.  And now those pictures are coming to an end!  It may be for the best, though.  When they were little, they were just fascinated at having the opportunitiy of seeing trees full of colorful apples.  Now all they can think of is picking the right ones that we can use to throw out the car window on our drive home.  It's probably a good thing that these crazy little boys won't have the chance to continue to build bad apple habits any more.


Since we didn't get to fill our Apple Pie fix, we decided to drive down the road to Emma Krumbees.  We've never liked this place much because they like to charge really high prices.  We discovered that things haven't changed much.  They now want you to pay $5.00 apiece to go for a walk through their little scarecrow patch and it used to be free!  They also charged us for cups of water to go along with our pie and that is blasphemy as far as I'm concerned.  Blasphemy!  Why couldn't that silly developer have bought Emma Krumbees instead of Minnesota Harvest?  My guess is they tried to charge him too much money!   



1 comment:

  1. Minnesota Harvest will be open again this fall. New management has leased the orchard from the developer. There will be a Blessing of the Blossoms event on Sunday May 22, 2011. See Minnesota Harvest website for details.

    ReplyDelete