Playin' at the 'Wicki!

Well, after months of us waiting, Brody finally called Kevin on Wednesday with "good news".

(Kevin later commented to me that Brody recently got promoted to sales manager, and anyone with management training would know how to spin even a worst case scenario to present it to a customer as good news.)

But in our case Brody's news was in fact good, and almost the best case scenario! The township had their "meeting" (a two minute phone call) with Clayton Homes and are only demanding a "small" stormwater plan for our property. Brody said it's the smallest he's ever seen, and smaller than the one his township is currently making him do. (He and his fiancee recently acquired a property overlooking the Susquehanna River and are also having a house built by Clayton Homes).

The downside is we're still on the hook for $7500 for something we don't want or need, but the upside is the plan is so small that Clayton can just draw it up on the build plans themselves instead of having to hire a stormwater engineer who will charge $600 an hour and make sure it takes him half a day's work to trace the outline of a safety pin on the sketches that will be submitted to the township.

So we're guaranteed an approved build permit at this point. And since $7500 is a whole lot less than the $22,000 we might have been on the hook for, the total projected costs are back down under $400,000 and should be back in budget for us.

We'll know soon!

In the meantime I made chicken, potatoes, and green beans in gravy for dinner Wednesday evening, and then we canceled out the healthiness of the meal with ice cream for dessert :)

Then on Thursday we made a sausage, tomato, and onion pizza for a quick dinner:

Then Taylor, Ahlina, and CJ surprised Riley and picked her up to take her to FallFest at Shady Brook Farm.

They apparently didn't take any pictures the entire evening night, but Riley said they went on a haunted hayride, had funnel cake, listened to live music while they walked around, and had a lot of fun!

In the meantime, Kevin and I still haven't started a new show since we finished watching Grimm. Kevin doesn't really like committing to watching an entire movie (he says he's "been burned too many times") but he was reluctantly scrolling through Netflix in search of something tolerable.

He came to Highlander and said "I've never seen this, but people still quote it all the time. And everyone always talked about it like it was awesome. Is it any good?"

I told him it was okay. Just kind of dated now.

So we watched it.

And three minutes in, Kevin's eyes glazed over and I could tell he was bored out of his mind.

Then at the end he said it was one of the worst movies he had ever seen, with "crappy characters, no plot, and the absolute lamest antagonist of all time."

Friday night we made enchiladas for dinner. Kevin took care of the chicken and made fresh pico de gallo while I stopped at Giant on my way home from work and got some Spanish rice and refried beans.

The enchiladas were phenomenal:

Later in the evening, we were scrolling through some standup comedy videos on YouTube in search of something to watch, and we came across Matt Rife's Walking Red Flag.

Kevin reminded me that his brother-in-law Steve told us to check Matt out "like 15 years ago" (ahem, probably back in June or July). So we decided to give it a shot and it was hilarious, especially for being improvisational!

Saturday afternoon our downstairs neighbors were being particularly bangy and slammy, even for them.

We looked out the window and spotted a cargo van but we couldn't tell whether a bunch of stuff had come from Africa or was headed to Africa.

Kevin did notice their peculiar way of spelling Pennsylvania though:

Saturday evening, we headed over to Kevin's parents' house for dinner. Catherine made some of her delicious lasagna and Ron bought Tasty Kakes for dessert.

It was a beautiful day:

But when Kevin went out to harvest more tomatoes from our garden, he came back in and said, "Well when we starve this week, this is who we blame!":

Later that night, Kevin agreed to watch Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets which I had seen before and felt like watching again when I found it on Netflix.

His eyes glazed over pretty quickly again and he clearly wasn't a fan, although at least he said it had three good parts and was better than Highlander.

And finally Sunday (yesterday) we had plans to go hiking.

Riley decided she wasn't feeling up to it, so Kevin and I decided to burn another Burger King coupon for a quick lunch. But my primary debit card got unexpectedly declined in the drive thru, so then we made a pit stop at TD Bank literally right next door to demand an explanation and another new card (since this card was not even two weeks old yet itself)!

An hour later, we found out that my card had been locked due to an Etsy purchase I made the night before: That transaction had been flagged as potentially fraudulent because I had finally thought to update my last name on my Etsy account (we've only been married since May you know!) and apparently Etsy or TD or somebody thought this was suspicious enough to justify locking the card entirely instead of just calling or texting me to ask "Hey, was this you?"

Then we ate our cold Burger King (after driving down the street to park in the outskirts of the Giant parking lot, because Kevin didn't want to be on 50 cameras in the TD lot).

And then we finally headed to Playwicki Park for our hike!

The last time we were here (early April) it still looked like winter.

This time we were hoping it might look like fall.

First impression? Things were still pretty green:

But we saw some color as we parked:

And some more as we got on our way to the forest:

A few hundred feet into the woods, I saw Kevin stop to snap a picture. But I couldn't imagine of what.

What are you taking a picture of, my love?

So, yeah, that was a thing.

Everybody knows Raphael from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Myrtles, right?

Cowabunga, I guess?

And then he was off!

We just spent an hour sitting in the bank doing nothing, so I knew he was in a hurry to get into the actual woods.

(And now there was the rest of the TMNM gang to find as well.)

The Causeway

We arrived at what Kevin calls "the causeway" and got some really amazing pictures:

TMNM

We went up for a quick peek at the old (now nonexistent) railroad tracks before venturing deeper into the woods:

A short time later we stopped for a few minutes to take some pictures.

And suddenly Kevin announced, "Found Michelangelo!"

Then he looked up and saw this:

So, I guess I found all four of them?

Raph, Mikey, Mikey, and Mikey?

Oh well, I can photoshop it when we get home.

And for my part, I got a picture of the myrtles' mentor, Master Splinter:

Down to the Creek

Despite being within 100 feet or so from the creek for our entire hike, there are only really a few places where you can actually get down to the water easily.

Kevin snapped this picture just after we found Mikey, Mikey, and Mikey:

A short while later, we came to another clearing and spotted four people kayaking.

Kevin called out to ask if they were okay with a picture, and then they asked if this was Playwicki and how far out in the woods we thought we were:

It turns out they had kayaked all the way from Tyler State Park! And the front man said they only had to get out and walk twice (one of which, we later reckoned, would've been the "danger dam" at Tyler).

We got some other great pictures of the water and the foliage too:

And I tried my hand at a panorama here:

Further into the Woods

Then it was back up into the woods to press onward:

Kevin tried a panorama here where the forest finally gave us a reprieve from all the brambles and brush:

And as soon as I saw him spot this fire pit and pull his camera back out, I knew a satirical remark was incoming:

There were plenty of rocks two feet away, but we couldn't blame anyone for not wanting to try their luck at playing Jenga with any of these:

Once you get far enough back, you have to start crossing tiny streams periodically:

A Hitchhiker

I found a tick crawling on me when we got home, so Kevin jokingly but seriously said I should make a section called "Places Where I Might've Picked Up a Tick."

And there were quite a few:

But eventually the woods opened up again:

Kevin snapped these two pictures so he could "shame these trees on the blog" for not changing color yet:

Even though we only went out about a mile and a half, that's still a three mile round trip. Not too shabby!

The terrain definitely gave us a workout, and we had to do all of it twice since we took the same exact route back to the car.

Kevin got some lovely shots of the sun peeking through the trees on the way back:

And one of an old helium tank?

And some creepy dead trees:

The Artist

I was telling him while we walked to the woods after we first got there, I never really considered myself a shutterbug. I never took many pictures until I had my kids, and I never imagined myself developing an eye for photography.

But I've really come to enjoy telling a story through taking pictures of the things that I see when we hike.

Aaannndd apparently Kevin has come to enjoy taking pictures of me as I take my pictures:

He also enjoys rolling his eyes and giving me a "knowing" look anytime we come across berries because he knows I'm going to stand there for ten minutes trying to get my phone camera to focus on them:

The Art

We each got some more really great pictures along the way.

Here are Kevin's:

He said this one looked like Diane Feinstein reincarnated as a tree:

I got an interesting creepy tree shot too. And a few others :)

Something must've gotten to a woodpecker here. There were feathers everywhere!

These silver mushrooms were unremarkable when looking down at them. But from below?

On our way home, this jerk with a Louisiana plate cut me off, so I held my hand on my horn for a good 30 seconds until Kevin managed to stop cracking up long enough to point out that everyone else at the red light was also suffering through my horn even though they hadn't done anything wrong.

Then the guy either waved at us or gave us the finger. We couldn't tell which. Kevin said "Maybe he'll get out of the car and I'll get to Baton him right in his Rouge."

But he didn't.

And as soon as the light turned green, I switched lanes and sped past him (so fast that Kevin couldn't even get a picture, but he said the guy looked "kind of inbred".)

The rest of the evening was uneventful, but this morning I finally got the go ahead to drop my car off at Caliber Collision so they can fix the damage from when I got rear ended on the turnpike last month.

Then Enterprise picked me up and gave me a Chevy Malibu to drive around in until my car is fixed.

And since I had preemptively called out of work for today back on Friday anyway, Kevin reached out to Brody to see if it was a good day to drive out for a visit. (Might as well put the wear and tear on the rental instead of on my car!)

So we're heading out to Paradise in a couple hours to hash out some of the house details with Brody in person since we finally got a lock on the whole stormwater issue and we can start moving forward again :)