Why I Oughta...

The craft brewing craze has hit Lemax's Christmas Village in the form of The Hop Stop .  This is new in 2019 - for Lemax and being sold at Menards and is currently listed for $34.99 as part of the Harvest Crossing series .  This is the second day of posting some Lemax Christmas Village buildings from Menards.  Yesterday, I posted some images of the animated North Pole Tower .  Mantleburg had a tavern back in the day , but one would think that the tough times might bring about even more drinking establishments, but the Hop Stop is a little too bougie for a town like Mantleburg that is down on it's luck. 

The time has come for the Lemax Christmas Village posts from the setup at Menards.  I've done this over the years as my interest grew in the little village things and now that my interest is on the wane, I still enjoy going to see the setup and posting some of the more interesting structures.  The first one up is this North Pole Tower that is animated and makes some sound.  You can see the animation in the top image and the product page is here on the Lemax site .  This is new to me - and I think new to Menards - but it was released in 2018.  Part of the Santa's Wonderland series, I suppose it would be nice in Mantleburg, but the town has fallen on some seriously hard times.  Oh, and for you crazy people...this thing retails for $99.99.  Woah. 

A couple of weekends back, we took the kids to Richardson Adventure Farm up near the Illinois/Wisconsin border for some - you know - "Fall Fun".  This place has pig races, corn cannons, jumpy houses, zip lines, little rides and...the "World's Largest Corn Maze".  This year's theme is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo program.  We decided to try one of the smallest sections with the kids and they provided us a tip:  "take every left turn".  We did that and ended up at the exit in short order.  How do they make these mazes?  Sounds like there's a technology-enabled GPS way .  And a different, more old-fashioned way .  The Richardson folks also run a tree farm that we visited to check out as a potential option for trees this year.  More on that in another post. 

It appears that we have a confused rhododendron in our backyard.  Nat told me that one of our two rhododendrons were flowering out back and I didn't believe her.  Wrong time of year.  I went back there - and sure enough - she was right.  A small purple flower had emerged from one of the buds that the shrub has been setting as it heads into dormancy.  This same thing happened last year with our Chanticleer Pear flowering tree out front - it flowered in early November .  Back to the rhododendron, it appears (for now) that there's just one flower, so I'm not concerned.  This story claims that it isn't that rare for them to flower in the Autumn.  I'll return to these shrubs before the Winter sets in with a Wilt-Pruf application like I've did last year . 

Yesterday, I posted a photo of the large Oak tree that we use for our tree swing and today, I'm posting another larger tree in our yard that is pre-losing its leaves:  one of our Catalpa trees.  We have four of them and there are actually three in this photo.  The large one in the middle of course coupled with a Walnut tree on the left that has lost all of its leaves already.  But, tucked on in on either side of the Walnut tree?  A pair of small Catalpa trees: You may or may not know Catalpa trees, as I didn't either until we moved in and inherited these.  They're a pretty unique tree because they are considered what I would call an 'All of the above' tree .  That means they're a shade tree.  And a flowering tree.  And an ornamental tree.  They flower in the late Spring and have beans in the Fall.  And the leaves are H-U-G-E.  I like a lot about these trees, but I don't think that I've ever come across them in the nursery. They're native,

Last Summer, I documented the 'mighty' Oak Tree that we inherited in our backyard here on the blog in June.  As we're moving to late October, I wanted to post here the view - looking northeast - of the same tree and canopy before it drops all of its leaves.  This was a Mast Year and it dropped thousands of acorns, but like always, the leaves are clinging on to "fall" what seems to be the last leaves in the yard every year. There's no way to know how old this tree is, but I know we lop'd off some limbs before we built and opened up the tree a bit.  That means that this year, we saw quite a bit of growth on the large limbs to 'puff them up' a bit with new branches/leaf clumps.  The tips grew just fine, but that exposure of new parts of the central limbs has allowed the tree to fatten up a bit more this season.

I was sitting at the gate in my American Airlines plane waiting to back away when this ANA plane taxi'ed by our gate.  A NA is a Japanese carrier that is doing a "Star Wars Project" as they call it.  I've flown a few times to Japan (Narita), but I've only flown either United or JAL.  This BB-8 livery is one of three in the Star Wars fleet:  they also have a R2-D2 and C-3PO versions . If you're interested in seeing it, the fine folks at Flight Radar 24 have provided this tracking link :  Follow the BB-8 777-300ER with registration JA789A . For you #AvGeeks, t he BB-8 livery is on a Boeing 767-300 .  This plane is awfully cute - but I think it is pretty clear: the C-3PO livery is the *best* one of the three, right?  Check out the release on the ANA Star Wars site here for full details including the cabin details that match the livery: From ANA's Star wars microsite - showing the cups, aprons and seat headrests all C-3PO-themed. This is not my