More family pictures

Family pics on the farm

The Farm

On July 25th, at 9:30 p.m., we left California for the
sunny pastures of Sullivan County,
NY(http://www.sullivancounty.net/) and the Ruebman
family farm. We plan on living here for the next year
or so before moving on to the big city.
The farm has a pond, tractors, an old barn, lots of
frogs and snakes (I killed my first one with a
baseball bat last week) and a farmhouse that will be
our home for the next year or so. The kids miss
Berkeley of course, but they are having a great time
in their new environs.

E and I are going to share an office space in
Roscoe (http://www.roscoeny.com/) right on Main Street,
as soon as our landlord returns from a week long fishing trip.
Roscoe is 14 minutes from the farm and world famous for its
Trout Fishing. It bills itself as 'Trout Town USA'.
The kids will go to a pre-school/daycare center that
moved over here after the recent floods ruined their old school in Livingston Manor.
I will go to the city for a few
days each week to work and E is planning on consulting a bit with
her old firm and taking EMT classes in the fall.
My big plans are to build a kitchen table and improve
my guitar playing. Hunting season start in October, but I am
a member of a locally outlawed religion, and was told that no
respectable club would let
me in, so I will stick to playing music, controlling the media and of course, world domination.
The closest town to the farm andwhere we do most of our shopping is Jeffersonville, NY. Grocery store, library, sandwich shops, restaurants, juice bar and a decent hardware store. It even has furniture shops selling overpriced designer sheets.
Ted’s (now owned by a Turkish man) restaurant is where
we just had our first celebrity sighting. Sitting at a
table next to us with a rather plain woman slathered up with way
too much makeup was Joseph R. Gannascoli, who played the closeted
mobster who got whacked at the end of the last season
(http://www.josephrgannascoli.com/). The Sopranos is
my wife's fav show, so I don't even have to tell you
how excited she was. Nobody else recognized the actor
and we played it cool the entire meal.

Speaking of the gays, we even have a day to be gay in the Catskills festival just a few miles from here. It costs $15 to be gay, but you can be gay all day if you like. Check out http://daytobegay.org for more info.

The kids are still adjusting to country life.
Veronica is scared of all bugs, but has figured out she doesn't have to ' freak' every time she
spots a fly or ant.
I still hear screams coming from her room
in the middle of the night when she spots a moth, but the new windows we
ordered will help with this situation.
Miles held a frog in his hand yesterday with great pride
and seems to be taking the whole experience in stride.
He loves the farm machinery the best and told me tonight he doesn't even miss
Berkeley anymore.
The usual crap about how amazing the night sky in the country is true
and the sunsets are great, but I miss walking the 2 blocks from my house
down to the cafe to get some coffee o rwaking up to the
Times on my doorstep. I miss my neighbors and my house. We
adored our house. It was the first one we bought together and
both E and I loved every inch of it. The light bouncing off the wood floors,
the sunny kitchen, our amazing backyard that we designed and fixed up, my basement
lair, and our kids first and only bedrooms. We were looking at some
pictures of the kids in the bathtub a few nights ago and we both started crying.
It doesn't help things when our current digs feels like we are on an extended camping trip,
but we are not complaining too much as we both love being back on the east coast.

The farmhouse itself needs lots of work before summer
ends, so we are busy most days unpacking, painting or moving furniture.
We had to remove40 years of "heirlooms" to make room for all of the
'heirlooms" we brought with us from California. Nobody on my wife's side can bear
to throw anything away, so it has been left to us to clear the closets.

We are now New Yorkers and hope you come visit us
on the farm if you are in the neighborhood. If you feel like helping us
out with the kids or just relaxing by the spring fed pond, we would love to have you up.
If you don't mind, call first and see if we might need anything.