the embarrassment of having a housekeeper

When you're a stay-at-home mom, it feels really decadent to have a housekeeper three days a week. Don't get me wrong - I can survive the guilty feelings, but it does feel bad. I feel like I should be curing cancer or something instead of surfing the internet when Ruth is here, so generally that means I leave home during her hours of work.

So today when Ruth got here, I took inordinate pleasure in the fact that I really was working. I am in the process of updating sponsor information on the corn maze website, so I was able tell her - truthfully - that I'm a partner in a business in the US and that I was working on the website. Not exactly curing cancer, but I could tell she thought that was important.

I kept working, but I could hear the blender going. The next thing I knew, she was bringing me a freshly juiced glass of passionfruit juice. She said it helps with attention.

D-E-C-A-D-E-N-T. I love this woman.

P.S. For you corn maze lovers out there, check out www.WestFarmCornMaze.com for everything that's going on this year at the maze. Everything's been updated but the sponsorship information. This year, there's a reward program with our sponsors, so you can get all sorts of neat discounts and free food, etc.

P.P.S Our sea shipment is being delivered on Friday morning at 11am.

welcome to the fat farm

When you're alone, driving stakes into the ground in a middle of a 6-acre corn maze, you have a lot of time to think. Possibly too much time to think.

Today as I was sweating under a hot, blazing sun wondering where the rain that we were supposed to be getting was, I came up with what is surely a brilliant idea.

We are on year 5 of the corn maze and for all these years, I have referenced the "corn maze diet". The diet isn't really about food; it's more about exercise, which I get entirely too little of during most of the year.

And then those few weeks before the corn maze come around, and I put in a lot of hours of sweaty physical labor. The year's accumulated weight falls off and I can see my clothes loosening their tight grip.

I know the Corn Maze Diet works because last year, I didn't come home until after the corn maze started, thereby missing those pre-opening weeks that are crucial to the success of the Corn Maze Diet and I didn't lose any weight at all.

This provides - for me anyway - the empirical, scientific evidence that the pre-opening weeks and the physical labor attached to them are the key. The food part of the diet takes care of itself. You're either too tired to eat or your metabolism is working so well from the exertion that you can eat what you want and there's no gain.

So here's where the brilliance comes in. We could run a fat farm for 2-3 weeks every September. If you were looking to lose weight, you come to West Farm and we help you take it off. It might not be pretty and there will be a lot of dirt involved. You'll sweat more than any class at the Y; the hours will be long and arduous; you'll sleep well without the assistence of Tylenol PM (except you might need it to dull the muscle aches); you'll do weight training, resistance training, interval training without even realizing you're doing it; and everything will hurt, be blistered, bleeding, nicked, or cut at some point during those few weeks. BUT your shorts will be loose after just two short weeks.

Best of all? You don't even have to pay for this boot camp. We'll let you come for free.

Is this not brilliant? We get our corn maze prep work done and you (that's a royal you, not a "you" you) get the fat farm for free.

Of course, the drawback is that we (and that's the "we" we and not the royal we) get fatter and lazier and our pants get tighter.

Clearly, I need to spend more time in the corn maze alone....

when a lightweight does heavyweight work

how do I know the corn maze opening is just around the corner?

When I come home from a morning of work, take off my socks and tennis shoes, and still find this much grime under those two protective layers:

October 2 is our opening day of the 2009 season. If you're in the area, please come out to see us!

my first visit to the Berkeley County Airport

Today I went to the Berkeley County Airport to take a little plane ride with a local pilot so I could take the aerial photo of the corn maze.

For our first four years of operation, our friend and pilot Randy Bales took our photo from his plane. But you may recall that last year during our corn maze season, Randy was hit and killed by an unlicensed driver while riding his motorcycle to work. Sadly, we were forced this year to find someone else.

The corn maze has given me lots of opportunities to do things I would never have done before. Like cold-calling the Berkeley County Airport and explaining what we needed done and asking if they could recommend a pilot who might be interested. And then having to cold-call a pilot and explaining what we needed done and asking him if we could hire him.

Randy always took the photos while piloting his plane, so we just got the end product. The pilot that I contacted said that one of us could go up in the plane and take the photos. Ummm. That's a lot of responsibility that I never realized was on Randy's shoulders. He had to take THE perfect photo, all while piloting a plane 2000 feet in the air!

When I saw Steven and Charlotte this weekend, I told them of the plan and that we needed to draw straws to see who would go up. I was secretly hoping it would be me because I've always wanted to see the corn maze from the air. Charlotte immediately said she was out of the contest because she doesn't do small planes. Steven said he was working and so I won! YEA!

Except that I started wondering how safe this really was. After all, I am the mother of one, hopefully soon-to-be two boys. My husband's in Afghanistan. And my most favorite blogs in the whole world are written by two irreverent but deeply Mormon sisters in Utah, one of whom suffered burns over 85% of her body a year ago in a terrible plane crash. Was this worth it? Our only other choice was Mom, and quite frankly, Mom, you were never really an option because we've seen the photos you've attempted to take in the past.

So I went to the Berkeley County Airport today for our 4:30pm flight. I thought I saw very ominous clouds on the horizon so I commented on this in my most meteorological expert-sounding voice, but the pilot told me it was a beautiful day for flying. Whatever.

And then I looked for a nice big sort of jet-looking plane and only saw these little propeller planes. Where were the bigger-ish planes? You know the ones where you don't have to fold yourself up to get in? The ones that don't look like they require a rubberband to get the prop going?

The fuel man filling up the plane before we took off. Now is not the time to try and save a buck. FILL IT UP!

But what was I going to do? Chicken out?

Funny I should mention chickens because while I was in the airport terminal (and yes, that's what they called it), two men came in in their very official University of South Carolina-logoed gear. I didn't think much of it because my pilot was telling me it was time to go.

We climbed into this little baby and after going through pages of pre-flight safety stuff, we got to the end of taxiing and stopped. I heard all this chatter on my headset but didn't know what any of it meant until the pilot pointed to a plane that was coming in and said that as soon as that plane landed, we'd take off. This is when I realized that I could never be a pilot: I never even saw that plane coming.

So the plane landed and it was a sleek little jet, all black with a big old Gamecock logo painted on the tail. Very cool. Mac would have loved to see that. So I guess these guys were recruiting down here and heaven forbid they have to drive the whole 1.5 hours back to Columbia in a car. You might not know this but we tried to get the rights to do a Clemson-Carolina theme at the corn maze a couple years ago. We had to go through both schools' athletic department attorneys and the collegiate licensing board (or whatever it's called) and they decided we were going to have to pay both universities royalties plus a fee to use their logos. At the time, I thought "this is ridiculous, we're a small family farm just trying to do an interesting and relevant corn maze theme, we've paid lots of money to both these schools for tuition and booster clubs and athletic events, etc." Well today I thought "this is still ridiculous but I understand better why they wanted our relatively paltry bit of money. It takes A LOT of money to fly that sweet little plane around to recruit players."

Back to the flight. So we took off; we headed out to the corn maze; I took photos; he changed elevation and I took more photos; we toured around the lake, the locks, downtown Moncks Corner, the Cane Bay area, etc. It was all very enjoyable and I do believe that everybody should take a flight around their hometown every once in awhile. But I will be the first to tell you that I was glad to get back on terra firma.

Now I just need to figure out how to be a Gamecock recruiter...

A sad day at the corn maze

If you've ever visited our corn maze website, the first thing you see is an aerial photo of the maze. That photo is what hooks people on the idea of walking through a corn field because the picture is always so cool. Since our beginning in 2005, our photos have been taken by Randy Bales, a quiet, hard-working guy who loves to fly airplanes and ride motorcycles.

Yesterday morning, Randy was riding his motorcycle and was struck by a driver who ran a red light. Randy died of blunt force trauma. He is survived by his wife and 7year-old son. The other driver had several traffic violations already, was an unlicensed driver and is now free on bail even though he killed a good family man whose son only got 7 short years with his Daddy and whose wife is now faced with the seemingly impossible task of trying to live without her mate.

Randy came into our lives in a manner that so typical of small-town life. About 9 months before we opened the first corn maze, I was having my teeth cleaned at our local dentist's office in Moncks Corner. My dental hygienist Cindy mentioned in passing that her husband had a small plane and loved to take it up. I asked if he could take a photo for us on one of his flights, he agreed, and the rest is history. This is one of a million reasons why I love small-town life. And we loved Randy Bales for his warm and unassuming personality, his good work ethic, and his great multi-tasking abilities (he could fly the plane AND take photos at the same time). We loved Randy because he brought their son on a school field trip to the corn maze when there weren't a lot of other dads taking time off to do that. We loved Randy because he always came out to the corn maze with his family on a weekend afternoon when he probably had a million other things he'd rather be doing. Our hearts are heavy today.

To check out all of Randy's photos, cut and paste the following link: http://www.westfarmcornmaze.com/west_farm_corn_maze_015.htm.