Walter's Shoe Repair

The place to have your shoes cleaned and polished in Northwest Arkansas, as far as I'm concerned, is Walter's Shoe Repair in Rogers. I paid about $10 to have two pairs of shoes cleaned. It's difficult to breathe in the repair shop, but the prices make it worth the risk of any toxic fumes I may have inhaled.

Exploring Rogers

Rogers is a suburban city in Benton County, about a 10 minute drive from Bentonville. It is the ninth most populous town in the state, with a total population of 38,829. Rogers was named after Captain Charles Warrington Rogers, who was vice-president and general manager of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad, also known as the Frisco. The town was established in 1881, the year the Frisco line arrived, it was at this time the area residents honored Captain Rogers by naming it for him. Below are a few shots I took the other day.

Day Care

Here are a few images I took of the front area of the Bright Ideas Learning Facility (http://www.bright-ideas.info/) in Bentonville, fairly close to our house. We finally found a day care facility for our daughter, albeit not this one.

However nice these people may be, the rusted mid-70's Monte Carlo was just enough to give me pause.

Pumpkin Patch

Last Sunday we traveled to McGarrah Farms in Bella Vista, which is about a 15 minute drive north from Bentonville, to visit the pumpkin patch. If anyone needs to find information on pumpkin patches in Arkansas, this site is pretty good: http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/ARpumpkins.php.

We ended up with a pretty good haul. Ines was a little pensive when we first plopped her down in the middle of the pumpkin field. A co-worker of my wife's, upon seeing the photo of our daugther's face, said that Ines was displaying the "I'm not participating" face. I think she was more concerned about whether or not this particular farm employs sustainable farming techniques.

This morning in Bentonville

Benton County Solid Waste District

Not the most exciting post, but I finally found a place to dump our glass bottles for recycling. In case anyone else in Benton County wishes to recycle their wine and beer bottles that were purchased across the state line, directions to the recycling center can be found here: http://www.bcswd.com/.

This can't be good

So everything has been great with the pool at the house we're renting here. It's been wonderful to be able to take a quick swim when the temperature hits the mid- to upper-90's.

However, last week there was a tremendous amount of rain in Northwest Arkansas which resulted a bit of algae build-up in the pool. I didn't think much of it at first; in fact, I tried to clean it a bit one Sunday morning. A few days later, I awoke to find the pool looking like this. My neighbor advised me not to swim in it.