Today’s haircolor: the perfect red, accented with a few speckles of warm beige semi-gloss wall paint.

Well, we made it.  Here we are in Iowa City—and oh, I have so much to talk about…! 

SO.  Iowa City is great so far.  We have a cute place, but when we first arrived this little white box was a blank canvas—and in need of some work.  The house numbers had melted off in the heat, the basement was full of cracks, the house reeked of old cobwebs, dust, and grime from within the ventilation system, and the flower beds were just mud and weeds…but we’re working on this place and finding it to be extraordinarily therapeutic and coming along nicely!  This is our country home, dammit, and we’re gonna make it nice if it kills us!

So far, we’ve replaced the house numbers, repainted the cement basement floor a deep chocolate color (where it was previously blue-grey speckled and wearing off in patches), filled in all the cracks in the basement walls with foam and caulk, replaced the door sweeps, and installed thresholds (so the buggles can’t get in and the doors will seal in the heat during the winter months).  We installed blinds, painted the living room walls a welcoming beige, scrubbed the hardwood floors, hung additional towel bars in the bathroom, and supplied each room with an area rug (affordable ones, too—thank you, Lowe’s!).  Every day we make more improvements.  I can hear Alex drilling away in the basement, and next I’ll be working on our flower beds and garden!

Aside from the abundant thunderstorms that come at night and the tornado warning sirens we work up to on Monday morning, it’s very quiet here in our little suburban neighborhood.  We have two big maple trees in our front yard, a backyard surrounded by bushes, and a back patio made of flat stones with weeds poking thru the cracks that I need to pull.  Everything is green. 

We have bunnies hopping around our yard at all hours and butterflies flitting about outside the front window as I’m writing this.  It’s so calm and nice here, people drive civilly for a change, and I have to tell you—I haven’t felt this thin and pretty in YEARS!  As it turns out, LA can be tough on the self esteem!  Who knew??!?

We’re driving a Ford SUV now, as you probably know from my previous posts, and I am so thankful we decided to go the rugged route—I literally haven’t seen ONE Mercedes-Benz since we left California.

Today we’re going to get a grill at the Fin & Feather out on Highway 6 (so exciting!), and we’re planning to embrace all that is Iowa with a trip to the Dairy Queen for Peanut Buster Parfaits later (they’re donating all of today’s proceeds to a children’s charity—I saw it on the local news).  And get this: believe it or not, Alex is actually performing at the Iowa State Fair tomorrow night with a band called The Nadas—who are apparently HUGE in Iowa—because they cover one of The Damnwells’ songs, “Kiss Catastrophe.”  I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to see him perform!  We’re gonna go get some corn on the cob, ride The Zipper, maybe get our faces painted, and Alex is gonna sing a cover of his own song—it’s gonna be HILARIOUS. 

What a nice change of pace for us…