September 2022

Welcome to fall, with warm September days and chilly nights. Good for sleeping with the windows open, for sure. The pumpkins in the garden have been harvested and are chilling in the basement waiting for Halloween and the rest of the garden is slowly being cleared out. We already have next year's garden partially planned out. Maybe fewer tomatoes next time...

Also: gettin' mah hairs did while I watched mah stories:

They were disappointed that my hair wasn't long enough for liberty spikes.

Emily and Vanessa spotted me taking their picture before the homecoming game halftime performance:

Rose with the help of her cheer squad cleverly spelling out a message asking Fern to the homecoming dance:

And Mr. Ballard leading a cheer. Remember, it's always a great day to be a Warrior:

This is Rose's last year of cheering at Wash. It's all going so fast! More pictures from the homecoming game:

Friday night lights:

Leaving for the homecoming dance:

Cool siblings pose:

Cynthia picked up an old Fisher Price Little People house and began working on turning it into a haunted house:

After a coat of black primer and a coat of dark grayish brown paint leftover from the ceiling fan, Cynthia started painting around the raised details:

Some Family Dollar skulls were added:

Last coat of weathering paint done and painting in the small details:

Popsicle sticks were used to board up the windows and make window boxes. Dried moss was added, too:

If there was actually a spider on your house that size I think you would hear it before you saw it:

Speaking of haunted houses, the girls picked up a couple of haunted house cookie kits:

We tried eating some of the cookies and stuff used to decorate the houses, but they were not great. Not really intended for eating, just for looks, yo.

Rose and Fern's house is on the right:

We put the finishing touches on the kitchen, adding a glass mosaic backsplash, baseboards, and a range hood. The kitchen looks so friggin' awesome almost like it doesn't even belong in our house.

Working on the backsplash:

Backsplash done, range hood installed, microwave moved into the kitchen:

Baseboards installed:

Now we just have to wait for the window guy to come out and replace the two kitchen windows in October and we will be DONE.

When Halloween stuff started appearing on store shelves we picked up a life-size skeleton, which then began showing up in random places around the house to scare people. This time he's waiting for Rose to come home from work:

Cynthia and I spent a Saturday in Des Moines visiting some of our favorite places. We had lunch at the Drake Diner, which still looks exactly the way it did the first time I went there. The food was awesome:

In my day you wouldn't be caught dead wearing your jammies to school. That's the kind of thing kids used to have nightmares about. Also, if you and your crew all showed up and you're obviously all wearing the same pants. Times have changed:

October 2021

Boo!

October is always a fun month, better than some of those other lame months, anyway (I'm looking at you, February). With the change in weather and the shift into fall comes all kinds of cool things like the cider stroll through Czech Village and NewBo and of course all the skeletons and pumpkins that pop up everywhere you look. And in that spirit we went to TCR and saw "Let the Right One In" which is an adaptation of one of my favorite movies (watch the original Swedish movie with English subtitles, not the cringeworthy American version) and it was good to see something like that after social distancing for so long. It was a small production that took place in the basement allowing us to sit in the front row and be almost in the middle of the action.

Rose and her friends came over to our house for dinner before homecoming:

This was our first time making garlic shrimp pasta and man, it was good stuff.

Shuttin' down the cider stroll:

Rose cheered for football again and we went to most of the games. My parents and the Conrads joined us when they could as well. Freezin' our butts off:

And Emily got her hair colored and a septum ring! She's doing proper teenagering these days:

Rose and her friends went trick-or-treating:

Cynthia and I carved pumpkins. The girls felt they were too old/cool to be bothered with such nonsense, so it was just the two of us. Cynthia is cleaning out the inside of her pumpkin using a baking mixer attachment on a drill. Makes that normally messy process go a lot faster and easier:

Check out our sweet pumpkins; the vampire from Transylvania 6-5000 and Grumpy Cat:

November 2020

In November Cynthia and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary by going to DSM and staying in our nifty mid-century modern hideaway again. And we visited Peace Tree when we got there:

 

A picture-perfect breakfast:

After a brisk walk around Gray's Lake we explored the new tunnel connecting to Waterworks Park:

All those years living in DSM and we never visited the Salisbury House. So we checked that off the list and it was even better than expected. As cool as it was I still think I like Glensheen better. This place is quite the castle, though. It was built for Carl Weeks, a pharmacist who made a killing making his own cosmetics and selling them in his stores, later distributing them nationwide. The Weeks family didn't have much money prior to their unexpected success, so when they achieved overnight wealth they didn't really know what to do with it all and went a tad overboard. They spent uncontrollably until the cosmetic business declined around a decade later and they lost ownership of the home, donating it to Drake University with the agreement that they could remain as tenants. Drake gradually placed more limitations on how they could live there and which parts of the house the family could access until they eventually moved out and lived in a small ranch-style house nearby.

The entryway was designed to impress and although I didn't get a picture of it from the main floor, I did get this shot from up above in the balcony overlooking the room:

The back stairs coming down from the balcony:

They had an enormous garage and a separate building for grounds keepers and a mechanic. They ended up in the center of controversy when one of the sons raced around the neighborhood in one of the cars late one night and killed another driver.

A Thanksgiving with just the four of us:

One of Cynthia's coworkers asked if I could draw a picture of her childhood home. This is my first completed color pencil drawing in over 20 years:

We found this snake on the trail on one of our walks. He/she was very cold and could barely move. I helped the snake find some soft earth to tunnel into:

Every spring and fall I clear out the Conrad's gutters. This year I installed gutter guards so their gutters wouldn't keep clogging:

Time to put up the tree!

I think this squirrel is ready for winter:

Daniels Park. A few months ago on July 4th we celebrated on this very spot pictured here with friends and family. It will be a very long time before Cedar Rapids recovers from the derecho.