Update 4 on robins

May 12, 2009 | Iowa,Spring,Weather

The nest on the gas tank now has six eggs.

Found another nest on one of our lights. It has three eggs in it.

Got enough spring yet? I haven’t!

May 10, 2009 | Iowa,Spring

Books: Growing up Country

April 24, 2009 | Books,Iowa

I got to meet Carol Bodensteiner at the Talbot Belmond Public Library on Tuesday night. I had her book already but hadn’t read it yet. I was compiling a list of Iowa authors for an article and found that she’d be speaking about 45 minutes away. I couldn’t pass that up, could I?

Bodensteiner talked about her book Growing up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, and she read some passages that had us laughing out loud. She listened as we told some of our own stories of mean chickens, 10-cent movies and amazing mothers. Bodensteiner is warm, charming and funny. I’m reading her book next.

Here she is signing books.

I’ll post the list of authors after the article’s published.

Update 2 on robin’s nest

April 23, 2009 | Iowa,Spring

Now there are four eggs. Will we have five? Stay tuned.

Update on robin’s nest

April 22, 2009 | Iowa,Spring

This just in … there are three eggs now.

The Internet says a robin’s egg will hatch in 14 days. So we’ve marked up the calendar and count every day.

Buh-bye, Winter

April 20, 2009 | Iowa,Weather,Winter

So long, farewell, aufwiedersehn, adeiu, adeiu, adeiu, to yieu and yieu and yieu … don’t let the door hit you on the way out … see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya … now, go take a long vacation and don’t come back until December. I hear Tampa’s nice this time of year.

I see you are a logger and not just a common bum

February 28, 2009 | Iowa

I got lost once and drove past this. When I wanted to show it to someone, I couldn’t find it again. (No, my GPS apparently isn’t programmed to find Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues.) I had an errand to run this morning, and I drove past it again.

Iowans are funny

February 3, 2009 | Birthday,Iowa,Stuff

I’ve driven by this house lots of times. Either I never noticed the lamp in the window or they just won it in a contest.

Here’s a laugh for my brother, who turns a year older today.

Happy birthday!

Is this heaven, Kevin? No, heaven’s not this cold.

January 28, 2009 | Iowa,Kevin Costner,Music

That’s what you get for writing a song about Leland, Iowa, and not, say … Palm Springs.

The thing about living “in the middle of nowhere” is that not all celebrities fly over. Some drive through on a tour bus. Some actually stop.

That’s exactly what Kevin Costner and his band, Modern West, did. They’re on tour up this way (and they’ll be in Tampa on Jan. 31, my Florida friends), and they stopped in Leland on their way from Minneapolis to Omaha.

Why?

Band member John Coinman has relatives in the area, and he wrote the song Leland, Iowa, for the band’s album Untold Truths released in November 2008. Besides, the local radio station called and asked them to come.

So … who knew I’d be living 10 minutes from where Kevin Costner would sing? For free. In a barn. (Yes. A barn. This is Iowa.)

:::Go to the diner, and they will come:::

The barn could only hold 200 or so people, and Leland residents with tickets got first dibs. The rest of us froze outside for 45 minutes (which is about the time it takes for frostbite to set in), waiting to see him maybe walk from his warm bus to the warm barn. Even better. He stopped and thanked us for waiting so long in the cold. (Everyone was quiet because, well, our lips were numb. I couldn’t feel my toes anymore.)

Then he said he felt bad that there wasn’t room for us in the barn. So he said, “Go to the diner, and we’ll play some songs for you there.” So we did. So did he.

He sat on the bar and sang three songs, the last of which was Leland, Iowa.

He said a few words and kissed a few girls.

He signed a few hockey sticks, shook a few hands and took some pictures.

“Gee, he’s taller than I thought.”

And that was that.

Reading winter weather signs

January 25, 2009 | Iowa,Weather,Winter

Remember the pretty sun dog I posted in December? I know what it means now.

Turn back! Go home! Lock up the kids! Stay warm! Hibernate!

Because if you don’t? You’ll have to drive on this.

And this.

And the wind will blow so hard that it will drift over your driveway, essentially snowing you in, which isn’t a good thing when your tractor/snow blower isn’t working properly and you can’t drive a shovel without coughing up a lung (or at least lunch) because of that cold you’ve had for two weeks now.