Will Landscape For Food

Not sure where the time has gone since we left the ship, but maybe something strange happened in the, um, hollers. We did stay with Katie's friend Kara, in Lexington, too, which seemed to be a normal place, but you never know.

In the meantime, we have been landscaping our way across the suburbs of southern Wisconsin. By my count, in three days we have trimmed seventeen bushes, pruned well over a hundred limbs off eight different trees--requiring the use of three separate power trimmers, two chainsaws, and at certain key points, three people using all their weight to hold the ladder--and planted three medium-size maples. Oh, and eight shrubs. Never forget your shrubs.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we've really been looking forward to this family trip out to the Rockies. First stop was last night, here in northwest Iowa, home of sister R, her husband J, and nephew Timothy, 15 months. Rarely a shortage of entertainment around here. A sample, from their latest email--

Possibly bad news: Timothy seems to be having a twofold identity crisis, i.e.:

1. He refers to the dog as "Nana" (thank goodness none of the grandmas claimed that name!!); we have no idea where he got that from, but he's been doing it for about a week now. This is the same child who refuses to call us Mama and Dada or anything resembling that.

2. I asked him yesterday, "Are you my little monkey?" and he replied "ooo ooo ooo eee". No joke. This has been repeated several times since, with the same result, slightly varied (sometimes it's "eee eee ee oooh". Perhaps we should cut back on the animal noise books....

(photo credit: R & J)

Lest anyone still think Iowans perpetually bored, as i once foolishly did, R & J's plans for a romantic anniversary evening last week were unexpectedly expanded to feature not only a Lutheran and a Catholic showing up to argue theology on their couch, but additionally, a barefoot town resident in severe abdominal pain staggering around their lawn and collapsing on the patio. They said it was when the one-armed man rang the doorbell that they finally just gave up and called it a night.

Really, it makes me feel better about living on land for a while.