I just finished my Christmas letter, which will be going out with my Christmas cards in the mail shortly. I will post it here, too, but not until after I send them out, so as not to spoil the surprise for those of you who kindly sent my your addresses.
I think it’s quite funny, if I do say so my self. And funny in the intentional way, not the unintentional way of… ahem… some people I know who’s Christmas letter I read out loud to my friends every year.
I drove to my grandmother’s house in Brighton, Iowa on Wednesday last week. Brighton is in south eastern Iowa, an hour north and west of Burlington. My younger brother Gary went with me, and he was very cool to ride with because he’s interesting and funny, despite the constant backseat driving. 🙂 He’s twenty-five, single and a Wabash graduate, BTW, in case you know any single girls. We stopped in Peoria, Illinois on the way to get photos of the Uniroyal Gal. We stayed at the Super 8 Motel in Washington, Iowa, which is about 13 miles north of Brighton, because Brighton doesn’t actually have a motel. It’s rather small.
My three other brothers all drove also; Todd and Paul drove their new trucks, too. Paul hit a deer on the way, unfortunately, and damaged the front of his truck, which I just realized I should have taken a picture of, but didn’t.
On Thursday, we all stayed around Grandma’s and ate dinner, then opened Christmas presents. All the male relatives got gag underwear, which they tried on over their pants for a photo. My grandmother gave us beautiful plates that she hand-painted herself, which will I will be hanging in my dining room.
On Friday, we went to the Amana Colonies to eat at the Ox Yoke Inn and to shop. The Amana Colonies were formed in 1854 by a german religious order who bought 18,000 acres of land in Iowa. They aren’t Amish, although there is a large Amish settlement nearby in Kalona, Iowa. Kalona is where we stop to get cheese curds every year. I bought a lot of great things this year at the Amana Colonies, including wine and beer for New Years Eve.
On Saturday we stopped at my aunt Rosemary’s farm for cinnamon rolls and coffee (recipe for the rolls will be posted soon!) and then started the six hour drive home.
I spent Thanksgiving weekend at my Grandparent’s house in Brighton, Iowa with the rest of my family. I should post more about it, but I have a ton of stuff to do at work today and not very much time to do it in, so more later.
1) Had fun at Girls Game Night at Outword Bound books.
2) Washed my truck and cleaned it all out.
3) Raked my leaves.
4) Bought a table, a cabinet and copper trellis from Urban Bloom, because they’re going out of business.
5) Visited my mom to take her Dutch Letters, a book, and bought several other books.
7) Helped Dan and Doug unbox ornaments for their Christmas trees.
8) Visited Tim and Avi’s Salvage Yard.
9) Sorted out all the door and window trim I had and picked out enough to put in the living room.
10) Upgraded the operating system on my iMac to 10.3.1
11) Messed up my e-mail so I can’t download it. (That’ll be fixed soon!)
I didn’t realize my friend Melissa has a blog (since March, 2003!). While perusing her site, I noticed that she’s a part of Indy Blogs, which is a site for Indianapolis Bloggers. Cool. I signed up.
If you watched ER last night, you may have noticed that the writers (who must have been reading my weblog!) completely ripped off my appendix surgery story on their show last night. Unfortunately, they changed just enough details to avoid having to pay me royalties. Here are their mistakes:
1) In Real Life, I’m not a middle-aged black guy.
2) I never ate any hospital food on my first trip to the ER, because I was doubled-over and completely nauseous. On the show, the guy with appendicitis scarfed down a tray of hospital food, which by the way, since when do they feed people in the ER? In Real Life, if you had shown me any food, especially hospital food, I would have puked on you, except that I couldn’t because I had puked up everything the day before.
3) When I initially went into the ER, my symptoms were much clearer and my pain was evident. The mis-diagnosis happened because the doctor thought my pain was the result of gallstones, even though my gall bladder is under my ribcage, and the pain was by my hipbone, where the appendix is located. I tried to point out to her that she was ultra-sounding the wrong place, but she didn’t listen. And they had totally doped me up on morphine, so I was inclined to be passive, rather than the insistent pain in the ass that I normally am. On the show, however, the guy’s symptoms were ambiguous, which is why they decided to send him home without a CT scan.
4) My appendix ruptured at home, rather than in the ER waiting room. On the show, the guy comes back and his appendix ruptures in the waiting room, and he pukes on the doctors shoes, which I didn’t do, but I sure wish I had, because, poetic justice. In Real Life, my appendix ruptured at home while I was waiting to get another ultrasound for my mythical gall stones.
5) On the show, the guy didn’t almost die, because he was in the ER waiting room, rather than at home because of mythical gall stones.
6) I didn’t go into surgery right away, because they were afraid that would be worse, so I sat in the hospital for a week until I was no longer septic, then several weeks later I had laser surgery.
Moral of the story: A) Television shows are total rip-off artists. B) A lot more people read my weblog than you think. C) If you want me to stop being an insistent pain-in-the-ass, morphine will really work.
When I was a kid, we used to drive from Ankeny, Iowa (where we lived) to Brighton, Iowa, where my Grandma lived. On the drive, we usually went through Pella, Iowa, and if we were lucky, we’d stop at the Jaarsma Bakery and get my favorite dessert of all time… Dutch Letters. Jaarsma Bakery has been open since 1899, when it was founded by Herman Jaarsma who used recipes he brought over as an immigrant from Holland.
Originally, the Dutch Letters were made only as a special treat for Sinterklaas Day (the Dutch Santa Claus Day), December 6th. They are typically shaped into an “S” for “Sinterklaas” according to the website.
Now Jaarsma has a website and does online ordering, which quite simply kicks ass.
Wil took an eastbound trip from California to Vegas along old Route 66, and during the trip he overlapped with some of the route of my 1998 road trip with Laurie and Twyla to help them move out to Arizona. He has several photos that are the same as mine… the largest cross in the western hemisphere, the leaning water tower, the giant cowboy, and several photos in Shamrock, Texas, including one of a beautiful 50’s cafe. This is his photo, and here’s mine:
U Drop Inn Cafe, Shamrock, Texas
UPDATE: In the summer of 2007, I took a long roadtrip on Route 66.
In the house section of my site, I added up to date pictures of my living room including the electric work, mudding and taping, painting the ceiling and painting the walls. Other photos I added to the house section: some photos of the flowerbeds in the front yard from various times this summer, pictures of my basement that I took a while back, more photos of the fence around Talbott Street’s parking lot. Also, a picture of my new aquarium.
Update: I ended up taking down photos of my house after someone used them to stalk me, sadly.
Sigh. I still have to put up Amy’s Birthday photos, some kick-ass pics from Halloween (featuring Mike Pullen as the Gorton’s fisherman and Dan and Doug as the Skipper and Gillian), pictures of the last Mutual Friends softball game of the season, and five days worth of photos from the “painting my house” series, and a bunch of photos of Drusilla, who actually came downstairs and explored this morning.
The cool thing about owning an automatic after years of having a manual transmission is that you can drive home from Walmart with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a bag full of water and four goldfish. I really intended to get just three goldfish; Ahab, Ishmael and Queequeg, but little Starbuck managed to stowaway in the fishnet along with the others and land in the plastic bag, so I ended up buying him too. I figured if he was that intent on coming home with me, I should probably adopt him. I put them in my new aquarium that I bought specifically for Kathy’s Plecostomus, who I named Moby. He’s huge in comparison to them. They have a cave rock, a tiny ship, and a statue of Neptune to swim around. Moby immediately adopted the cave rock as his new home, which is what I was hoping when I bought it.
I now own nine animals. Thank God five of them are fish.