A meeting of children
Could have been forgotten
But we continued
Pen Pals
You to Missouri
Then back to Iowa
We played and
Became best friends
Jumping on my bed
Listening to Beatles
We both wanted to be John
I was Paul
And so the summers went
Playing soldiers
And Planet of the Apes
Times in the tree house
I don’t know
If we could have been
More wonderful
And complete
2021 By David Jacobi
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
William Faulkner
Part One of this travel log can be read here.
July 21 – (Shelly writing) Lounged until 10:00 am, then kids and I went into town for a few supplies (we thought we should stock up on beer before RAGBRAI showed up) then back to the cabin. David made his famous scrambled eggs with all the leftovers (wonderful!) I did clean up then we all piled back into the car to go back to Eldora to do fun things. David went checking out a few stores while the kids and I went to BJ’s Video. We played pinball and pool. Their favorite game was Motorcycle Derby – they actually sat on a plastic motorcycle and leaned left and right to curve it and turned the throttle to speed up and pulled the brake to stop. We had agreed David would come back to us in 40 minutes. When he came back the kids and I went to Ahoy Fountain while David explored a few more stores. The Fountain was great, Jacob had his first real banana split (he ate the whole thing) Sarah had a single dip cone and I had an old fashion yummy root beer float. The whole town was gearing up for RAGBRAI – extra supplies and help. We came back to the cabin, Jacob roller bladed, Sarah explored, David and I read and relaxed. David took the kids down to the creek and I continued to relax and read. It was great weather today, cloudy and cool. We turned off the AC and opened the windows in the cabin. After the kids and David came back from the creek they showered and had supper. We all relaxed, read then played a game of Monopoly. We are looking forward to tomorrow – we go fishing!
July 22 – We all slept in (again!) then ate and to the beach. Too hot for me, so I came back to the cabin and relaxed for a while. I decided to try fishing the Iowa River (one snag, several bites, no fish) After two hours at the beach Shelly and the kids came back and wanted to fish too. We packed up and walked over to Lower Pine Lake. Sarah caught three fish, Jacob two and Shelly and I had no luck. After about an hour and running out of worms we decided to try the river. We restocked at the cabin and tried a new spot on the river, where the spillway stream from Lower Pine Lake meets the Iowa River. In the shallow of the stream just before it empties into the Iowa there was a lazy school of at least 300 fish. Everyone was very excited and began casting right into the fish – who, of course, were not interested at all. After about an hour of actually hitting the fish with our casting and them ignoring it we decided to head back to the cabin. The kids ate, then Shelly, then they were in bed reading for the night. Time for me to get some grub and join them.
Continued Next Month
This photograph, titled “Lunch Atop A Skyscraper” or “New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam,” was taken 69 floors from the ground atop Rockefeller Center during its construction and was first printed in the New York Herald-Tribune on Oct. 2, 1932.
I mentioned back in September that our well was fixed but it turns out it was not just the pump that needed help. The water levels in our area have been dropping, most likely from the last two years of drought we have experienced. Our well man decided he would try to add two more sections of pipe to our well, which would put our pump at a depth of 320 feet, the maximum our one horsepower pump could handle. Early this month he very carefully and slowly lowered the system, adding the two lengths of pipe and additional wire. So far so good, we have had water since then. We are crossing our fingers that this problem that began in August is finally fixed.
Our first snow this season blew through this weekend, beginning with freezing rain, then snow and 30 plus mph winds. We only received one or two inches, but with the wind it left behind a few foot high drifts.
It was an uneventful month out here since I last updated, not much else to report on. We decorated for Christmas this week and are looking forward to celebrating with family on the big day.
If you have little ones make sure to share NORAD Tracks Santa with them beginning December 24th to track Santa’s flight around the world.
Austin City Limits “is the longest running music series in television history, the name behind exciting and successful music festivals in Austin (US), Sydney (AUS) and Auckland (NZ) and an award-winning concert venue. Broadcast on PBS for 43 years, Austin City Limits TV has become an institution, as well as the recipient of a rare institutional Peabody Award, an official Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Landmark and the only TV series to ever be awarded the National Medal of Arts.:
iBiology’s “mission is to convey, in the form of open-access free videos, the excitement of modern biology and the process by which scientific discoveries are made. Our aim is to let you meet the leading scientists in biology, so that you can find out how they think about scientific questions and conduct their research, and can get a sense of their personalities, opinions, and perspectives.”
FAIR Health’s “mission is to help you understand your healthcare costs and health coverage and to bring transparency to healthcare costs and insurance. We are an independent, national nonprofit organization known for providing fair and neutral information to all those we serve, including consumers like you. We are able to provide reliable information about healthcare costs because each year health insurers around the country send us over a billion healthcare bills, which are added to FAIR Health’s database of more than 35 billion claims. We use information from those claims to estimate what providers charge, and what insurers pay, for providing healthcare to patients all across the country. We make this information available to consumers, researchers, businesses and many other users.”
This tasty meal only takes about half an hour to prepare.
Ingredients:
8 ounces cooked spaghetti
3 cups cooked chicken, cubed
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 cup milk
Parmesan cheese to taste
A pinch of black pepper and parsley
1 tablespoon of sour cream
Directions:
Mix all ingredients in saucepan and heat through. Serve with a favorite cooked vegetable.
Once a month I highlight a piece of art I have created and posted on my Fine Art America site. This one is titled Winter Gloves from the Scanner Still Life Collection.
Off The Back Porch 