Category: Iowa

Jazzed Up Mr. Grinch for the Big Arctic Blast

I heard this last Friday KCCK on ‘da Friday Blues with John Heim aka Big Mo, believe it or not. So it’s a little late, but I had trouble finding it. Stay warm!

Cedar Waxwings Get Cold Breakfast

The morning of December 22, 2022 was one of the most frigid days in recent memory. The winter storm brought 30-40 mph winds and temperatures sometimes to down to 30 or worse.

I didn’t get right out there to shovel. Snow was blowing around until well after noon. This gave me a chance to watch a flock of Cedar Waxwings gather around the winterberry bushes in our backyard.

The berries must have been pretty cold. There was ice on them. One bird couldn’t seem to get a bill bite on them and dropped his breakfast on the ground a couple of times. I don’t think he got a bite to swallow.

And the city plows plugged our driveway as usual.

That means Sena and I had to get out there around 3:30 in the afternoon to shovel our driveway and sidewalks. It took us about an hour and I am considering calling whoever in city government is responsible for ordering up this weather.

Snow Day!

I wrote this post yesterday because I didn’t know whether or not we’d have a power outage because of high winds (up to nearly 50 mph) predicted for the Arctic Blast this week.

When we’re not outside scooping our walkway and driveway, we’ll probably be playing cribbage or, God forbid, Scrabble (which I always lose).

We’ve heard about the renewed interest in board games, one of them being Scrabble. We recently found an old Scrabble game at Old Capitol Town Center (formerly Old Capitol Mall). It’s Super Scrabble and it was on sale for $50 at a hole-in-the-wall shop lacking an entrance sign. The high price is because it’s a collectible relic from the past, although a quick internet search revealed it was made in 2004—hardly an antique. You can find them on eBay for $30. On the other hand, you can find them going for as much as $179 at an on-line store called Mercari.

We’ll also probably take a break by munching on our Christmas cookies.

I’m all set for the freezing weather. I’ve got my thermal underwear out and sweats out, along with my heavy gloves.

The wind will probably make shoveling pointless at times. We’ll probably bag it and then I’ll practice the juggling behind the back trick—another pointless activity.

Blockbuster Sasquatch Cribbage Game Antics!

Brace yourselves! Sena and I are going to break the internet with the never-before-seen YouTube video of our antic-filled cribbage game on our Sasquatch cribbage board—and playing with the Sasquatch cribbage cards!

This had an extremely rare outcome. Wait’ll you see what it is.

I also shared a few nuggets of knowledge about Sasquatch that I learned from the internet. One of them is that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) credits the state of Iowa with 76 reports of Bigfoot encounters (not necessarily sighting per se, but so what?).

Sasquatch Cribbage Board Game!

Today was the inaugural game on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. It’s a very handsome item, made of walnut by the maker, David Sprouse, in Ferndale, Washington. His website is 3MoonsMakerSpace and he markets the boards on Etsy. It was delivered only a couple of weeks ago. It came with pegs and deck of cards. It has a hole in the back for hanging on a wall, if you want.

We played the game to 61 just for the sake of brevity since the point was to show off the board itself.

I don’t know really what to make of Bigfoot stories. Many claim to have spotted the creature way out in places like Washington state and elsewhere. There are reports of a few sightings even in Iowa.

I wonder why you never find corpses or even fossils of Sasquatch? Probably because extraterrestrials beam them up too quickly in order to harvest the fur for throw rugs for their space ships. The usual problem, of course, is getting the smell of beef jerky out of them.

Stanley Museum of Art in Iowa City

We visited the Stanley Museum of Art, which opened in August. One piece impressed us even before we entered the museum. One of our favorites is “Two Lines Oblique” by George Rickey. It’s a huge mobile outside the entrance.

The mural “Surroundings” by Odila Donald Odita is striking. Odita says it’s his answer to “Mural” by Jackson Pollock. I don’t even know the question posed by Pollock’s huge work. I guess some see a dancer in motion.

Sena’s favorites were the mobile and the painting “Spring Embraces Yellow” by Alma Thomas. I initially missed the point of “Heeler III” which Sena got immediately. It’s one of those platform high heel shoes, dang! I guess the platform is back in style, according to a few recent fashion web articles. I guess I’ll wait on putting in my order.

Some pieces of art might be a little hard to say we “like” per se, because they convey a sense of violence or tragedy. I think “Red April” by Sam Gilliam is one of those, because it originated from the grief and horror after Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April of 1963.

The photos of downtown Iowa City are a kind of walk down memory lane for us. It’s been years since we’ve visited the place. In some ways, it hasn’t changed much. On the other hand, the “Writers in a Café” monument with the quote by Marvin Bell in the ped mall was new to us.

The Iowa Avenue Literary Walk has been around for ages, but Kurt Vonnegut’s quote about “What we pretend to be” was unfamiliar. It seemed like a fresh insight into human nature, but one which we probably already knew.

We don’t pretend to be art critics, but I think we can say we’re art enthusiasts. We’re not pretending that.