Month: November 2025

A beautiful fall so far

It has been a really beautiful fall season in Iowa, at least so far. Yesterday it was in the upper 60s, and we decided to take the RZR to Wisconsin for a ride. Kevin has added all sorts of things to the RZR – new lighted whip lights, a new winch to replace the less capable one we had, and an emergency brake. Did you know emergency brakes don’t come standard on most sUTVs? I didn’t! This one just holds down the brake pedal when activated. Hopefully it will keep the RZR from moving around so much when Kevin loads it in the truck. Regarding the trip, no pictures because we road only 7 miles! Turns out the power steering is screwed up again/still. Luckily we can now reproduce the problem easily for the service shop, and Kevin had already made an appointment with them for yearly maintenance. Sigh. This was the reason we had decided to take the ride, just to make sure everything works well before our winter sojourns. Better to wait for service and parts now than when we are in Arizona!

I actually have been piecing quite a bit, but I didn’t take pictures. I added 72 piece border blocks to what will become our RV bed quilt, then I added an additional 4” border all around those. Now I have to add enough borders to get it to an RV king bed size with a 10” drop. I even planned for 5% shrinkage, just to make sure it fit. I will probably get those borders on tomorrow. Then back to the Block of the Month!

I do have some nice pictures though. The first two are a follow-up to my last post which shows the development behind our house. The first one shows our house and how it sits now, while the second shows the new lot lines. They are priced outrageously in my opinion. I live in a nice neighborhood in what is considered a LOCL area, and the lots are going to $110,000-$140,000 for a 1/4 or 1/3 acre lot! No scenery, just previously fallow Iowa farm land. No wonder young people can’t buy houses!

My house circled in blue
The new lot lines. Arrow points to a newer elementary school.

We also had some real excitement with the recent solar storm that lit up the sky with auroras. We could see them with the naked eye, but the photo sensor on my iPhone caught them even better. These photos are not processed at all, as should be obvious from the dust and the porch light flare. I think they are still pretty impressive though.

Green bars
Red flares

My ukulele playing is definitely improving. I remember the chords pretty well, and I am moving between them fairly quickly. The chord transition is what I am concentrating on now. I have a book of mostly old folk songs, and I am just working through the ones in the key of G and C. Once I get these in good shape, I’ll work at some others.

I have a birthday coming up, and Kevin has already gotten me a present – a new GoPro remote control that charges with a USB C plug. My previous one had a weird custom plug that was always getting mis-placed. Since we now have 20-30 USB C cords around, I doubt that will be an issue with this one!.

First week at home in 4 months

We definitely did the right thing by staying at Canton two nights. The wind gusts towards our destination were 45+mph. The winds were great when we finally got on the road towards home on Wednesday. 22 October. We put the motorhome on a site at Big Woods park, our standard clean up location. We cleaned and cleaned! All kinds of cabinets were opened, emptied, and cleaned. Amazing how out of date seldom-used spices accumulate! The other thing we did was clean out under the slides and do a major cleaning project on the floors. Our Dyson stick vacuum died on this trip, and we replaced it with a well-regarded Shark version, but it is heavy and doesn’t clean nearly as well! I found a good sale during a “Prime Day” special, and I bought a Dyson v11. We filled a trash can halfway with cat hair the Dyson picked up! It was rather embarrassing.

On Sunday we had some of our kids and grandkids up for dinner. It was awfully nice to see them after so long. The cats adjusted quickly and seem to enjoy the extra space. I realized I hadn’t put up too many pictures of them, so here is a cute one of Minnie on the cat tower.

That look!

These next two are while camping, but they are awfully cute.

Curled up Minnie
Stretched out Luna

My other big news is that I bought a baritone ukulele! It uses guitar tuning and chords, but just on four nylon strings. I am so, so happy with it. I have already learned some of the simpler chords and can sing along with the “easy ukulele” versions. It also convinced me to try to sell my acoustic guitar. Hopefully I can cover most of the cost of the ukulele with the sale of the guitar.

Women’s size 10 shoe for size

Kevin also replaced the toilet in our hall/guest bathroom. It was only a standard height with a round bowl – not very comfortable for adults. We replaced it with a really nice comfort height elongated bowl version with smooth sides. He also added a bidet sprayer, because once you get used to a bidet you have real trouble using a toilet without it.

In other local news, construction has begun on the fallow land behind us. It had been platted years ago around the same time our place was platted. My concern has been the area behind us is higher than our lot, and I was worried we would get flooded. However the rough grading showed they dug a deep swale in the right spot. Obviously it won’t be as deep as it shows here because they will back fill with top soil and then sod. But it pretty promising! The picture below is a screen capture from Kevin’s drone. The other thing is they finished the street the other side of this lot! It took only 2 days to finish the three blocks of city streets.

Construction swale

I am pushing myself to start sewing tomorrow. I need to finish the last 3 months of my Kona Block of the month. On 1 December we will have our last meeting where we will talk about finishing approaches. I also need to get a couple of quilts quilted. Oh, and there is always Christmas items to finish!

Oh, and I forgot to add: yesterday was Halloween and we had 340 trick or treaters! We had maybe 20 pieces of candy left at the end of the night because we planned for a lot of kids. The weather was cool and crisp, and there are hundreds of kids in the neighborhood. We are known as one of the neighborhoods with the “good stuff,” so we get children from other neighborhoods coming by. It was great fun. Kevin had the garage nicely warmed with propane heaters, and we sat in the garage with the candy, animal crackers, and chips. We ran out of chips and animal crackers way before we ran out of candy, so we will add more of those next time.