Freakishly Happy

Hi All!

We took part of the weekend off to go hang out in Iowa City. On Friday we left the farm late in the morning and drove the hour or so to Iowa City. We had lunch at a restaurant we frequented (and by frequented I mean three or so times per week) when we lived in Iowa City. It was good, but unfortunately, our very favorite waiter was gone, and the food wasn’t quite as good as we remember it being.

After stuffing ourselves on Crab Rangoon, we went down town and did a little shopping. Iowa City has a lot of cute shops, but unfortunately a lot of them feel so trendy that it’s almost painful going in to them.

After a while of looking at things we’d never buy, we decided to head over to the Futon Shop. We’ve been sleeping on an air mattress for over a month now. It wasn’t so bad in the beginning when the thing was retaining air, but after an unfortunate incident with a tack, we’ve been hitting the floor long before morning for some time now, so we decided to look in to alternative sleeping options.

We’d been contemplating building a futon, but then decided that we’ve currently got enough on our plates, and that we might as well go shopping to see in anything piqued our interest. Couldn’t hurt, right?

We had been looking causally at furniture at another place and the sales person was completely clueless about what the furniture was made out of, where it was made what the warranty was etc, and I was a little more than disgusted…. So I was very pleased a few weeks ago when I called the Futon Shop to see if they had any organic cotton and/or wool mattresses, and the guy had been very helpful and knowledgeable, (little did I know he was the Employee of the Century (www.iowacityfutons.com)).

Needless to say, we’d picked out our futon in a little under 20 minutes, and spent the next hour or so gabbing with the sales guy about parachuting and living on a bus.

We did a little more shopping before going out to dinner with John’s dad. After dinner I took a nap while John worked on his father’s computer (it’s great being me), after which we all went to Scattergood School, a Quaker boarding school outside of Iowa City, to go contra dancing.

Let me tell you, contra dancing is SO much fun. I like it almost better than the ballroom dancing we used to do, because you don’t really have to worry about planning your next move, because it’s already planned for you! I know that sounds a little too structured to be coming out of mouth, but you’ll have to trust me on this one. It’s great! We danced late into the night (well, okay 11pm) and went back to John’s parent’s house and crashed.

We woke up late on Saturday, too late to go to the Farmer’s market, (although we did make a valiant effort and got there just as they were closing up), so we went to the Co-op instead.
I love the downtown Co-op in Iowa City. Everyone looks freaky, like us and it smells healthy. We bought a few things, but mostly just enjoyed being at the Co-op.

We went back to John’s parent’s house and decided that we’d go try the new Russian restaurant in a town nearby that John’s dad had discovered earlier in the week. We had Borek, a flaky Turkish pastry, and potato dumplings similar to Pirogue. Every thing was delicious!

After lunch we went down to Kolona to the Mennonite store in search of a clothes ringer and some other things we needed for the bus. Unfortunately, the woman looked at me like I was crazy for asking if they had one. We did find some great bulk foods, wicks for our oil lamps and a few other odds and ends.

On our way back into town we went to the New Co-op in Coralville because I’d been jonsing all day for concord grapes. The produce manager had just thrown them away but he let me take them out of the compost bin! Free grapes taste better!

On Sunday I woke up late (surprise, surprise…), we went to the Fiddler’s picnic. Fiddlers, mandolin, banjo and guitar players as well as many other musicians from around the state gathered to give/take workshops as well as jam out with other musicians. It was wonderful.
We got to listen to a lot of really great music, and I met a woman who not only knew where Vermont is, but had actually lived in Castleton, a town very close to where my family lives. When living in Vermont I thought it was really great meeting Midwesterners, but it’s nothing like being in the Midwest and meeting a Vermonter. It feels sort of like finding the proverbial needle in that proverbial haystack.

While we were at the picnic, I discovered my future instrument: washtub bass. It seems only to require a sense of rhythm to start, and the rest you kind of pick up as you go along… and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t get really good, because who really cares, right? (no offense to any wash tub base aficionados out there).

We also got to do a little more contra dancing… I’m telling you people, if you haven’t already tried this, especially if you live in Vermont the land of contra-dancing plenty, you really must give it at least a shot.

It’s getting pretty hard for me to keep my eyes open, so I will close.

G’night!

So things have been going pretty well since we left Vermont and landed in Iowa. The drive out here was long, but mostly uneventful (except for when our under storage bay popped open and our hammer bounced down the highway).

Since we’ve arrived we’ve been staying on John’s grandmother’s farm, a little north of Cedar Rapids. It is truly beautiful here. I’ve never really been fond of Iowa, but this is nice. I think that if it weren’t this picturesque here, the transition from Vermont would have been much rougher.

The farm is situated on some open country side. The land is rolling, and the farm is surrounded by meadow on one side and land that is being turned into natural prairie on the other. There is also quite a bit of wooded area all along the farm, which seems to be pretty unusual for the rest of this area. The house itself is surrounded by several different types of fruit trees, apples, pears and plum, which were nearly all ready to eat when we arrived.

John’s cousin, Shannon, also lives on the farm and helps maintain the house as well as keeping an eye on Grandma. Shannon has three gorgeous horses, two Frisian (huge, black, beautiful horses) and one Palomino (white with brown paint). The horses graze freely on the meadows behind the house during the day. It is really nice to be able to look out the window and see them running and playing on cool evenings.

Since we’ve been in Iowa we’ve been trying to do a lot of catching up with family and friends that we missed while we were in Vermont. It’s been really great to catch up with everyone, although there are still a lot of people we haven’t seen yet.

Bus-Life has been really really good, too. It’s been a little hard because at first we didn’t have running water, electricity or a toilet. While we still don’t have running water, we’ve got the other two under control. We also have wireless internet, which really sucked at first, but after John fussed with it and bought a couple different pieces of hardware, it works great! It’s exactly like Little House on the Prairie… except in a bus… with electricity and internet…

For those of you who were wondering… the composting toilet has been working really well, with only a few minor hiccups. There is virtually no smell (and that’s not just because we’re dirty hippies and we can’t smelly anything over our own stench either! I had our friend Dawn verify… lucky her, right?) and it’s really easy to use (always a plus in a toilet).

There really are only a few downsides to living in a bus. It’s been a little frustrating because we have all of our stuff with us and haven’t really built much storage or shelving yet. But it’s definitely giving us a perspective on what we need… and what we don’t.

The only other downside is the flies. I’ve never lived on a farm before, and have always had screens on the windows. I guess when you live on a farm, and/or when you don’t have screens on the windows you are targeted by every fly within a 20 mile distance, or so it feels. By the time night sets in we have mizillions (millions of zillions) of flies ALL over the bus. Luckily/unfortunately they sleep during the night. This means that they are not a nuisance when you sleep, but also they are harder to find/kill and they start dive bombing you bright and early in the morning. Now I was really pacifistic towards all beings before moving here; a mosquito could land on me, suck my blood and I would do nothing, figuring that it was his right as a mosquito… (Shut up Rich). This tendency towards universal kindess has dwindled somewhat in me, especially where flies are concerned. Flies completely gross me out. The little hairs all over their body, the crunchy yet moist quality of them… the buzzing noise… you get the picture. Everything about them completely freaks me out and to have at least one if not ten of them touching various parts of my body, John’s body, and all of our stuff at any given time makes me a little neurotic. Now oddly enough killing flies with a fly swatter also freaks me out. I don’t want it done any where we eat, cook or sleep or any where that the body might fall and not be seen, thus leaving it exposed to bare feet. Call me crazy (again, Shut up Rich). Also, I feel bad every time I kill one and find my self walking around going around something like this, Whack!! “Sorry,” Whack! “Sorry,” and there is really only so much guilt a girl can take. So we’ve come up with some conventional and not so conventional means to dealing with them.

Last week we bought Kmart out of fly tape. I have always hated fly tape, almost as much as I hate sneeze guards, finding it utterly repulsive. Although my feelings for it haven’t changed much, it’s sure effective and leaves me mostly guilt free and it’s the flies who are choosing to try and cannibalize other flies who are stuck to the tape, thus getting stuck to it themselves… it’s their bad karma.

We figured out really quick that hanging the fly tape high doesn’t work John and I both got it stuck in our hair within 10 minutes of hanging it, and besides the flies are down low during day while they are buzzing around, only going to the ceiling at night to sleep. So I started hanging it down low (this also proved awkward right after hanging it when I got the whole thing stuck to the back of my thigh while wearing a dress, and had to run screaming from the bus “get it off, get it off!” It was some of the nastiest, stickiest stuff I ever felt. Ten minutes after this experience a fly got stuck to some of the residual gunk on my thumb, causing me to scream and dry heave in my mouth. … Since we’ve figured out a system of hanging it where that we can’t get it stuck to ourselves, it’s worked really well. The other day I hung some and honest to goodness within an hour we’d caught 50 flies on one tape. Gross!

The other day our friend Dawn was here, when we had a particularly huge crowd of flies (the biggest crowd ever I think). After dinner, she decided to see if she could suck them up in our vacuum cleaner. Now a couple of years ago I begged for a really nice vacuum, I know, a funny gift for a girl who hates to clean, but now that gift has paid off. Our vacuum has a detachable handle that turns into a sucking wand with a 16 foot reach. This was really really useful for sucking the little buggers off the ceiling and besides it made us feel really cool a la Ghostbusters. We all took turns holding the flashlight and sucking up flies for at least a half and hour and by the time we were done there must have been well over one hundred flies in the canister. Not only does the vacuum have a long detachable sucker-thingy… it also has a see through canister so we could watch the little nasties flying around in there like it was perverted ant farm. Man do we know how to spend a Saturday night…

John has been working really hard on his engineering contracts lately, which means we’ve not been working as hard on the bus. But we have gotten some stuff done. Today John built a wooden platform for our woodstove to go over the steel cage he and our friend Adam built while we were in Vermont. I’ve been sick with a cold for the last few days, and have been taking it pretty easy, but I’ve been doing a decent job of being the foreman in Rich’s stead. We also moved the stove over on to the platform ourselves!! This was quite a task and thank god John is an engineer. The stove weighs in the neighborhood of 400 lbs. and so there’s no way that we could lift it ourselves. Instead using engineering principals, we lifted up the stove and put boards underneath it until it was level with the platform. Then we put two longer boards under it, screwed them down to the other boards (which were also screwed down) and John “walked” the stove on to it’s platform. For the record, he is still the strongest and smarted guy I know.

Tonight we had pizza from our local pizza place. I’m not sure if it’s just small town Iowa pizza, or small town pizza everywhere, but man… it was good/shitty pizza. You know what I mean… upon first biting into it, it’s lava hot with molten cheese that you can’t chew and grease dripping all over your fingers. It’s got sickeningly sweet sauce but golden brown crust. It’s that perfect dichotomy between delicious and disgusting.

Now that I’ve got this dauntingly huge blog out of the way, I will try to update more frequently! And post pictures soon, too… Probably a longer wait on that one though, as our internet connection is still a little slow. We haven’t put up the webcam yet either, we thought it might be a little awkward since we’re actually living in the bus, but it may come back online one of these days. Who knows?

So thus far we are very happy with our choice to live in a bus rather than be grownups... I'll keep you posted of any changes or continue to gloat about how great it is in the future :)

    Just wanted to give you a quick update....

 We finished our final coat of wax on our floors today, and so far they are looking really good. We found quite few loose hairs stuck to the first coat, which was not only a little gross, but also a pain. I think I might write the company and tell them to put hair-nets as a requirement on the can.  They probably don't have too many dirty hippies using their product though, so it's probably a wash.

Today we also went up to Rutland and got our bus registered and signed up for a new license.  I really thought it'd be more difficult than this, because we had to have a constable or state police officer sign off on it. Lucikly, our friend and my sister's employee Lindsey's dad is a state trooper, and he stopped by yesterday after work to help us with the paper work.  Hooray! New plates should be arriving soon.

That's about all for tonight... I'm fighting to keep my eyes open. G'night!