Decorah, IA
My mother is on her way to my apartment, where I am sitting listening to the Beatles "Birthday" and the rest of the White Album. Mom will take me shopping for my birthday. I am very excited, I hope she is in a relaxed mood, but not too relaxed. I was thinking last night while I was writing that prose was "unfolding the form" of poetry. I think I'll play darts.
1994
Rachel and I rode the BMW K75 together to Decorah for the first time today, our longest trip so far. It rained during the last five minutes, but was great otherwise. We had brunch with Chris's family, and our mom, though Christina had to study, so she sent her Andrew along instead. Katie ordered me sausage egg muffins, a fine choice. We rode back to Spring Grove with Sharon, since it was still raining and I was riding down to Decorah tomorrow with Rachel. When we got home we reorganized furniture in the house, and cleaning up. We put the new oven in the wall as well, though we didn't hook it up. We took tickets at Elyse's play, Peter Pan. She was a mermaid. Then we snuck back to the house to clean until 6pm, when people came over. Mark and Sarah came at 1730, and I forced them to watch South Park until others arrived. Steve, Linda, Jen, Sara, Abe and Laura came. We made Pimm's Cup for everyone, and they really loved them. We used basil for the herbage, because we couldn't find any mint. Yum. Cucumber, blueberries, and lemon's also. I'm excited to publish the pictures. After everyone left, John came over and had one too, and entertained us for about an hour. It was a wonderful night.
2012
Rachel picked me up at 16:00 from work, we loaded her luggage into the Golf, and headed downtown for a snack and a final drink with Lydia, who is headed off in the next few days for Oregon to start her teaching career. We went to the Hotel Winneshiek because it was nearly our Anniversary, and we had a few sweet martini's. Then, Lydia took our Mercedes home to Spring Grove, and Rachel blindfolded me and stuck me in the car with a book on tape to keep me occupied while she drove us to an unknown location, stopping off ever 25 miles to take pictures of me in front of different landmarks so that I could some day know how we got to our final destination, which turned out to be Elkader, IA. We first went to Schera's restaurant, and Algerian bar/restaurant with amazing middle eastern dishes. We ate there three times in the next 2 days. After dinner and drinks, we went to our B&B, The Jailhouse Inn, at the very top of Bridge Street in town. It was a jailhouse from 1850's at the back of a very nice stone house, overlooking the entire town, and actually was above the top of the steeple of the very tall catholic church in the down-town area. We had a lovely night playing table top shuffle-board and the old 20 foot long table. We took a jacuzzi, and then went to bed. It was very luxurious.
2015