It was 1995, and I was a dork. Now it is not 1995, and I am still a dork. (There was no college football championship at the time, and Iowa State certainly wasn’t doing anything bowl-worthy, so I took my best shot.)
I have a couple different fears now, but that’s not to say the old ones are gone.
Sometimes I think about how to reconcile who I think I am now with the person I thought I was. It can be very difficult.
November 4, 2019: From the Lincoln Highway in 2011 to the Jefferson Highway in 2019, Iowa’s scenic and historic byways received a more uniform, more visible signing scheme in the 2010s.
Since the Second Great Decommissioning and completion of four-lane corridors that had been planned out in some form since the late 1960s, the Iowa highway system on paper was between mostly dormant and low-level active for the 2010s. These changes do not cover the massive interstate projects in Council Bluffs and Sioux City, which totally reshaped how traffic gets through but did little map-wise.
And then we got the out-of-nowhere shock to the system: The eastern half of I-680, between I-29 and I-80, was renumbered I-880. Some people may point to this as a case of state governments adapting to global warming, because this was precipitated by an unusual “bomb cyclone” that left vast areas of the Missouri River floodplain under water at a time of year it should not have been.
I, however, just want to hate it because I believe it is both unnecessary and the wrong type of number to assign. I-880 by itself doesn’t form a loop or partial loop, and/so it should have been numbered I-329, I-180, or I-580 (to avoid confusion with the nearby-ish I-180 in Lincoln). An odd-first-digit route can still have both ends at another interstate; see I-155 in Illinois and I-196 in Michigan.
October 11, 2015: Notre Dame’s stadium expansion includes academic facilities and its first video boards.
I wrote before on this blog that Iowa State would never play Notre Dame in football unless the stars aligned for a bowl game. Well, much like with “ESPN College Gameday” in Ames, an improbable course of events has resulted in exactly that.
AND I CAN’T GO. (It is possible I will never be able to attend a bowl game again.) But at least I can watch it on TV, given the kickoff time and lucking out into being on ABC for the second time in three years.
Tonight’s and tomorrow’s games, with Iowa playing USC and Iowa State playing Notre Dame, would be the perfect matchups to josh “Irish Trojan” Brendan Loy (who graduated from both). But after he ended his blog, we lost contact, and then the 2016 election changed him.
After Saturday, there will be eight teams the Irish have never played, three of which are in the Big 12. But now is the Cyclones’ chance, in ISU’s first Florida bowl game ever, in front of maybe the biggest TV audience since at least the 2011 Oklahoma State game if not ever…
WITH BLACK HELMETS?!?!?
Sigh.
This is an expanded yet condensed version of my 29 states in 12 months of ’16-17. The only additions to the red group on this map were Wyoming (two months before the 12 began), South Dakota (very barely), Washington, Oregon, and North Dakota — all but SD 12 to 17½ years since the previous stop.
At the close of this decade, my least-recently-visited of the 48 are Georgia, Montana (less than 15 hours in the one visit), Idaho, Utah, New Jersey (at 2 hours, now the record-holder for least time spent), and California.
But small-ballers only count states. Counting counties is where it’s at, and I racked up 128 new counties in 11 states the past two years, for a current total of 1680 (53.47%). But again, my nearest unvisited counties with an interstate in them are in Indiana and Arkansas.
Here’s a reason Iowa needs to keep the presidential caucuses. A major media outlet left to its own devices went looking for a “small town” and found
Try again, please.
October 22, 2013: There’s a Casey’s in Casey, Illinois (seen here). There is not a Casey’s in Casey, Iowa.
Casey’s hangs its convenience store hat on two major things: Serving rural Americans and making great pizza. In many places, maybe even a majority, it’s the only place in town you can order a pizza. For a long time, it has run a deal where you can save 10 box tops (tabs/coupons, really) from large pizzas and get a free one.
But the low-tech days of saving tabs are coming to a rapid end, as Casey’s announced it will be ending that tradition.
This is sad/troublesome in many ways. You HAVE to have an account on the app, which means you HAVE to have a smart phone AND an account. You won’t be able to pool coupons and you won’t be able to get that stroke of luck from someone who threw their box out without taking it off. When you hit 10, you HAVE to claim your reward in 60 days.
Of course, all these “analog loopholes” may be why it’s ending the program in the first place. But Iowans who don’t have smart phones, or who would like to get their coupons without extra work, are going to be left out.
For the appropriate time on ABC’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”:
I’m Hugh Downs…
and I’m Barbara Walters…
and this is… 2020!
[Someone may have watched more TV newsmagazine shows than was healthy in the ’90s.]
June 4, 2014: The national end of US 77 at the Missouri River and I-29 in Sioux City was converted from “Iowa’s Most Stupid Intersection” into a mostly-diamond interchange in the early 2010s.
The decade-plus-long reconstruction of I-29 through the Sioux City area will be completed by Christmas, save for an unexpected bridge repair and miscellaneous edge work, the Sioux City Journal reported at the beginning of the month.
The state will now turn its big-project attention to the ongoing Council Bluffs interstate project, which has progressed far enough that I-80’s express and local lanes are now separated, and the I-80/I-380 interchange in Coralville.
(Food blogging and year/decade reviews took precedence! — Ed.)
Cincinnati chili “three-way” with fries and the requisite oyster crackers. The fries were very good.
7. Camp Washington Chili, Cincinnati, Ohio (Oct. 31)
I have consumed Cincinnati chili and lived.
You might have heard of it under the name of a chain, Skyline. This is not from one of those; it’s a 75-year-old restaurant on the list of “1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die.” The chili is ground beef, an array of spices, and most important for me, no beans. I had the “three-way”, which is chili over spaghetti with LOTS of shredded cheese on top. I plopped the whole concoction upside down on a second plate, which was probably not the brightest move, but how else was I supposed to mix it?
The taste is hard to describe, but it’s got a zing that announces this is not spaghetti sauce. For me, this counts as being adventurous. It also served as 24 hours’ worth of food until the pizza in Seymour. Would I eat it again? Probably, sometime, if I ever make a fourth trip to one of the places that calls itself the Queen City.
Combine that meal with a free hot dog from the Indianapolis Police, served at the foot of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in below-normal temperatures with multiple forms of precipitation being spit at me, and Halloween 2019 was certainly a unique food day. The national FFA convention was going on in Indianapolis, meaning every hotel room at the airport was sold out.
Eastern Time Zone Trip: 13 new counties, 5 US route state clinches (IL US 136, IN US 136, OH US 27, IN US 50, IL US 50), 1 construction-imposed national non-clinch (US 136, 5 miles short), 1 26-hour day, 1 state capitol, 1 Underground Railroad museum, 1 baseball museum, and 1 college football game in the 150th anniversary year of the sport
By the time I found out about the Marion Community Band, I had not officially played for more years than I had. But, thanks to all those early years of practicing, I was able to wobble my way back on the bicycle for Ye Moƒt Noble and Eƒteemed Woodwind.*
That led to being in the “small but mighty” Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) Band, which mostly plays for company employees and nursing homes but is basically my only non-road-trip activity.
This year (in today’s concert), the band has an extra challenge — the “Hallelujah Chorus”. You know the music. I love the music. Mr. Shay challenged the high school chorus to do it when I was a freshman. I can sing both the soprano and bass lines cold.
The band version does not follow the vocals at ALL. The high winds act more as strings and bells. There are only 32 notes in the whole thing below middle B, where the finger-register divide is. It has notes I never learned until this summer, when I got shown up by a Linn-Mar student who later made All-State. It is one of the most challenging pieces I have ever played, or more accurately attempted.
However, “Hallelujah Chorus” does not rise to the annual exhaustion that is “Sleigh Ride.” (If a trivia question ever starts along the lines “written during a heat wave” this song is likely the answer.) It has a section in A major (three sharps), the line never stops moving, the notes soar way into the beyond-high-C stratosphere, and THERE ARE E SHARPS IN HERE.
I will die, but I will die valiantly.
