a Thanksgiving announcement

I'm about as grumpy as I can be about having to work on Thanksgiving.  And by work, I don't mean teaching funny little 8th graders, I mean spending a whole day in meetings with other grumpy adults.

I need a special emoticon for this feeling.  One that can express rage, annoyance and homesickness.  Something like

/:(

No, that's not doing it.

Anyway, on this day of thanks I am thankful for the opportunity to break my own rules and announce something that I am not 100% certain of, but because I am about 99.9% certain, I will now say:


WE ARE MOVING BACK TO IOWA!
Give thanks.

The plan now is to move to Cedar Falls, where I will start my master's degree in school psychology and Brad will finish his master's degree in administration.

This is possibly bad news for the blog itself.  Probably no one wants to read, Dollar Thousandaires, the story of two Iowans, living in Iowa.  But as the picture of what our lives will be starts to form, I am thinking things could be interesting.  One thing is for sure: We will be broke.  Brad's plan to counteract this is to live in married student housing, which he points out will be conveniently placed on the bus route. 

Whatever the case, our lives are going to drastically change.  No more weekend trips to the beach.  No more months-long vacations through Asia.  Slowly, this is sinking in and I am coming to terms with how our lives will be. I picture it a little like this:

At the laundromat, I'll be folding a fraying and faded blouse.  I'll turn to the woman standing next to me.  "I used to have a maid," I'll say.  "Cleaned the house floor to ceiling five days a week."

"What is it," she'll think, "with laundromats and lunatics? And why do they always bother me?"

Each morning I'll climb on to the bus, flopping down in a seat, dragging my belongings behind me. "I used to have a driver," I'll say to my seatmate, who is fixedly gazing out the window.  
"Oh?" she'll ask, being, as always, politely Midwestern.
"Of course he had a terrible odor problem, but he took us where we needed to go, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, we had a private chauffer at our beck and call.

Guests will come on Saturday to our rooms in the student housing complex.  There, our silk rugs will be doing a poor job of hiding the abuse the carpet underneath has taken.  Red Bull and cigarette stains will peek out of every corner.  "We used to have a house made of marble," I'll say.  "In a land where the sun shined every day."