House becomes a home?

We've gotten some of the worst of it done, if you don't look in the baby's room. (Thank God the baby isn't here yet, there'd be no room to put her. Him. PC pronouns for imminent but not extant people are even more troubling than those for just plain people.)

And trying to get a house set up and get up to speed on the progress of the Des Moines Social Club is hard. We're meeting lots of people and taking meetings, good stuff I think, but there are no salaries. We're looking for sponsors for a big Halloween event (and trying to plan it at the same time) but the seeds have yet to blossom into fruit. And we are adjusting to a very different life here--the hardest part isn't the culture shock but the uncertainty. Julie and I had both worn pretty comfortable grooves in New York. We were good at what we did and knew what was going on. In part, I think, that was the problem--we were both ready (we thought) for some big changes, but the financial uncertainty of getting a massive arts center off the ground in a town we've been in for 10 days is, well...stressful would be fair, I think. Inadequate but fair.

There's a chance I could get to play Tom Joad in Colorado. Josh Robinson texted me about the opportunity (the previous Tom had to drop out because of a family emergency) and I video'd an audition in iMovie and posted it on Youtube for the director (a friend of Josh's) and the artistic director, for whom I played Aguecheek in 12th Night in the Shenandoah Shakespeare. Tiny little world. I haven't heard, but it would start at the beginning of September, which would be okay by us. Naturally, once you want one of these things it goes another direction, but hey...we'll figure it out.

Send good thoughts.

Love,
M

Des Moines, Ahoy!

It's been a remarkable summer.

Julie and I were married on June 13th. (view some pictures here.)

My cousin Rob married Sarah in Maine on July 13th, and I officiated. There are some photos on Facebook here but I don't know if you can see them if you're not Sarah's friend.

Then the following weekend, July 19th, Andy and Elizabeth got married in South Dakota. I'm sure somebody's got photos somewhere.

Then Julie and I moved to Des Moines. Which brings us up to today.

Well not really. There was two weeks of packing, a quick trip by yours truly to Sleepaway Aikido Camp, and then 14 wonderful people helped us load all our stuff into a truck. A reeeeeeeally big truck. Which I then drove 3 days across half the country while Julie fed me coffee and zucchini bread. (Thanks, Suzanne and Beth & Jeff!)

We stayed in Jenkintown with Julie's childhood friend Heather, in Pittsburgh (Mt. Lebanon, actually) with my cousin Beth and her husband Jeff (who made this panko-crusted fried vegetable feast that I'm still trying to burn off) and then in a hotel outside of South Bend.

The Indiana Sand Dunes are beautiful, and make it a little easier for me to be so damn far from an ocean. I'm a coastal boy, really. Except for college I've always lived within hours of the ocean. So to see Lake Michigan receding into the distance, with the ghostly outline of Chicago rising out of the water, made me feel like I could get my inspirational-massive-body-of-water fix.

Today we unload. This weekend is a Keokuk Celebration of Marriage (Chuck and Carole Betts' 40th Anniversary party, combined with a Matt and Julie Wedding Celebration in Iowa party, at Julie's parents' house).

We ate at Raccoon River Brewing Company last night, where I'd been before, and where the ribs are quite acceptable. I have no new impressions of Des Moines, except that driving down Ingersoll near our new aparment looked good enough to live. For a while.

More later. Greetings to any and all who read this.

M