Sunday...

Fall weather seems to be leaning more towards winter than just fall.  Frost in northern Iowa this morning and our wind chills are not being mentioned.  It was 47 degree F. this morning while I was out with Barney and it is very windy.  I have to now look for a stocking hat to wear and a winter coat.

The only thing that looks tropical around here are the goldfish.  The largest gold fish died of old age but there are still two of them in my tank. The camera just didn't pick up the fish because the water is pretty much clear. It has more of a mysterious monster look this way.

I shared this photo on my other blog today.  I really like my new one-cup coffee maker.  Unfortunately I don't like my other regular coffeemaker coffee as much anymore.  I have a favorite flavor of donut shop coffee and a verona cafe.  It is not cheap to make these one single cups at a time but it does taste so good.

A mystery of the design of my neighbors house on the next street, downhill, are the two bump outs on the end of the houses.  They are not gas fireplaces.  I see that most of the houses in the row have these.  I would think that a space just for closets would be silly. There are not sewer vents so they are not bathrooms. I would think that it could have been better design.

I was on realtor sites yesterday looking at the price and sizes of houses around us.  I discovered that I was whining about only having a double car garage but it is a good thing.  The houses on both sides of us look large with three car garages but their square footage is a lot less than ours.  Our house is designed more like a cape cod house and it has a smaller roof area but the reality is that we are the biggest house. It will be cheaper for us to shingle our roof also as we don't have all those complicated sets of gables on our house.

I tend to share info when I get it about things in our new city.  We knew we were moving to a big city, 6th fastest growing in the nation, but we didn't know really how big.  We received a school publication on Friday and learned some new things to tells us why we have a little high taxes.  We have 11,000 plus students in our school district.  Eleven elementary schools, four middle schools, and two high schools, that are needed to handle all of the kids.  I don't know if they have any other schools in the works for building but the second high school was built a couple of years ago.  The high schools run independently and have different names.  Our high school is called Ankeny Centennial. Because we live on the far southwest corner of the city with timbered areas in some of the places, we don't really feel like we are in a big city. If we want to drive to the post office, it does take a while to go up into the old part of the city. Also it takes the post office many hours to service this large of town.  I read that they were behind on delivery of mail one day and at 7:00 in the evening they sent our four trucks to hit our area all at once.

I hope we have warmer weather again as I will need days to clear flowers and trim back dogwood bushes. These flowers seem to do well in spite of the cold but I am sure the tomatoes will fold up pretty soon.  It is a typical Sunday for us today.  I hope all out there are doing good.  Thanks for stopping by this day