When we first arrived here late in the day, we went to the town hall so that someone would turn on our water. It was cold, we had been in the car all night long- we drove from Denver starting at 2:00 am. We had to be in Inowa by 5 the next day. A 13 hr trip- no problem except you change time zones and loose an hour. :)
So we got to our home, which we hadn't even seen in person, and went off our realitors reccomendation. We got here and turned on the water. Little drips... then a little more and then nothing. The water man came to the door and said..... did you turn it on? Yes, we didn't get anything. Come to find out that the water had not been shut off ever and with the line from the road to the street along with most of the house was frozen! Upon hearing this from the water man I quickly thought to myself Self, what would you normally do in a situation like this? And self answered, Call Nick your brother of course! For a 6 pack of Dr. Pepper Nick would fix anything. > Lucky for us Nick was the one driving the moving truck and was 20 mins from arriving. Durnig that time the water man returned to his office to talk it over with others.
Next thing I know, a woman appears at the end of my driveway and promptly announces that she "heard about my water problem and wanted to be the first to come over and let you know that we are going to get this taken care of. I'm the mayor of this town, and I want you to feel welcomed and will do what we need to to get it fixed." So we met the mayer of the town and I learned my first lesson.....
#1 IN A SMALL TOWN THEY ALL KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU IN 2 MINS.
AND #2 THEY ARE MOST LIKELY RELATED TO THE PERSON YOUR GOING TO COMPLAINE ABOUT SO DON'T.
To finish the water highlight, the owner of our house (cause we are renting here until we get things figured out...) paid for us to stay in a hotel in town.
The next day we learned that just the meator was broken, no pipes in the house and we had running water. It started with a faster drip, then finally shards of ice broke through, and then chucks of ice cubes. It took a while but we got it all fixed.
By the time we had water, there were 18 people at our house unloading our truck so fast I think it all ended up in the garage so I could sort through where I wanted everything. They had us unloaded in about 30 mins, and had shoveled all our snow in the driveway and cleared a path for the back door access. It was great!
Note on that point. Each of our boxes had labels on them with rooms and a listing of the cjiooi g nbgvglkvnn hkttgottttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhlikjjkjjjjjjjjjjjjjghughgubnontents (Kadence is adding her input). When we moved in we didn't want to put anything inside because we didn't know if the pipes were busted or not. So we slowly moved things in that we needed.
We quickly noticed how much fun we were going to have in Iowa belonging to a small branch. (For all the non mormon followers each area you live in has an assigned congragation. A Branch is a small group 0-200 or so and then you get a ward of about 300-600) That's a guss khiojuyhuhfg - Ok so change of author Jake is going outside to shovel snow off our driveway). I am not sure where he was going with this last line. 45 minutes after the men from our branch left the relief society president showed up with lunch and cleaning supplies ready to help clean the house and unpack us. When we didn't put her to work she said she would be back with dinner. So we had dinner that night and for the next two nights after. It was so nice.
A funny side note to our hotel experience: It has been a joke at our house that they must eat lots of corn and bacon here since those are things they grow alot of. So we go to dinnerour first night here and I asked if they had broccoli as a side dish for Kadence (she really likes broccoli) the waiter says "No we don't have broccoli but we do have corn."
