I’m home

After a week filled with dear friends both old and new, a new dog you’re all lucky I didn’t dognap, favorite haunts, new museums, historical learnings that I’m still processing, a 5K along a gorgeous ocean boardwalk, delicious cooking, gallons of Diet Coke, the endless magical convenience of Uber in an unfamiliar city, and a Charlotte-to-Cedar-Rapids flight that looped over to Omaha to avoid what looks to have been an epic storm, I am home and happy and thankful and sleepy and ready to resume my regularly scheduled adventures at dawn. Good night!

Trying to take a normal, respectable, youthfully handsome selfie in this town is impossible with all these damn monuments everywhere you look

Our state capitol is capitoler than your state capitol

Our gold-leafed dome shimmers on the hill:

 The staircase up to the breathtaking rotunda:

Toldja it was breathtaking:

Boobies:

A vestibule off the first floor:

A gorgeous bas-relief tribute to women crowned by an unmistakably Deco sunburst:

Another vestibule has a creepy display of dolls fetishizing the inauguration gowns of our First Ladies:

The stairs to the second floor of the rotunda:

Corn art!

The I above the House chamber windows stands for I LOVE THIS BUILDING: 

But gross. Just fucking gross. Just because an impotent man-boy climbs on his Big Wheel and hurls his feces at the adults to play president doesn’t mean we have to sully our Senate chamber walls with his festering rictus:

Patterns and textures on the second floor:

The steps to the dome, which I unfortunately didn't get to climb:

The freaking STUNNING second-floor library, ladies and gentlemen:

It has lots of books:

And a dumb waiter. For smart people. They’re smart because they read books. And they figured out a way to avoid carrying them up the steps:

And an intricate iron staircase the is the envy of the entire Industrial Revolution:

More intricate wrought iron:

And a beautifully stenciled ceiling medallion:

 A little sorbet to cleanse the palate:

Monuments on the nearby grounds:

Iowa’s memorial to the drooling buffalo that used to wander our land, moistening our soil.

Walking away: 

 Goodbye for now, noble capitol: