Shop Hopping and Water Heater Maintenance

So the All Iowa Shop Hop is going on for the months of June and July. Here are a few of the fabrics that I have acquired after visiting all the shops in my region. The idea is you stop at each participating shop and get your passport stamped, and they also give you a cute little printed quilt block. Then when you are done collecting all the stamps from around the state-or as many as you can-you mail in your passport and hopefully win great prizes.

Hubs  rode along with me yesterday to get the last four shops-Cascade, Clinton, Dewitt & LeClaire. It took us about 6 hours round trip and shopping included. I'm pretty quick at most shops. 

See! All done with this region! This year there are something like 86 shops participating-I don't think I'd ever get the whole state-you'd need a lot of driving time available in your life to do it! But a lot of folks do the whole thing!

And we had our Plumber friends from Ackerman Plumbing out to do maintenance on the water heater. 

I had to move A LOT of bins of Christmas stuff to get this path cleared out for him.

We had this water heater installed 5 years ago and Hubs thought it was probably time for them to check the anode rod. Yeah, that's the rod inside the water heater that attracts metals and crud in your water. 

Here's what ours looked like when he took it out. He said he's seen MUCH worse.

Here's the new one along side our old one.

And here's one he took out from a water heater in Tiffin-right up the road. He said the water is so hard and bad in Tiffin, folks need to get their anode rods changed EVERY YEAR! The crud just eats away the rod material, I don't get how it doesn't eat the whole water heater, but what ever. Anyway, $220 and we're good for another five years or so.  So good to move on to the next projects.