Foosball anyone?

As I was looking though the Sunday ads this morning, I noticed some items on sale at the sporting goods store. I yelled to DH in the other room "Hoonnneey! Foosball, ping pong, air hockey and pool tables are on sale this week. We need to get one before the Midwest Enforcement people come to get us." He laughed because he knew exactly what I was referring to…

In Spring 2006, while living in Los Angeles, we started house hunting online for available homes in Iowa. We joked about how often we saw Foosball and pool tables in the listings. Coordinating our search with our local agent, we scheduled a trip back to Iowa, with a goal to see as many houses as possible in one day. I'm pretty organized in my house-hunting efforts and utilize a worksheet and digital camera to make notes of all the features we desire in a house. Sometimes it's just notes about whether it has gas or electric kitchen appliances or double sinks in the master bath, but it allows us to see several houses very quickly. On this particular Iowa trip, we saw around 30 houses in under 7 hours (all in one day) in three different cities.

In the very first house we walked into, DH and I joked about whether the house would have a Foosball or pool table. Sure enough, it did - and when we saw it, we both burst out laughing. Our agent didn't quite get the humor of it until she witnessed, as we suspected, one or the other (or sometimes an air hockey or ping pong table) in every non-vacant house we toured. She admitted that she had not realized it was such a predominant feature in basements in the Midwest! She probably had not noticed it before since this was the first time she had ever been power-hunting. You can't really dispute the results when you see it so many times in one day.

I'm looking forward to our future remodel of the basement but don't have any immediate plans on installing any of those recreational tables. When I receive a citation from the Midwest Enforcement Department, I'll have to reconsider.