Last few weeks' wrap...

We've been busy here, but nothing uniquely Fargo has popped up recently. Still, Fargoing's many fans have demanded an update. Here goes:

Katie and Joey wrapped up their soccer seasons on Oct. 14. It was a gorgeous day that day, and so I wasn't able to take the picture of the players running around a snowy field in their winter coats. Still, by the time Katie played her game that afternoon, Joey and Ellie were ready to bundle up and try to soak up a few rays:

For the record, Katie scored the tying goal that saved her team from a loss. A very nice wrap-up to two terrific seasons.

The next Monday, Katie's team had its end-of-season party at Space Aliens, our all-time favorite restaurant here (it will be the subject of its own post once I manage to take some interior shots of it). I had been asked to take pictures of all the girls for the cake that Erin, the team manager, had dreamed up. I made the slight improvement of giving the girls giant heads in Photoshop, and this was the result:

As mentioned in the Halloween post, Jen's mom and stepdad, Judith and Ken, came up for Katie's birthday party this past Friday night, the 27th. Ken specializes in fabulous cakes for his grandchildren, and this one was no exception:

Katie invited a bunch of school and soccer pals over for a sleepover. Jen had them up late into the night fastening curls to their heads with bobby pins. This also worked out pretty well by Saturday morning:

Katie is in the black shirt with the long ringlets; Ellie is in the bottom right corner, and seems to have brushed out many of her curls already.

Over this past weekend, Ken and I went to go see Dave Eggers speak at NDSU. He was the author, a few years back, of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (a book coincidentally given exactly that name). Eggers is a soft-spoken, very likable guy who has just written a new book about the life of a "lost boy" from Sudan who now lives in Atlanta. He is also a native Midwesterner, and said he'd spent the day wandering around Fargo and found it to be kind of like Champaign-Urbana, Ill., but without the smell.

Jen's folks return home tomorrow, Wednesday, and then Jen herself takes off for Washington on Friday for a week of editing and attending sisterly baby showers. I'm hoping to have a bunch of my courthouse colleagues over for dinner on Saturday while she's gone; this may prove to be an uncommonly stupid idea, given how much housecleaning I'll have to accomplish to make that happen. Jen returns the following Friday evening, and then I take off for St. Louis Sunday night for a week with the 8th Circuit to hear cases argued. It's going to be a pretty crazy spell, and December's not much better.