Saturday, May 20, 2006

The house!

It turns out that our presence is going to have to supply most of the charm to our new home -- it's pretty ugly. Here's the best view of it:


...which highlights the very nearby and quite beautiful Bennett Elementary School.

Jen took 122 photos while in Fargo, but managed not to take one of the actual front of the house. After first accusing me of erasing the photo she must have taken, Jen now admits that it might have been a mental block -- she didn't want to record how awkward this house is. Here's a shot from the real-estate flyer:



All right! Now, having said all that, I think we're going to enjoy the year there. The interior spaces are quite nice. Here's a quick tour.

This is the view of the main floor -- steps down to the front door, and another flight from there to the two bedrooms downstairs.


This is the view of the kitchen and main eating area, directly behind the first shot. There's a bedroom up front, which will probably serve as an office for Jen, and one in back, for me and Jen. There's no actual master bedroom in the house -- no bedroom has an attached bathroom. Odd. But we're pretty used to our bathroom being a public space.


Here's another shot of the main floor. The doors lead out to a nice deck...


... and here is that deck:


This is the view out the front window:


This is the view from bottom of the stairs, with one bedroom to each side, and a big playroom directly behind the camera. Jen seems to have sold Joey and Ellie on sharing a bedroom, which I wouldn't have dared attempt.


This is the secret hiding place Joey discovered in a closet in one of the bedrooms, which I'm sure will get some use:


This is the back of the house:



Ok. that's the tour. There's nothing particularly notable about the individual bedrooms or bathrooms, plus, they're hard to photograph. On to Bennett Elementary!


This is the drop-dead gorgeous library at Bennett:


It's not clear to me why they have such high ceilings in the school -- wouldn't they be hard to heat? I'm sure they know what they're doing.

This is a cluster of classrooms. They tend to have a bunch of rooms lined up, with a common area up front, where activities can be conducted among several classes:


This is the really cool part: Lockers!


Everybody gets one. Katie is very excited, though she would prefer that only the upper grades were issued lockers.

This is the lunchroom -- also very nice. I love the exposed woodwork in the ceilings, which seems to run throughout the school:


Moving on! This is a shot of the brand-new Hornbacher's grocery store that serves the neighborhood:


Yum! Here was the highlight of the trip for Joey -- the waterslide at the hotel he, Jen, and Judith stayed at:

Monday, May 15, 2006

We have an address!

Jen, her mom Judith, and my boy Joey have found us a place to live! Barring any trouble, it looks like we'll be hanging our balaclavas at 2278 58th Ave S in Fargo. It's about half a block away from Bennett Elementary School, which came highly recommended to us. Both house and school were built around 2000. Sadly, the school is not named for former education secretary William Bennett, which would have been fun, but instead in honor of recently retired Fargo Schools Superintendent Vern Bennett. Bennett Elementary's mascot is a bear, and each grade gets its own kind of bear:



The bears seem to get angrier the further the children progress through the school -- I'm not sure what's up with that.

The City of Fargo has a very informative page with details on the neighborhood. Trash pickup is on Fridays.

The house had been on the market for sale for awhile; the owners agreed to rent it out instead for the year. It's a split-foyer, four bedrooms, about 2,800 square feet. A little pricier than we had hoped a Fargo rental would be -- almost $1,600 a month, and a $500 fee for the dog for a year. It doesn't have a washer or dryer or a microwave -- apparently those things don't convey in that part of the world (it could be worse -- in the South, you tend to have to provide your own refrigerator).

Jen can't send photos back (the laptop was in the shop when she left), so until Thursday when she and the boy return, we'll all have to settle for an aerial shot:



I think it's the house with the milk-chocolate-colored roof in the middle there.

Here's a larger shot, from Google Maps. Their image quality for Fargo is kinda poor, and their map geometry is a little off. So the red pointer should be not on the vacant lot, but on the house just below and to the left (click for a larger version):


Bennett Elementary is off to the right, and that three-pointed thing off to the left appears to be a condominium of some sort.

The house is about six and a half miles from the federal courthouse (left) -- might be nice biking.

This neighborhood is on Fargo's very southern frontier (in fact, the area just west is called "Frontier"!):



We had been hoping to nab something on Fargo's very beautiful north side, and closer to downtown, but Jen reports that the available house rentals up there were completely scary. They all seem to be geared toward college students, and look it. Perhaps nicer housing is available to rent at other times of year on the north side, but everything Jen & Judith saw was a real beater.

My only firm requirement was that the house be on the North Dakota side of the Red River, because if we're going to live through a Fargo winter, I don't want people to think we're luxuriating in tropical Minnesota. You say "Moorhead" (Minn.), people say, "What?" But you say "Fargo," they say, "Whoa!"

So this house sounds great to me. I'm assuming, however, that unless I hear otherwise, it fails Katie's main requirement, which was "a spiral staircase."

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Short update...

Not much to report. Jen and Joey are headed up to Fargo May 11-17.

I had my very last law-school class today, a review session for Administrative Law. This class is my only exam, and I have taken it pass-fail.

I turned in my last paper, for another class, around 11:30 p.m., easily beating the midnight deadline, but the whopping amount of caffeine (144 mg?) I ingested eight hours ago in just one "Full Throttle Fury" (a wannabe Red Bull-killer from the good folks at Coca-Cola), is keeping me vibrating.

Hmmm.... so short of absolutely bombing Admin, my law-school GPA is set.

I mailed all my employment paperwork to Fargo, and my judge has signed it – "which officially makes you a 'law clerk,'" my future Fargo colleague tells me. Woo hoo!

That's all for now. Plenty of updates once Jen gets her boots on the ground next week.