The week's wrap-up...

It was pretty cold this week for September for Marylanders; the day after our 37-degree morning, I caught some frost on the front lawn as I hiked out to get the newspaper:

I'm sure they handle the cold just fine, but Fargoans aren't quite as water-resistant as we had thought. The Red River Soccer Club warned us early on that they would only cancel games if lightning were actually striking the goalposts on our child's specific field. (More or less.)

But here we sit this morning with all the games postponed because it's been raining for the past few days. Our pal Brian, in town to interview for his own circuit clerkship, scheduled a late flight out just so he could catch a few of the kids' games tonight. No dice.

The two career clerks I work with are devoted to a Cajun restaurant that used to be downtown and recently moved to the south side of the city, most of the way back to our house:

This reminds me of the proverbial talking dog: it's not so much what the dog has to say, it's more that the dog can talk at all that is amazing. This restaurant can talk po' boy and boudin, but perhaps with more of a Midwest accent than a New Orleanian might find ideal – they also talk beer-cheese soup at the soup and sandwich bar.

Walking back to the courthouse from lunch the other day, I took a good, close look at this sign:

That's a nice, friendly edit on the bottom line there.

I'm headed to St. Louis Sunday night to accompany Fargo's active circuit judge and his staff to hear arguments in the cases we've been working on for the past month, and will be there until Friday night. There's a court dinner one night, and we're going to catch a Cardinals game another evening. Should be fun.

The End of Autumn...

It was 37 degrees this morning -- after it had warmed up a little. It's now 45 degrees at 10 a.m.

I was laughed at when I mentioned it to a colleague. She called it "jacket weather."

I'm thinking it's the end of fall and the beginning of schadenfreude* season for our friends and family back East. Enjoy yourselves!

* spelling corrected

Itasca!

We moved up our camping trip to Minnesota's Itasca State Park because the weekend weather was supposed to be just terrible – lots of rain and temperatures in the low 40s and high 30s.

So Katie and Joey and I took off Thursday afternoon rather than Friday. We called along the way, and were assured that we could find a camping spot. We arrived at sunset, and were able to set up the tent pretty quickly in the dark.

The original plan had been to backpack to Lake Hernando DeSoto, about five miles into the park, but this was scrapped when we realized that even with our stepped-up schedule, we were going to have just one nice day. So we stayed put at the campsite.

Friday morning we headed out to Itasca's headline attraction: the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Here it is; to the left is Lake Itasca; to the right is the Mississippi River:


Katie and Joey don't have a lot of context for this; I'll be in St. Louis when the Eighth Circuit meets there next week and I'll try to snap a few pictures of the Mississippi where it's a little more Mighty.

We then headed to the park's tackle shop, where I bought a fishing license and a few worms. We were told that the best shore fishing in the park was by the main lodge, off the pier. We fished all day there, and practiced our casting, line-tying, and loafing around.

Toward the end of the day, I did actually catch a fish, a good-sized sunfish. We mostly had the pier to ourselves; some other guys showed up with some very impressive-looking lures. They could cast like pros, but they didn't catch a thing. It made us feel a little bit better about our skimpy haul.

We attached our fish to a stringer and tossed him back in the water while we fished on. Joey and Katie took turns showing the fish off to everyone who wandered down to the pier; to a person, they were quite impressed.

We hung out later than we probably should have to see if we could catch a complete meal, to no avail. We judged the day a great success, if only because no one ended up with a fishhook embedded in their bodies. (I'd studied up on hook removal technique, figuring we might be far from help; to the right is the "string-yank" method, I kid you not.) Both kids were very careful with their fishing poles all day; I was proud of them.

It was twilight and starting to rain when we gave up and walked back up to the lodge. Joey carried the fish in a Ziploc bag; everyone with a window seat in the restaurant cheered him as we passed – there's nothing more sweetly all-American than a little boy with his caught fish.

We got back to the campsite, and finally remembered to take a picture:


The kids played cards in the tent while I massacred the fish in the dark with a sharp new filet knife by the light of my headlamp. I knew it was going to end up this way: We ended up with about three tablespoons of fish meat. If I'd had a few more to practice on, I think it would have gone better.

We gamely battered and pan-fried our postage-stamp filets, and everyone tried them. Joey and I thought it was delicious, but I think Katie was still picturing the whole live fish. She had promised not to name him, but kept slipping and calling him "Freddie." I will admit to a little regret that our fine fish gave his life for so little in return. Mostly, we dined on macaroni and cheese, little sausages, and hot chocolate.

The skies opened up into a torrential downpour overnight, with winds that might not have been so impressive had we had a real roof over our head. In the tent, it was quite a show. The kids slept soundly while I lay half-awake wondering it the trees were going to be able to take it. They did, as did our tight little tent.

The next morning, during a break in the rain, we packed everything up and headed down to Park Rapids, a small town with a jewel of a Main Street. We ate breakfast at a classically beat-up cafe, Wimpy's:



It was delicious. The kids had scrambled eggs, a giant cinnamon bun, and more hot chocolate. I had coffee, juice, eggs, toast, hash browns, and bacon. An old-timer ambled in and pressed bicentennial half-dollars in the kids' hands by way of saying hello. How cool is that? I'm embarrassed to admit I'd almost headed to the McDonald's instead.

This doesn't happen often, but I am moved to verse:

Itasca! Itasca! Itasca!
A park that's as big as Nebraska!
A place to catch fish
Lots of rain, and an itch
Your mama been there? hmm -- Alaska.

Fall Sports...

Soccer – and ballet – seasons are upon us. Oh, so is fall – summer has come to an abrupt end. It's 47 degrees at midnight, and the overnight low yesterday was 42. To everyone who has asked me in the last week or so, "Is it snowing there yet? Ha ha ha," you can still go to hell, but the real answer is, "Soon enough."

Saturday was stunningly gorgeous, with a high of 65 – great weather to start the soccer season. It doesn't last – I'm told that by the end of the 6-week fall soccer season, kids are wearing their heavy winter jackets under their jerseys. You'll note from the photos above that people are getting ready: the kid trying to take the ball from Joey has long pants on. (Click on the photo itself – or any photo on this blog – to get a larger version!)

Katie and Joey are in the Red River Soccer Club, which has nifty reversible jerseys so one team can always wear white, and the other red, with only one jersey required. It's a very friendly style of soccer; Joey's team doesn't worry about offsides (which is good, because I haven't figured that rule out myself quite yet...) and is casual about "hands" violations, and they both play on half-sized fields. We missed the deadline for registering them back in April or so, and sent a check that included the late fee; the league refused to cash it – they don't charge Fargo newcomers a late fee.

Both kids' teams practice twice a week at local schools; games are held at the Pepsi Soccer Complex up on the north end of town by the airport. It's a vast, beautiful, almost brand-new facility with nine fields, most of which were broken up today into the half-sized fields, for a total of about 15 or so games going simultaneously and over several shifts. The West Fargo and Moorhead leagues also play there, and Katie's team played one from across the river in Moorhead.

Ellie started a pre-ballet program Saturday morning as well: 45 minutes in a very nice studio a few blocks north of us. It's weekly and runs $30 a month. She is very excited to be in leotards and all the ballet accoutrements.

We'll have an early indicator tonight of how Katie may tough out the winter: She and two pals, one from soccer and one from school, are camping in the back yard tonight in a tent. So far, so good.

I noticed something out in the soccer complex parking lot on Saturday:

The vast majority of vehicles out here are American-built; for instance, in the shot above, just about every single car you can see is from the Big Three. This is a complete reversal from where we live in Maryland, where I'd estimate the majority of vehicles are foreign-made, with an emphasis on Japanese makes.

I can't believe we missed...

...hotdish on a stick at the fair! Hotdish on a damn stick!

Actually, it looks like we were totally negligent in checking out the cornucopia that is the Minnesota State Fair. According to another blog, we failed to take notice of:

1. Cajun Season Alligator Sausage on-a-stick
2. Uffda Treat
3. Wild Rice corndogs
4. Dogzilla
5. Political pop
6. Bug juice
7. Puff-daddy on-a-stick
8. Batter-dipped deep-fried chocolate chip cookies on-a-stick
9. Pancake wrapped around sausage on-a-stick
10. Cheeseburger calzones on-a-stick
11. Pizza on-a-stick
12. Tater-tot hotdish on-a-stick
13. Spicy buffalo chicken filled wonton
14. Walleye on-a-stick (also affectionately known as a "fishcicle")
15. Mac-n-cheese on-a-stick

The Minnesota State Fair!

We've just returned from an overnight trip to Minneapolis-St. Paul (or "the Cities," in local parlance) for the Minnesota State Fair. I'd really hoped to see a real, agricultural-state state fair while we were out here, and I was not disappointed.

Well, maybe just a little. It turns out the Minnesota State Fair is now targeted at largely the same demographic as our beloved hometown Montgomery County Agricultural Fair: Suburban kids who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball, not so much because they're bad pitchers, but because they have no idea what a barn looks like.

As much as I'd hoped to see something qualitatively different from our home fair, I have to admit that Katie, Joey, and Ellie fall squarely in that target audience. They were delighted by the horses, cattle, sheep and pigs we saw. They received tattoos and hats from the swine folks:

The concessions closely tracked the ones found at the MoCo Fair, with a few key exceptions, among them, the all-the-milk-you-can-drink-for-$1 stand:

...which has very impressive apparatus backing it up:

For the record, the white milk, from the bottom row of pipes, was 2%, and the chocolate milk, from the top row, was 1%. All of it was icy-cold and delicious.

Sadly, one is also unlikely to see this at the MoCo fair:

Something about cheese curds just makes me happy.

One absolutely outstanding exhibit was the "Miracle of Birth" center, in a spanking-new building. Jen and I both initially thought, independently, that it was perhaps an elaborate antiabortion display, but it turns out it's sponsored by Minnesota's veterinarians and conglomerate CHS Inc. and devoted to actually showing people the, you know, miracle of birth.

The vets stock a large building with dozens of animals just about to pop with child, and then let fairgoers watch the deliveries. A calf had been born to a cow about two hours before we arrived, and we were there to watch it stagger around and get its first bottle feeding, while the mother ran somewhat angry circles around her calf and the vets attending to it. Katie, like 90% of girls her age, wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up, and was delighted by the whole building. The kids were mesmerized by a case full of chicken eggs that were hatching (left).

They also liked checking out the row of piglets nursing:

We'd read a story in the Forum about the champion state-fair pumpkin, an 813-pounder. I promised to get my colleague P. a picture of the kids with it; here it is:

Ellie seems particularly pleased to be there.

We wrapped up the evening with:

...not so much because they sounded good, but because they are perhaps the ultimate state-fair food. Ellie refused to even take a nibble – I'm not sure what she thought they were, but she would not be moved.

It started raining just as we left the fair – terrific timing. We were out of the parking lot in two minutes, and after a little congestion through St. Paul, were back on the interstate to the hotel in Minneapolis in no time. I dropped the kids and Jen at the hotel, so as not to muss their 'dos, and parked on the street. I parallel-parked in front of what I thought was a swanky new Corvette, but which turned out to be a swanky $440,000 Porsche Carrera GT, which makes me extra-happy I did not back into it:

On the way out of town this morning, we hit the Minneapolis Ikea to get a few more sets of curtains and a few odds and ends. Since Target is based in Minneapolis, we also stopped by what looked like a very fancy Target store, but once you got past the two-story target-shaped atrium, it was a profoundly regular Target store.

This Dakota stuff is starting to seep in...

So the kids flipped on a football game while we were in the hotel room last night, and I was pleased to see the University of North Dakota handling themselves well against an ACC opponent, Georgia Tech.

Wait a minute – that doesn't sound right. "ND," "ND." Any other states start with "ND"? No. Who could it be? The announcers talked right through half the quarter and mentioned Georgia Tech probably a dozen times before they mentioned Tech's opponent – Notre Dame! Oh, right! They play football, too. Geez.