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.

Halloween in Fargo!

The dominant memory native Fargoans seem to have of Halloween is of trudging through a foot of snow, with their heavy winter coats zippered up over their costumes. We didn't quite get that experience this year – Minot, N.D., about 300 miles northwest of us, was dealt six inches of snow yesterday, but we received only a dusting.

Still, it was 25 degrees as the kids and I set off to collect candy from the neighbors tonight. Jen bravely volunteered to stay home and staff our candy distribution. Ellie was Snow White, Joey was Anakin Skywalker (Luke's father, before he turns into Darth Vader), and Katie was an adorable Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a costume her Grandma Judith made her. (Indy made for an ill-tempered Toto, and I had to end up holding her leash as the kids went door to door.)

Judith and Ken were up here for the week to visit and celebrate Katie's birthday. The actual picture of the kids with their winter jackets zippered up over their costumes is living on Ken's camera at the moment; I'll try to retrieve it in the next few days.

The bright side about the cold was that the kids were really pretty agreeable about heading home after a relatively short round of trick-or-treating. It was only about 6:30 when we returned, but it had been dark for quite some time. Thanks to the time change the other day, the sun now sets at 5:15 p.m. I was wearing my fabulous winter coat, which kept me toasty.

After the kids warmed up with hot chocolate and sugared up with a sampling of their haul, Jen decided it would be a good idea to go to the Haunted Corn Maze:


It was indeed. Ten miles due south of Moorhead on the Minnesota side of the river, both the Haunted Corn Maze and the Haunted Farm were in full swing on the last night of their seasons tonight. We left Ellie at home with Grandma and Grandpa, wisely, as it turned out, as she would likely have enjoyed being chased around a cornfield by chainsaw-toting masked figures even less than Joey did.

Kate and Jen quickly became separated from me and Joey; the boy and I braved the spooky figures jumping out at us and made it through the maze in relatively speedy fashion (aided when one ghoul took pity on us, broke character, and said, "Ah, don't go that way – it's a loop. Go over there instead").

The women were not so lucky. Joey and I warmed ourselves by a campfire for about 15 minutes before they reappeared. Katie told one of the figures in the maze, "You don't scare me!" He replied, "Well, I did the first eight times you walked past me." Once the maze's actors stopped laughing at them, pity was also taken, and the guy said, "Look, just follow me, OK?"

The Haunted Corn Maze also featured "The Vortex," a slowly spinning cylinder that goes around a catwalk within a small building, which produced an optical illusion that gave you the impression your body was actually flipping upside-down. Jen peeked inside and pronounced it nauseating, but Joey and Katie couldn't get enough of it. We capped the visit with a very nice hayride in the dark.

The City of Fargo apparently suffered some trauma a few years back concerning Halloween, and many of the city's public schools won't celebrate or acknowledge the holiday at all anymore. I don't have all the details, but it sounds like some parents made a very ugly stink over the supernatural overtones of the holiday. Satanic, shmatanic. As a result, even at Bennett, which seems to be relatively cool about this sort of thing, only the first graders were allowed to dress up. And Ellie's ballet teacher hemmed and hawed and could barely utter the word "Halloween" for fear of giving offense when asking if we would mind if she choreographed a dance with all the kids in their costumes.

OK, this is a little better...

For the record, Jen is the one who sent Ellie out with bare legs.

Is this the best you got?

Um, probably not. But it's what we woke up to this morning. A little disappointing.

A year of Fargoing...

It's been a year since Fargoing's initial post.

Now we're here, and the business end of our stay in Fargo is beginning to present itself – the inch of snow we're expecting tonight makes that crystal clear.

On the phone with my mom the other night, I was talking about how much we're enjoying life here – the pace, the ability to really spend time with your family, ridiculously short commutes, all that good stuff. Now, staying here permanently is not possible – we have to go back to our house in Rockville, and Jen's office will want her back as soon as my clerkship is done. And of course we miss our family and friends dearly. And we miss Chick-fil-A.

To reassure Mom, I said, "We'll be back in Maryland next year..." but the thought suddenly hit me – and perhaps I should not have said this out loud: "...but I'm not sure we'll be happy."

Winter may cure me of this sentiment, but so far the quality of life here is very alluring. I might not want to be a teenybopper or a single twentysomething living here, but as thirtysomethings with a houseful of kids, Fargo suits me and Jen pretty damn well. It's not clear to me how the day-to-day of living in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is going to be an improvement. (Perhaps I should keep reminding myself that it's going to be 72 degrees in Rockville tomorrow...)

A year ago, the move West was forever away, we didn't own any winter clothes of note, and I had never heard of hotdish. Mashed-potato wrestling only existed in my dreams. This is Fargoing's 70th post in 365 days – hope you're enjoying it. Grab a cup of hot chocolate and gather by the computer screen for the next few months as the real adventure begins.

Eeek!

I will, of course, post snow pictures as soon as they are available...

A Night at the Symphony...

OK, I'll admit it – the main attraction was to be able to brag to Jen that I managed to take the kids to "the Symphony" while she was out of town last week. The theory being that six nights of inattentive parenting could be overcome with one night of highbrow fare. Jen saw right through it, of course, but despite her better instincts remains impressed at our tony evening out.

The Fargo-Moorhead Symphony and the Fargo-Moorhead Youth Symphony performed a concert of John Williams standards (well, okay – middlebrow fare) Saturday night in the basketball arena at Concordia College in Moorhead. This is the two orchestras together:

A pretty impressive crowd playing to a sold-out show. The Youth Symphony turned out to be about two-thirds of the musicians, and when they were excused after performing their numbers (one was Beethoven's Fifth, which I was unaware John Williams wrote – what a talented man!), the stage was much more empty.

The organizers clearly knew how to draw and keep a crowd; it was billed as "Pizza Pop - The Epic in Williams," and after the show, there was indeed pizza and pop served to the crowd on the basketball floor just behind the sound reflectors behind the musicians. Also, Darth Vader appeared toward the end to stalk the stage while the orchestra played his theme song: Williams' "Imperial March." Tickets were promoted heavily at area supermarkets, where we purchased a family five-pack for $25.

St. Louis...

Jen and I were two ships passing in the night this past weekend; I'd been in St. Louis until late Friday night for the 8th Circuit's week of hearing cases, and she took off Monday morning for a week of face-to-face managing of her newspaper and staff.

I've been a single dad all this week, which renews my respect for those who do it full-time; I can't quite imagine how anyone makes that work (there are only so many sugar-beet-plant field trips one can undertake). Jen'll be back Sunday night unless she decides to extend my suffering. Actually, no, the kids have been taking it pretty easy on me; I haven't had to burst into tears yet. Yet.

I enjoyed myself greatly in St. Louis. We caught a Cardinals game Wednesday night, in which the Cards pulled themselves out of an 8-game losing streak that gravely endangered their division lead – the 3-run homer in the 8th did the trick.

Tuesday night was the circuit's annual court dinner, where the judges and their staffs, and the circuit staff in St. Louis, all get together for a very nice evening. The judges introduce clerks old and new. Judge B. mentioned my efforts to drag people to Fargo for the marathon in May, a mention that bore fruit, as a staff attorney I met with later in the week signed on to Team Ibu once we finished talking business.

The rest of the week, we ran around to blues clubs, trying to underspend the per diem the federal government has us traveling under (It's actually fairly generous – I may eke out a small profit for the week).

One thing I was very happy to learn about St. Louis is that at the end of a block bearing three blues clubs, there's a White Castle:

It occurred to me that I'll probably get to know St. Louis' night life far better than Fargo's this year, as the judge's staff and I will be returning to town something like six more times, five days at a shot, and I don't have a damn thing to do other than wander around the city.

It's a far cry from real life – Jen and I recently realized that we haven't gone out on a date even once since my judge's lovely reception back in July, when we first arrived in Fargo. We're kind of used to this kind of date-deprivation, given that I've been in night law school for the past four years. But, geez, this year our evenings are free! No classes for me, no commute for her!

We've promised each other we will line up a babysitter as soon as Jen gets home.

Sugar beets!

It's sugar-beet processing season here in the Red River Valley. The "campaign" has begun!

During this initial two-week period, roads are filled with large trucks delivering mountains of sugar beets to processing plants. I must see this for myself, you say. Here goes:

Here's a large truck loaded down with beets:

...Moorhead's processing plant:

...and a better look at the really impressively large mountain of beets (click on it for a larger version...):

Where we lived in Maryland, we really weren't connected to agriculture at all. The closest we got was trying to find out the season for soft-shell crabs (for the record, it begins around May, and only lasts a little while). Here, the local paper tracks the sugar beet and other crops carefully, and as a result, I know things like:

• We're getting a bumper crop of sugar beets this year, despite the lack of rain that stunted other area crops. Sugar beets' roots go deep and apparently there was plenty of water down deep this year.
  
  
• Around 3,000 of the region's farmers own the American Crystal Sugar Company cooperatively. They hold each other to strict limits on how much everyone can haul in – if the crop is too good, as it threatened to be this year, they sometimes decide to plow under the excess sugar beets.
  
  
• Sugar beets are a $1 billion crop in this part of the world (eastern Montana to western Minnesota), and that generates another $2 billion in indirect effects.
  
  
• Though sugar beets are processed for months beginning around now, the push to get the beets out of the fields and to the plants is quick and concentrated. The beets sit outside and are, not surprisingly, quite frozen for much of the winter. This seems not to hurt them, and is a quite economical way for the processing plants to store them.
  
  
• Lots of folks take 2 weeks' vacation from their regular jobs to go work in the processing plants. The base hourly wage isn't fantastic, but people work 12-hour shifts, which generates tons of overtime -- and weekend hours pay double.
  
  
• The plume of emissions from the processing plant is quite fragrant, I'm told, though I haven't gotten a really good whiff of it yet. I've been told it smells like popcorn, or maybe a little bit like sulfur. (That's a pretty large range there...) Apparently, the worst place in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area to sample the smell is at the plant itself – I took the kids there this afternoon to check it out, but the tall smokestacks lift the aroma much further away. But when the wind blows just right, downtown Fargo is suffused with the scent. I'll give a full report if I get a really good noseful of it.
  
  
• Sugar beets fall off the trucks all over town. Some of them are barely indistinguishable from the gravel on the side of the road (right). Some of them are fine and clean enough to bring home (below). I'm not sure what we're going to do with this fine sugar beet, however. It's still sitting on the kitchen table.
  
  

For more details on this crop, my friends at the Wikipedia have a comprehensive article on all things sugar beet.