Return to Central Time

"So, when was the last time you celebrated New Year's Eve in a different time zone?" Jen asked a few minutes ago as we shoot across Minnesota this afternoon on the last leg of our epic Christmas journey.

"Not ever," I replied, thinking, man, that's a little pathetic. Not that it's ever been a big holiday for me, really, and not that I ever have a reason to travel far and wide during the holidays. But still.

"It'll be odd," Jen said. "They'll be dropping the ball in New York and we'll still have another hour."

Ellie spent the morning torturing me from the back seat with a game she had devised. "I am going to ask you questions," she said, "and the answer is a number."

Math? Fine. I can do four-year-old math. "Question One: Why do people get married?"

"Um, two?" I ventured. "Wrong," Ellie said. "It's ten. Because two sounds like ten."

She alternated questions between me and Jen, and I sensed a little favoritism, because Jen's answers were always deemed correct, whether or not Ellie had whispered, "Pick twelve!" to Jen beforehand.

Other questions included:

• Why do you and mom go on vacation so much?
  
• Why do bulls hate red?
  
• Why do leaves fall from the trees?

Jen was pronounced the winner eventually.

The trip from Atlanta has been pretty easy, with the kids glued to Nintendos or the "Best of Charlie's Angels" DVD Jen's sister gave her for Christmas. We had a little snow just west of Minneapolis, which looked like this briefly:

...but soon cleared up to this:

We're 63 miles east of Fargo now and the sailing is clear. Happy new year!

2006 Wrap-up

It's Christmas Day here in Atlanta, and all is well. The trip from Fargo to Maryland last weekend was amazingly quiet, due perhaps in part to my brother Dan and sister-in-law A.J.'s generous purchase of battery-powered Nintendo games for each of the kids. They played Super Mario Brothers wirelessly against each other all the way across the country, and most of the way down here to Atlanta.

Last week was nuts, with our days and nights fully booked up with professional and family demands. This week, it's only our nights that are booked up, and only with family demands. Should be a little more restful.

I've been getting hassled for a "Fargoing" update, but here's the thing: I haven't been in town, really, since Dec. 7. It has been Fargo to Maryland to Omaha to Fargo to Maryland to Atlanta, and that Fargo stop there in the middle was only about 18 hours long. So I haven't had much to say about our Fargo adventure since then.

A great friend of ours recently wrapped up her bloggging year by stealing a technique from several other bloggers: "[M]y year in review as encapsulated in the first line of the first post of every month." It's a cheap trick, but the results aren't half-bad. Because – just as in poetry – good writers borrow, and great writers steal, here's my attempt at greatness:

January: "We're well-launched into 2006, and the idea that we'll be elsewhere this time next year is beginning to seem more real."

February: "The City of Fargo is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the movie of 'Fargo' with an outdoor screening on March 1."

March: "Here's an example of the kind of news item I used to pay no attention to, but now read out loud over the kitchen table to Jen:"

April: "Jen's new hobby is perusing the online classifieds for Fargo house rentals. Hey, here's one:"

May: "Not much to report."

June: "Well, just as the Washington area is about to lose us to North Dakota for a year, it is getting what I believe is its first North Dakota-themed restaurant, Agraria."

July: "We're still moderately well on track to get out of here on Tuesday morning."

August: "The story of how I spent roughly three days studying for the bar exam between packing the house, driving across the country, unpacking the house, meeting the Judge's past clerks, attending the wedding in Austin and then getting my tail back to Maryland will be a much better story if I actually pass the exam."

September: "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."

October: "It's sugar-beet processing season here in the Red River Valley."

November: "For the record, the bar exam saga has ended, and it turned out to be, to my great relief, a 'tale of triumph against overwhelming odds.'"

December: "It looks like summer is over for good."

Have a cool Yule and a groovy new year.

Thanksgiving Dinner for Five

Thanksgiving is probably my most favorite holiday. It's essentially impossible to commercialize, and what's not to like about a holiday whose reason for existence is a big meal? Plus, the menu is difficult to screw up. A turkey's a big bird, but it's not really all that hard to cook.

We were able to celebrate Thanksgiving this year in a totally unprecedented manner. Usually, we have a terrific time at a large family gathering, either at our home or at others'. This year, it was just the five of us in Fargo.

It struck me as we were preparing the meal that Jen and I have never celebrated the holiday ourselves – not pre-kids, not post-kids. Even if we wanted to have Thanksgiving by ourselves in Maryland – which we didn't – we would have had to offend, perhaps mortally, a healthy proportion of our DC-based family members, perhaps all of them.

But in Fargo, where it is just us in our little house on the prairie, we could have our dinner without making excuses to anyone, without worrying of offending anyone, without having to justify to anyone our wanting to hunker down as a family of five.

It was a lovely, delicious meal, with all the trimmings one would expect. They grow a lot of turkeys in Minnesota, and I think they may keep the best ones for local use. The stuffing was delicious, as were the chocolate and apple pies. Only the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes caught fire – a blaze count well below our family average – and even they were quickly extinguished and replaced with fresh marshmallows.

The meal was, in miniature, all Jen and I had hoped our family would experience during our year away. An opportunity to catch our breath, draw close, and just be a family.

Would I want to do it this way every year? No. There's something irresistible about dinner for thirty. But I'm very pleased we took what may be our only opportunity ever to celebrate Thanksgiving as just us.

Yikes!

I'm off to D.C. today for a few days, then heading to Omaha to help Judge B. hear cases. (Just in time! The wind chill is supposed to drop to -25 to -35 today.) Jen wants me to go to Warren Buffett's favorite restaurant, Gorat's Steak House, while I'm in Omaha.

In D.C., I have to get a "character interview" with a local lawyer this afternoon, then head up to Baltimore with Meg tomorrow morning for a "professionalism" course the Maryland Bar requires. Today is my mom's birthday, and I get to have dinner with her and Dad.

The Mighty 790

I have admired this sign since we arrived in Fargo. This just says "Radio!" to me, with all the power and glory that the word once held. It's iconically Fargo, just as the Fargo Theatre sign is.

KFGO is "The Mighty 790" on your AM dial. I haven't actually listened to the station, which is owned by the giant Clear Channel corporation and which seems to have a news-talk format. Still, cool sign. For no good reason, I was worried they'd tear it down before I could get a good shot of it at night.

Bonanzaville in Winter...

We finally made it out to Bonanzaville, the nifty collection of area artifacts out in West Fargo.

Bonanzaville is owned and run by the Cass County Historical Society, and serves as the society's headquarters. It's a collection of exhibition buildings and actual historical buildings uprooted and moved, presumably to escape the wrecking ball. The former town hall of Arthur, N.D., is there, as is the Northern Pacific Railroad depot from Embden, N.D.

The handsome fellow off to the right is the Case Eagle, "Old Abe," who used to grace the J. I. Case Building in downtown Fargo. The Case Company was a manufacturer of farming equipment – it's now a giant who bought International Harvester while I wasn't looking and renamed itself "Case IH."

The "bonanza" part of the name comes from the farms developed after the railroads came to Cass County in 1871. To stir up business, they advertised back East and in Europe that land was available. Presumably, the winters were mentioned in the fine print.

The massive farms that resulted – with thousands of acres per farming family or company – produced bumper crops, and became known as "Bonanza Farms." One of the biggest bonanza farms was the Grandin Farm, north of Moorhead, with around 40,000 acres during the height of production.

The occasion yesterday was Bonanzaville's annual winter program. Controversy erupted last year when the program's directors decided to be a little more inclusive and accurate, and renamed "Christmas on the Prairie" "Holidays on the Prairie." Great unhappiness ensued locally, and attendance suffered. This year, in an attempt to straddle the divide, it was called "Christmas Memories."

Christmas Memories was a nice program of music and crafts, with vintage music being played and danced to, carols sung by groups wandering around in century-old dress, and lace being handmade. Choruses and choirs from area schools and organizations sang in the big performance building. Horse-drawn wagons were ridden upon:

Notice that while we're all bundled up and still pretty cold, actual North Dakotans walk past us without hats or scarves. The girl off in the background to the far right isn't even wearing a jacket or gloves!:

Make no mistake, it was cold. The low yesterday was 5 degrees, and the wind chill while we were outside was about 15 below. Hopefully, we can make it back out in the spring, when it's a little warmer and all the buildings are open.

The Party's Over...

It looks like summer is over for good. We missed the big storm that dumped snow out East. But it's 10 degrees at the moment, with a wind chill of minus three. And that's an improvement from yesterday, when the wind chill was on the order of minus 15, and felt every bit of it while we were walking around in it. The newspaper the other day said we'd have freezing temperatures "for the foreseeable future." The high temperature so far this month is 32 degrees.

I finally got a vision yesterday of what winter is going to look and sound like around here – relentlessly gray, with wind knocking hard against the car when we drive and whipping along the siding when we're home (and, sometimes, blowing our cheap front door wide open – terrific). This picture only gives a hint of it:

A court security officer explained his view of Fargo's year to me a few weeks ago: Any nice day you get after October 15 is gravy, and he'd never seen a Christmas that wasn't white. We have just a dusting of snow down right now; the same eighth of an inch is blowing constantly from place to place.

This morning, I went downstairs to our garage, hopped in my truck, and drove to the courthouse to get a little work done. To get into the courthouse at odd hours, I pull up to the garage and wave my ID in front of a sensor. Well, today, three out of four of the Pathfinder's windows were frozen shut – and this is having been in our garage overnight, and warming up for 15 minutes on the way in! I had to move the truck, step out of it and wave the card. Hardly a hardship, just surprising.

I learned a new term the other day: "Snirt storm." It's what you get when there's high winds and not a lot of snow on the ground already – a whipping mix of snow and dirt that freezes to the consistency of rock when it finally does settle. It'll wreck your car if you hit it, and can even derail a train if it gets bad enough. They're rare, and, apparently, a hell of a thing to see. (Interestingly, though it's a well-known term around here, it gets fewer than 20 hits when Googled.)