A Few Updates...

The Snowstorm
So, it's finally started to snow tonight – we were getting worried there for a bit. We were supposed to get 5 inches or so this afternoon, but received only a dusting. Jen thinks it's hysterical that while the forecast looks like this:

...Fargo doesn't have any kind of weather "warning" at all from the Weather Service. If D.C. were facing that kind of forecast, they'd just about be blowing the air-raid sirens. I'm guessing we'll have a full day of school tomorrow.

I was thrilled to win $1 in the courthouse snowstorm betting pool today, even before the storm began. Here's how it worked: Everyone in the pool paid 50 cents per increment of snow they signed up for, mostly by the half-inch. I took 16.1" to 16.6", then took another chance on anything over 20 inches. What the hell – I'm an optimist. But I more or less kissed that dollar goodbye – I can't compete with the pros here.

The next time I walked by the folks running the pool, they informed me that it was no longer for cash stakes. (I'm guessing it was supervisor intervention – what, no illegal gambling in a federal courthouse?) So they gave me my dollar back! A payoff far richer than I expected.

Sausages
My colleague P. took some pictures of the sauasage-making; here's a few more insights into the process:

Because no event in North Dakota is complete without a shot of red eye:

P. and T.'s lovely daughter K. is graciously administering the red eye to me, as I have raw meat all over my hands. K. wisely decided not to partake in the red eye because it was, as she put it, "10:30 in the morning."

This is me kissing a casing much more impressive than the one on the video:

This is how the casing went onto the stuffer; you inch it up over the nozzle – a surprising amount of it will fit there:

This is a better view of T. putting the sausage into the smoker:

And this is, from left, (1) P. & T.'s son E., (2) T. and (3) me. E. and I are watching T. wash the ashes from the sausages as they come out of the smoker:

Mmmm mmmmm good.

Let it Snow!

OK, here comes some real snow, hopefully. After the weekend brought us a few inches, enough to go dog-sledding (below), we were pretty pleased.

But now a storm forming in the central plains is getting ready to head up this way and drop anywhere from 8 to 18 inches on us between now and Friday. "If, a week or more ago," says The Forum, "you were wishing for a winter with more snow and less cold, you're getting your wish. And then some." Woo hoo!

Mush!

The Fargo Parks Department had a dog-sled exhibition this afternoon, on the first day all winter with enough snow for such an event to possibly work. It was a good sign, so we showed up and had a terrific time. Pairs of kids went on a surprisingly long circuit, towed by a half-dozen good-looking dogs. (Click on the picture above for a larger version.)

Typical of the city's going the extra mile, the sled rides were free, as were the pizza and pop.

Joey had his mask on most of the day, so he's not recognizable in the picture above. He protested the exclusion of his mug as I was posting this; here he is unmasked (right).

Here's Ellie, with a classmate who we don't know real well, so his face isn't going to make "Fargoing":

Environmental health...

An uncle-in-law who lives in San Diego sent one of my father-in-laws an article on the Earth Day Network's ranking of Fargo as the most environmentally healthy city in the country. The San Diego newspaper was surprised that Fargo rated so far above S.D.'s mere 31 ranking, and gave some folks here a call:

We probably take our great environment up here for granted some times," said Cole Carley, CEO of the Fargo-Moorhead Convention & Visitors Bureau.

"We probably should do a little bit more with (promoting) it, but we are so busy trying to let people know that they don't need a sled dog to get up here... so the environmental part sometimes gets forgotten," he said.

Here's the full list.

Foggy Night

Just past midnight about a week ago.

Sausage!

Otto von Bismarck, for whom North Dakota's capital city is named*, once said, "The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night."

Turns out he was right only about the laws: I have now seen sausage made, and it was just fine.

Otto probably meant industrial-level sausage production, the kind that made Upton Sinclair famous. But at a once-a-year family production, it was admirably clean, with utterly appealing ingredients. I've been waiting for this for months.

Here's how it's done. Start in P. and T.'s unheated Fargo garage. Heat it with a kerosene space heater bought at auction from P.'s parents when they moved from their farm (right). T. had the great improvement this year of placing the heater just outside the garage's doggy door. Apparently, in past years, after a few hours of running the heater inside the small garage, people started to get early symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Plus, it's noisy. Much better outside.

Next, take a lot of meat, about 180 pounds of it total, probably 75% pork and 25% venison (deer meat alone makes sausage that is far too dry):

That's about 50 pounds of meat there, plus salt, pepper, garlic, tenderizer, and lots of water. Next, take a bowl of casings:

This is really the only part that could be considered nasty – and, really, only if you think about it too much – the inflation of the pig intestines that sheath the sausages, or "kissing the casings," if you prefer:



Wrap the inflated casing around the nozzle of the antique stuffer:

...and crank the meat into the casings. (I don't have a photo of this step, since I was on the crank.) Next, cut the sausages into double lengths, and hang them on a pole:

Now to the smoker. The body of this one is a fuel tank T.'s dad fashioned into a smoker years ago, and does the trick quite well. Underneath is a fire fueled by applewood, which T. harvests between his house and the river:

This is what the sausages look like when they're smoking:

Once done, they are rinsed in cold water to wash the ashes off them:

Here's what they look like back inside when they are done (with unsmoked links hanging off to the right):

Wrap 'em up, and you're done!:

The ones wrapped in paper are to be eaten soon. The milk cartons in the back are wound with sausages inside, then filled with water, which allows them to be frozen far longer.

The result: delicious! Once we made it through the 180 pounds of meat, we came back into the house for sausages, fruit, and homemade knoephla soup (traditional German chicken-and-potato-dumpling soup – also terrific!). P. and T. kindly sent me home with an armful of packages of meat, which made for a great dinner last night.

* A little-known fact about Bismarck: It was originally founded in 1872 as "Edwinton," to honor Edwin M. Johnson, a chief engineer for the Northern Pacific railroad. The next year the railroad renamed the city "Bismarck," after Otto, in an effort to attract German immigrants. Because "Blizzardville" would have attracted only Dairy Queen fans, like Jen.

Singing the No-Snow Blues...

Jen is becoming obsessed with the weather. She has moved past temperature to focus on precipitation. We have about 2 inches on the ground that's here to stay – it's pretty convincingly white outside. But that's nothing we can't see in Maryland; Jen is hankering for a real storm.

This morning, she flipped open the laptop in bed and skipped right past the part of the weather.com page showing that it's minus-13 here, with minus-30 wind chill (this no longer impresses us), to study our forlorn radar map:

Nothing for hundreds of miles in every direction. "Bo-ring," Jen says.

Meanwhile, Maryland is set to be dealt a nasty ice storm this afternoon, and our home school system has thrown its doors open for the day. Jen theorizes that they were burned last week by closing for the day for a storm that amounted to nothing, and are unwisely overcompensating today. "Look at that storm map!" Jen exclaimed. "Why would you open schools if you know that's coming?":

Our pal Sue wrote in with an update from Maryland this morning: "We already have as much or more snow than we had the other day when they cancelled – and it is snowing now," she reports. "Silly Montgomery County."

Jen's newspaper offered to put staff up in hotels to ensure they would be able to get the paper out today and tomorrow; I thought it would be cool if winter weather kept Jen's entire newsroom home, and she had to run the deadline single-handedly from Fargo.

Snow cover...

Let's talk about roads for a moment. Back in Maryland, snowy roads are cleared pretty quickly, either by warm weather, salt, or plows that scrape all the way down. And by "cleared," I mean, "You see the road."

It's a little different here. It doesn't get warm enough to melt the snow and ice, it's too cold to efficiently salt the roads, and the plows rumble by regularly, but for some reason leave an inch or two behind. As a result, all but the busiest roads have a solid white cover:

That grey part is not asphalt; it's dirty ice. Every once in a while, there'll be a small patch of real road:

...but pretty much, we're driving on snow most of the time. Here's the alley behind our house:

It's not as hard to drive on this as I thought it would be. By and large, it's not terribly slippery; you just have to be aware it's there. The city tosses gravel down at intersections for a little traction, which seems to work, though one colleague reports that he's slid right through more intersections than he cares to count.

There are advantages. The Pathfinder has a terrible turning radius ordinarily; now, on a narrow snow-covered road, I find that if I need to pull a U-turn, I can turn the wheel, gun the engine, and fishtail the truck right around where I want it to be. My colleague P. laughs, shakes her head, and tells me Fargo boys get fishtailing out of their systems when they're 16. I find that difficult to believe. Man, that's fun.

The vehicles are working pretty well, though the Pathfinder's four-wheel-drive system may be on its last legs. I'm not sure whether the groaning it makes when I'm coasting or braking is the last gasp of the transfer case, or simply the sound of the truck complaining about the cold. It's almost impossible to shift it in the morning for the first few minutes – it really needs a warmup. But once warmed, it drives and holds its grip quite well.

The van, meanwhile, is only front-wheel-drive, but it has magic antilock brakes and a magic traction-control system. Stomp on the brakes on ice, and it comes to a smooth stop. Stomp on the gas on ice, and it very politely accelerates only as fast as it can without slipping.

Did I say magic? Well, almost magic. One of us (the cute one) managed to pop the van into the back of a pickup truck a few days ago and crush the front bumper (right). We'll find out on Tuesday how much styrofoam on the inside needs to be replaced.


We still receive e-mail school closing alerts for Montgomery County, Maryland. I gotta say, there's little more satisfying than checking e-mail just as Joey and Katie are walking out the front door in the morning so I can tell them MoCo's schools are closed for the day on account of the half-inch of snow they received the night before. Joey and Katie shake with outrage as they set out into their minus-30 wind-chill Fargo morning.

Here vs. there...

Our other home of Rockville, MD, is under a severe weather alert for tonight:

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A WIND CHILL ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 12 PM EST MONDAY.

TEMPERATURES WILL DROP TO NEAR 10 ABOVE EARLY MONDAY MORNING. WHEN COMBINED WITH WINDS...WINDCHILLS AS LOW AS 5 BELOW CAN BE EXPECTED NEAR DAWN.

Oh, no! Wind chills are low as five to ten degrees above the temperature here in Fargo with no wind at all! Run for the hills! We're expected to hit a temperature of minus-28F tonight, with an unspeakably low wind chill. Do we get an alert? Nope.

Sun Dog: Caught on Camera!

Katie and Joey and I caught a sun dog when we were out driving on Friday:

The reflection off to the left of the sun wasn't nearly as bright, so it looked like there was the usual sun, then another off to the right. I'm very proud of both of my nerd kids – they both independently noted that we must be on Tatooine, the dual-sunned planet that is home to Star Wars' Luke Skywalker:

Science on the Tundra

We have done it! Witness boiling water thrown into Fargo's subzero air:



It was a little warm for this experiment – a mere -15F – but I figure it was nicely unwindy, and this might be as cold as it gets this weekend during the day. Despite Katie's reaction on the movie's soundtrack, it did work. It was kind of a lot of water, so some of it did hit the ground instead of turning to frozen vapor. A smaller volume might have converted more completely.

Blowing bubbles is interesting. We didn't get the "skyrocketing" effect our pal Dave suggested, where the hot air in the bubble shoots up through the cold air (I didn't chill the bubble solution, either, as he'd suggested we do). Instead, a blown bubble behaves like a regular bubble, until it suddenly turns from clear to translucent – it has frozen!:

If it pops in the air, it looks a little like broken glass, and the filmy shards drift slowly to the ground.

If it pops on the ground, it looks like a deflated balloon, like this:

Good stuff! If it gets colder, I'll try to repeat some of the experiments. Also, it'll take some time for my fingers to rewarm...

We Be Jammin'...

"The first line of the blog entry will be, Tonight, I became an American," I told Jen as we left the parking lot in the frigid cold last night. "No," she corrected gently, "The first line should be, Tonight, I became Homer Simpson."

Yes, our first visit to the famed Fargodome was to see "Monster Jam," a monster-truck rally that had been advertised on the radio incessantly all week long. What caught my attention was that the kids' tickets were $5. Eager to maximize our investment in high culture, we showed up early for the pre-game show, where you could walk up to the trucks and get the drivers' signatures. We didn't particularly desire anyone's signature, but we liked looking at the trucks. This one is Grave Digger, a legend on the monster-truck circuit (I'll admit that even I had heard of it):

People who walked up to the box office yesterday were sold pretty good seats, but if you bought them online, they gave you nosebleed seats:

...which was fine, because it appeared that the closer-in seats were earbleed seats. The guy next to me theorized that they sold them online from the back row forward. The Fargodome's not really that big; the view was perfectly okay:

Here's Grave Digger in action... click on the triangle to start playing it....:



It was kind of a funny event. It was certainly loud – I bought some earplugs at a concession stand, and we used them. But honestly, it wasn't all that.... exciting.

The Friday night show was "freestyle," which sounded like more fun than what we ended up seeing: "racing." It involved the trucks going one or two at a time around the circuit, jumping a few crushed cars. It was okay the first few times, but when they insisted on holding quarterfinals, etc., until a winner was picked, it actually got a little boring.

Which I totally didn't expect: I thought, okay, maybe this is going to be really lowbrow, but it's gotta be entertaining. Two trucks overturned in the early going, which actually seemed to shock the race organizers. Truck-body pieces flew off, and one truck had to sit out a few rounds. I thought it would be a lot more busting stuff up.

They had motocross bikes in the middle of the show, where guys jumped their bikes from a metal ramp onto that big dirt hill in the middle. Each rider made his jump; he was scored based on the difficulty of the contortion he threw himself into while his bike was in the air. This is scored just like figure skating! I thought.

The big finish was a demolition derby, but they restricted the fleet of beater pickups to the right-hand side of the field, so no one could really get a good head of speed up. For both me and Jen, it did bring back happy childhood TV memories of Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero trying to avoid the infamous "Mallachi Crunch."

Still: Let the record show that we have seen the monster trucks. If you hear my kids complaining in later years that we never took them to see anything, please refer them back to this post.

Groundhog Day!

Turns out Groundhog Day is a win-win situation around here. If the groundhog fails to see his shadow, winter will end soon. If he does see his shadow, then winter ends in six weeks, or, as they say around here, "really, really soon."

In the meantime, it's going to be cold around here for a little while. The local paper forecasts highs of minus-17 over the weekend, with a low of minus-21 tonight. Subtract wind chills from that and you've got yourself some genuinely cold weather. Even the natives are taking note. We'll see if we can get to those cold-weather physics experiments this weekend.

It doesn't really feel all that cold if there's no wind. It was minus-5 the other morning when I was dropping Ellie off to school, and the air was still. I found I didn't really even need to zip up my coat to be comfortable. I was glad I wasn't walking two miles in it, but for walks from car to door, it was just fine.

We had an interesting test last night: Jen was still out of town and I was arriving home with the kids. We pulled into the garage, closed the door, and within 30 seconds the overhead light turned off. Odd. The light on the garage-door button was also off. The door would not go back up.

We'd arrived home just in time for a power outage! How exciting.

We found some flashlights, lit some candles, and called the power company. They were already on it. The kids were running around with their flashlights, getting ready for bed, and all of a sudden, I had a momentary twinge of panic. What if we needed the flashlights to get out of the house, to get the van out of the garage? I scooped up all the flashlights, turned them off, and made the kids navigate by the light streaming in our windows from nearby streetlights and the reflection of the moon off the snow. Turns out it was plenty; after his eyes adjusted, Joey found he could even read by the ambient light.

It was late, so we brushed teeth by candlelight, and I put the kids down. They wanted to sleep upstairs, since heat rises. No dice. The house is pretty tight, and Jen had bought the kids down comforters just in case.

About an hour later, the power came back on to stay. The house had hardly cooled at all, even though it was about minus-6 outside. The furnace fired up for a few minutes, and all was well. Jen arrived home 20 minutes later from the airport to a non-frozen family.