Fargoing

Last thoughts...

2007-08-08T15:00:00.000-05:00

So. Our Fargo adventure is over. I accepted the clerking job from Judge Magill on September 30, 2005, and started this blog ten days later.

Between then and now, Fargo went from mysterious northern locale to the object of much research to home. It is, finally, where we spent a year. We had left so much of our stuff behind in Rockville that even before we unloaded the moving van, our Rockville house immediately seemed full and familiar and home. Now, two weeks later, at odd moments, it's almost as if we never left. Well, except for all these damn boxes I still have to unpack.

Looking around the house, the town, and the metro area, we realize a year really isn't that long a time – except for Rockville's nifty downtown, which had been years in the planning but was finished while we were away, everything is largely the same as when we left. We had lived in this house nine years before heading to Fargo, and could have ticked off a tenth here quite comfortably.

But instead we picked up our lives and our stuff and moved it all north for the year. We saw and did and ate all sorts of things we had not seen or done or eaten before. We made great new friends. We became more resilient people. I look forward to seeing how that resilience expresses itself as the five of us face new challenges.

Thank you to those who made this all possible: those who hired, encouraged, and moved us; those who welcomed us and took us in; those who kept us connected to life back in Maryland; those who taught us about the law, North Dakota, and making deer sausage; and those who helped us return. Our year in Fargo will always be a very important year for our family to have lived.

And with that, I close the book of "Fargoing." It was always designed to be a "deployment blog," and our deployment is over. I hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures; thank you for doing so.

Safe in Rockville!

2007-07-29T20:33:00.000-05:00

Well, we have ignored R.E.M.'s advice and have Gone Back To Rockville. The trip was uneventful. Jen and I pulled in last night around 9 p.m. Everything was unloaded this morning by a swarm of our friends, to whom we are very grateful.

Here's what led up to it:

Penske, the company that rented us our truck, has a little online quiz if you want to tow a vehicle on one of their trailers. I had planned to drag the Pathfinder back here, as I didn't make any good plans to dispose of it in Fargo. I drove it over to the Penske truckyard and onto the trailer, and discovered that while a 1993 Pathfinder meets the height, weight, width, and length requirements for the Penske 4-wheel trailer, the wheels do not.

The webbing that is supposed to go over the tires and hold the truck to the trailer simply wouldn't fit over the Pathfinder's tires. The Penske guy went back into the office, consulted his system, and said, "It meets all the requirements, but there's a little note there: 'Check tires.'"

So, my fine truck had to be left behind. Ellie is distraught. P. and her husband T. have kindly agreed to handle selling it for us, which is a really big deal, and we thank them. Used vehicles do not have to be inspected before they are resold in North Dakota – it would never pass inspection in Maryland; you fail if you have rust spots!

I think the Pathfinder will have a solid next career as a hunting truck. Older trucks are in high demand in that area in the fall for guys to fill up with sporting gear and take off after deer. It'll be good for that.

Packing up was otherwise without trauma. Well, except for P.'s son E., who we hired along with his brother, his dad, and some of his pals to help us pack up. E. cut his knee on the tin on the back of our washing machine and had to go get stitched up. He had to miss two days (at least) of baseball. It wasn't a very big cut, but it was deep, and was in a place that bled a lot. He dripped all over the sidewalk:

In the end, the 26-foot Penske truck we had rented the year before to take us out there didn't quite cut it, and I had to dash out and rent a U-Haul trailer to get the last bunch of boxes on board.

It looked a little ridiculous, but it worked. I had great misgivings about whether a U-Haul trailer would make the journey in one piece, but it did just fine. The Penske truck had over 100,000 miles on it, and was not real happy taking some of Pennsylvania's hills at any kind of high speed, but it chugged up over each one of them eventually.

Just as the sun was setting, I crossed into Maryland (see right), which is never quite as gratifying as it should be when coming from the West, because it's such a little state, and you feel you really oughta be pretty close to home if you're crossing into Maryland, but really you have about 100 more miles to go.

When Jen and I finally did arrive, we were met by my sister Meg, her husband Griff, and their baby, Benjamin, who was born in March and who I had not yet met. The three of them will be living upstairs for awhile, which we're looking forward to. Also waiting for us were our pals the Hoyes and Mike Detwiler, which made it a very warm welcome. Later, Meg and I walked to Rockville's spanking-new downtown and enjoyed a beer at our new brewpub. Very cool.

The Final Countdown

2007-07-23T08:26:00.000-05:00

Well, this is just about it. All the kids have headed back East. Jen and I spent the weekend packing, and we are now awash in a sea of boxes. Judge Bye and his wife held a lovely going-away dinner for the law clerks tonight, and very kindly included me and Jen. My last day of work is tomorrow.

Pinky (right), the Daughter Formerly Known as Katie, had a great time in Alexandria with her Auntie L.J. and Uncle Seth, and has now headed to Atlanta for grandparent time for the next couple of weeks. L.J. and Katie obtained permission to add "a few" pink highlights to Katie's hair; this is what she ended up with, which does not look like "a few" to me, but I'm told I'm overreacting. All I can say is, when the day comes and L.J.'s wee daughter Sylvie, my lovely niece, needs a ride to go get a Mohawk, I'll be there for her.

One really, really sure sign the end is near is that we have started to repeat the events calendar. Jen and I went to the Fargo Street Fair over lunch on Thursday, where we once again bought a big honking bag of kettle corn. This was one of the first things we did when we arrived in town last summer. Here Joey and Ellie were then:

And here they are now:

Judging from the pictures, we are returning the kids to Maryland taller, older, happier, more tan, and a little more clean. I expected a year in Fargo would have most of those effects (particularly "older"), but "more tan" does surprise me.

Though we didn't make it to a Red Hawks game, we did get to the rest of our to-do list – celebrating Ellie's birthday and going to Space Aliens – simultaneously on Friday night:

Here's the main Space Aliens dining room:

Space Aliens is probably the single thing the kids will miss most about Fargo; on Tuesdays, kids eat free and get ten tokens apiece to play video games and win tickets to redeem for valuable prizes. The best part is, they'll provide three kids' meals for every adult meal. Well, this wasn't quite as cool as I'd envisioned; when I took the kids there when Jen was out of town, I ended up sitting at the table by myself for long stretches, keeping guard over hats and coats, usually, while the kids played in the game room.

Joey and I were out until 1 Friday night at Fargo's big Harry Potter book-release party at the Barnes & Noble, the last one ever. Joey wrapped up Book 6 with a few days to spare, and was good and ready. We showed up at 9 p.m. and just squeaked in the door; everyone who arrived a little later had to wait outside until 12:30 or so, when the crowd inside had thinned out. The line stretched two blocks long.

It was quite an event. They took Polaroids of the kids, told their fortunes, had little bottles they could fill up with layers of different colors of sand, and read from the sixth book for the last half-hour before the seventh book was released. At the stroke of midnight, the reader nabbed a copy of Book 7 and started in on that.

They also held a costume contest. Here is Joey practicing his Quidditch moves, as he came dressed as Quidditch-playing Harry:

Here he is after winning second place in the 10-and-under group:

Joey worked out exactly what he wanted to do as he presented himself to the crowd, and executed it nicely. He was well-received by judges and spectators alike. He was awfully proud of himself, and I am proud of him, too.

[Reflecting on the event the next day, I realized that it was the first of many times in my life where one of my children would be the expert at what we were doing and I would be the novice. I could point out those dressed as Dumbledore and Harry, and that was about it. Joey knew the full cast of characters cold, and engaged in intelligent conversation about obscure Potter plot points with grownups.]

Since we were in the third group of those who had reserved books (the 501-750 range!), we had to wait for a good while after midnight to purchase our copies. It was a pretty hellaciously big crowd (for midnight at a bookstore):

The Fargo Barnes & Noble sold 1,000 copies that night.

Ellie and Joey groggily kissed Fargo goodbye – Joey on three hours' sleep – around 4 a.m. Saturday, when Jen drove them to the Minneapolis airport. They flew alone with each other to Baltimore, were picked up by my dad, and are safely on the Maryland beaches.

For my part on Saturday morning, I headed east to Detroit Lakes, where Judge Magill swore me in to the Maryland and Eighth Circuit bars (It was just in time; while I was there, he also signed the papers terminating me as his clerk!):

I chose to embrace the lake setting and dressed casually for the occasion. It was a good choice; it was warm and beautiful at the lakes. I will miss the Magills; they have been warm and gracious to us throughout the year. Judge Magill says he'll miss me; he very well may, but I know for sure he'll miss Ellie; they hit it off really well.

Oh, dear.

2007-07-17T08:36:00.000-05:00

It looks like Fargo's winter took more out of the boy than we'd suspected.

Joey's class had their poems – all concerning "The Important Thing" about summer – published on the back of the Forum's sports section today. Joey's classmates cited all sorts of important things about summer: vacations, being able to play, the lack of school, how much fun it is, getting to spend time with family.

And Joey? What does he think is the important thing about summer?:

Here a Year!

2007-07-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

We arrived in Fargo a year ago today. I don't have any great insight to attach to this anniversary. We'll be taking off for Maryland two weeks and a day from now. Geez, we have a lot of packing to do.

Here's what's going on in the meantime: I'm wrapping up the last few opinion drafts at work. Jen is trying to get her suitcase back from AirTran, which lost it on her way back here last weekend. Katie is with her Auntie LJ in Alexandria, VA, and will not be back. Joey and Ellie are enjoying one last round of swimming lessons.

Joey is winning the race to finish up Book 6 of the Harry Potter series before Book 7 is released at midnight on July 20. He has been reading all day and all night; when I returned from three days in St. Louis last month, I asked Joey what he'd been doing, and he said he'd been reading Harry Potter. "OK," I replied, "What else did you do?" "Um, nothing else," he said.

We have two copies reserved at the Fargo Barnes & Noble. The plan is for me to go with Joey to this very last Harry Potter release party, bring him back to the house, and catch a few winks of sleep. Then we all leave around 5 a.m. for the Cities so he and Ellie can fly back to Maryland to go to the beach with Grandmas Mary Ellen and Judith. Then Jen and I pack like mad for a few days.

Some things we have to do before we get out of here: Go to Space Aliens one last time. Pack. See a Red Hawks baseball game. Celebrate Ellie's birthday a little early. Finish packing.

For some reason, it hit me hard last night that the milk I was buying doesn't expire until after we're back in Maryland. It's a sure sign the end is near:

Things You Can See in Fargo that You Won't See in Rockville

2007-07-08T12:33:00.000-05:00

I've been collecting photos for this post for awhile. (Don't fear – we don't still have snow on the ground here; it was 97 degrees here yesterday.)

Now, this is not a definitive list; it's just things I've noticed. And it's not to say they are unique to the Fargo area, exactly – some may be spotted elsewhere in the Midwest. And it doesn't include things I've written about before, such as sunsets, sun dogs, below-zero temperatures, sugar beets, all-you-can-drink milk, mashed-potato wrestling or the famous fire-hydrant sign with nothing but a fire hydrant on it. But they are cool. Here goes:

Car plug: OK, this is something I think everyone expected us to see up here, and we did:

This is an electric plug for an oil-pan heater. Outlets are found at some parking lots, but not, as in some places, at every parking spot along every street. I ended up parking inside at the courthouse this year, and we had the garage at home, so we didn't have a need for one. You don't really need them for trips to the grocery store.

Highway gate:

These are swing-out gates at some interstate on-ramps that the police use to close them down. This only happened one time this winter, I think. But out East, there's no mechanism at all for keeping people off interstates; the weather's never enough, and if there's an accident, we just park a police car there.

Roger Maris tributes: Maris is still a hero here in his home town for the record 61 home runs he hit in 1961, breaking Babe Ruth's storied record. He has a museum at the mall (right), and a very impressive homage at the giant Scheel's sporting goods store:

It seems a little silly – Maris' mark has been bested by Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa – but on the other hand, if Major League Baseball ever decides to wipe its steroids-infected records from the books, Maris may once again be the single-season home-run king.

Snow dumping:

I just thought this was funny – I'd never thought of snow as being something you could litter with. This sign is in Island Park, next to the Y.

Travel agencies:

People flee this town in droves during the winter, and there are travel agencies all over. This one seems to be unusually full-service:

Street Signs. The have some absurdly high-numbered streets around here:

But the funny thing is, it's not in town that they have them – it tends to be out in the middle of absolutely nowhere:

I've seen streets numbered into the 200s. Now that is planning ahead for future growth!

First kid on my block...

2007-07-05T00:25:00.000-05:00

I may be the only guy in North Dakota with an iPhone. I kind of ended up with one when I was in Chicago the day they were released.

The Forum, always one to stay on top of larger trends, see "Fargo Star," wrote an article the week before it came out, moaning about how there were no Apple or AT&T stores in Fargo, and AT&T won't write contracts here, so the iPhone wouldn't be available to North Dakotans.

The truth is, it does work here. Not perfectly, but it does work. AT&T's coverage is crappy, but on the bright side I'm costing them money by forcing them to route my calls through other people's cell towers. The reception does seem to be a little better than my old Sony Ericsson phone (which, honestly, did start to die last week and prompt the upgrade), but most of the same dead spots exist for the new machine. Since we have less than three weeks left here (holy cow!), I think I can put up with it. It worked great in Chicago.

Ka-Boom!

2007-07-04T22:44:00.000-05:00

"With the Fourth of July approaching, Fargo police are reminding residents that having, selling or using fireworks within Fargo city limits is prohibited," the Forum reported on June 29.

Have the cops split? They have? Okay, enough of that. On with the show!: "Families shopping for explosive entertainment this Fourth of July are seeking the biggest and brightest burst for their buck, local vendors said," the same newspaper gleefully reported two days later.

We missed this holiday last year, arriving in Fargo on July 12. A few days later I stopped by the fireworks warehouse around the corner from us. North Dakota has funny laws – out-of-staters like us can buy them within the city limits year-round, but North Dakotans can only purchase them for a week or so before and after July 4. I picked up a few items last July and promptly forgot about them in a closet.

Last year, I wondered why the laws were they way they were. Now I know.

These people are nuts for fireworks. Joey, Ellie and I decided to set up chairs on the sidewalk in front of our house instead of crossing the river to see Minnesota State University's show. The show came to us, in 360-degree surround sound. I'd guess a dozen different sites were shooting them off around us – and big ones, too!

"It'll go all night," our next-door neighbor said a little wearily from his front stoop; indeed, as I write this at midnight, our windows are sill rattling.

The outpouring of amateur rocketry prompted me to dig through the closet and pull out my paper bag of explosives. For one, it seemed like a good occasion for them. And also: I probably don't want to toss them into a moving van in three weeks and drive across the country with them in a 150+ degree moving van.

I checked out my stash – some parachute rockets, three "ladybugs," some things that light up real, real bright instead of exploding or doing anything, and one Mammoth Smoke, the munition of my college years. Without boring you with the details of how I know this, I will just say that Mammoth Smokes are more impressive when set off inside a car driving down an Interstate highway than they are when painted thinly across the vast North Dakota plains.

I kept the kids back at a safe distance, rolled up the windows of the truck and moved it down the street a ways. The very first thing I set off was a ladybug, which spun on the ground for a few seconds before shooting straight into the sky and sparking. I looked up, up, up to see it go, looked down, and there was a Fargo police car stopping in front of me. The officer got out of the car and informed me that all fireworks, including sparklers, were illegal within the city limits. Oops.

The officer then said, to my great relief, that the police's task tonight was to go after the really impressively loud rockets going up all around us, and that I shouldn't expect any more police on my street tonight. Whew! I took this as implicit permission to shoot off my relatively quiet fireworks, and did so.

Watching from home was a good idea. The kids were tired; fireworks can't get going here until 10:30 or so because it stays light so late. The mosquitoes were also out in force, which Joey and Ellie are totally unprepared for – I don't think we saw one bug last summer; this summer is far more typical, and they are ever-present and vicious.

Joey very quickly wearied of slapping bugs off himself, and asked if he could watch the rest of the show from inside. I think, honestly, that his retreat had to do more with Harry Potter than the bugs. He is in J.K. Rowlings' thrall – most of the way through the fifth book, and trying desperately to finish up everything before the seventh and last book arrives July 20.

Leaving our mark...

2007-06-24T11:11:00.000-05:00

The long winter is finally over. Not because it's gorgeous out, but because North Dakota finally has an elementary school listed in the Wikipedia: Bennett Elementary School.

The entry was created by Katie's fourth-grade class. I came in and demonstrated what the Wikipedia was (about half of them knew already), and noted that Bennett had no entry, indeed, that not one elementary school in North Dakota had an entry. The kids took the bait, and we researched the article over two more class sessions, the last one just before school let out for the summer.

I thought it was a cool project, because it gave the kids a good lesson on what the Wikipedia is, how its entries are created, and, more generally, how to research, source, and construct an article of their own on a topic they're actually a little interested in. And at the end of the day, instead of having worked on a project just for the sake of working on a project, we have added a little bit to the world's store of knowledge.

Katie and I took on the task of assembling the research into the article. I was afraid for awhile that we would get distracted by summer and head home to Maryland without getting the damn thing published. But we managed to get it out. Now I'm afraid that the entry will be deemed insufficiently noteworthy for inclusion in the apparently-not-quite-bottomless Wikipedia pit. We'll see.

Hey, be nice!

2007-06-24T10:30:00.000-05:00

The senior class of Falls Church, Virginia's Marshall High School were told by their graduation speaker last week to avoid Fargo at all costs.

"My advice to you today," said one of the school's history teachers, Tim Kane: "Work hard, believe in something, be passionate and be persistent in whatever you do or you will end up in Fargo."

"Yes, Fargo, North Dakota — the armpit of civilization. Why Fargo, you ask? Because for me, Fargo, North Dakota, is the physical and spiritual symbol of what happens to you when you die inside."

Awwww... that's not very nice. After all, the East Coast doesn't have to look this far for world-class armpits – New Jersey alone has several outstanding ones, including my native city of Camden. Certain parts of Richmond, in Kane's home state, come to mind as well.

How fitting that the address took place in DAR Constitution Hall, a symbol of ignorance in Washington ever since its managers prevented Marian Anderson from singing there in 1939 because she was black. Eleanor Roosevelt, disgusted by the racism, resigned from the DAR and arranged for Miss Anderson to sing on Easter Sunday morning from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a rapt crowd of 75,000 and a national radio audience. Where's Eleanor when you need her?

Kane's comments were reported this morning in the Forum in a column by its editor, who printed Kane's work phone number and e-mail address, and urged his readers to teach him about Fargo and to "[r]emember to follow his own advice and 'believe in something, be passionate and be persistent in whatever you do.'”

Neither I nor the Forum's editor, apparently, feel like having much of a sense of humor about this. I think it's because the weather has been gorgeous this past week; today is a high in the mid-80s with 50% humidity. We are totally headed to the pool for the day the moment it opens, and I'm not going to take anyone saying anything bad about this town today.

AirSho!

2007-06-17T10:30:00.001-05:00

After a week of heavy rain leading up to the Fargo AirSho, organizers were getting a little nervous; advance (nonrefundable) ticket sales were slow. “Whether we put a show on or not, we have $300,000 worth of expense,” one of the coordinators told the Forum. “All we ask is that people take the risk with us.”

The appeal to Fargo's community spirit proved unnecessary, as Saturday morning was beautiful, and about 15,000 people showed up to see the sights, the air show's best day ever.

Also helping was publicity from the Navy's Blue Angels, who took flight practice at low altitudes all over Fargo this past week, providing a window-rattling running reminder that this town was about to have an air show. Jen and I had lunch on the south side of town on Thursday, and the formation of four Angels swept over several times as we ate. Our waitress said the day before they had come by so low and loud they caused sympathetic vibrations in the kitchen's exhaust hoods, which had scared the hell out of one of the cooks. But she said this with a smile on her face – I get the impression that people thought it was pretty cool. The lunchtime flyover did provide the final bit of convincing I needed to drag the family to the show.

I laid down the rules for the kids as we took the shuttle bus from the parking lot: "No matter who asks you, no matter how nicely they ask, no one is joining the Air Force or Navy today. Got that?" We found a relatively dry spot in some still-soggy grass, and set up on our blanket:

One of the planes demonstrated was the Air Force's A-10 Thunderbird II. The announcer claimed the plane featured "devastatingly good looks." Nice try. Even I know that the A-10 – better known as the "Warthog" – is as ugly as it is effective. And boy, is it effective. Up at the top of this post is the A-10 flying in tandem with the P-51 Mustang, a legendary – and good-looking – fighter plane from WWII.

We were also treated to a B-52 flyby:

The announcer encouraged us to walk around the rest of the show, as we could see the action from anywhere, as they had "The world's largest theater screen – the big blue North Dakota sky."

Katie and Joey and I took a look around the displays. They crawled into a few helicopter cockpits and then took turns controlling a missile battery:

I gotta say, I had not seen that before. Best thing was, there were no lines – they just walked into the cockpits or grabbed the stick and started aiming.

Show organizers zipped around in GEM electric vehicles and on oversized Segways with rugged all-terrain tires, the latter being something I had not seen before. One display as we walked in was a bunch of really big pieces of farming equipment. I tried to convince Joey that they were airplanes, not tractors. "We're at an airshow, Joe. Why would they have tractors here?" I almost had him going.

The highlight of the show was, of course, the Blue Angels:

It had been unclear for awhile whether they would perform, as they had lost an Angel in an airshow crash in April. They apparently asked an alumnus to return, and performed with all six slots filled.

The Blue Angels are kind of a funny thing. They're very fast, and very loud, and they like to show off how closely they can pass each other, and how closely they can fly next to each other, often with one plane upside down. But something seemed missing. Maybe it's because these guys are flying fighter jets that are so capable that they can easily do what used to be impossible, or maybe it's because they're such superior pilots that they make it look easy. But somehow their performance came off as kind of sterile rather than thrilling. It was cool to see once, but I'm not sure one would get much out of seeing them again. In some ways, seeing them buzz the town the week before was cooler, as it was unexpected.

Here they are toward the end of their show, doing what I think is called the "Delta Break." I've seen film of a tighter cross, but this was plenty tight for me:

Little-known Blue Angels fact: the group's name stems from one of its founders' spotting an advertisement in 1946 in The New Yorker for the city's popular "Blue Angel" nightclub.

The AirSho was a cool outing. Having said that, it was overwhelmingly, if not surprisingly, militaristic. A few civilians showed up to put their stunt planes through their paces – and they were pretty impressive – but the bulk of the show was showing off machines designed for killin'. Having said that, the A-10 was the only plane for which its description centered on its firepower; the flying abilities of the others were impressive enough that we didn't need to dwell on their killing capacities.

After the show was done, the five of us were treated to a miracle of efficiency: we strolled to the front gate, hopped onto the first bus that pulled up, were taken directly to our parking lot, and zipped right out. "This is just the perfect-sized town for any kind of event like this," Jen said on the bus. (By contrast, the Joint Services Open House at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland draws hundreds of thousands of people annually, and creates traffic havoc in and around Washington, D.C. We had never mustered the courage to go when we were back home; it's convenient that even for Fargo's popular events you don't need to be brave, you can just show up.)

On Sunday, as Katie, Joey and I were out for a Father's Day bike ride, the Blue Angels treated us to a show in the skies above us as we rode north. "Angels at 10 o'clock!" Katie cried out as the diamond formation came into view. Joey joyfully rang his bicycle bell in an effort to get their attention he fully knew was futile. We were lucky to be on a very straight road, as our eyes were skyward for a good portion of the ride. Heading home later, we saw two Angels streak off to the south and disappear into the clouds, presumably heading for their next show.

The Fargo-Ecuador connection...

2007-06-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

Our great friend Dan Powers sent greetings this evening, along with a link to a cool map that tickled him. It renames each American state with a country that generates a similar gross domestic product (GDP) each year:

North Dakota, forty-eighth among the states and D.C., matches up to Ecuador (70th among nations at $32 billion). Seventeenth-ranked Minnesota, appropriately enough, is similar to Norway (28th among nations with a $262-billion GDP).

The full map is here.

Boom!

2007-06-11T21:24:00.000-05:00

At lunch today, my colleagues J. and P. had a great idea: "Why don't we go kill some clay pigeons?" While in general I'm really not a big fan of guns, I figured this was a golden opportunity to try something I'd never get to do back East.

So after a return to the office of a respectable length, we took off for the sporting-goods store to pick up shells and pigeons, then drove out to a deserted field on the outskirts of West Fargo. It was a beautiful afternoon to be outside.

Here's how it works. One guy places a clay pigeon, a little soft ceramic disc, in a plastic arm. Here are the two together:

He throws it:

Then the other guys shoot at it. We were throwing them low today, because the wind was picking them up pretty well – a few actually boomeranged over our heads. It doesn't take much effort; I'd say it's easier than throwing a Frisbee, and harder to screw up.

In this clip, the camera is sitting on the box of targets in the grass. I yell "Ready!", throw the pigeon, then pick up the camera to film J. and P. shooting at it. Very exciting; lots of wind noise:

I was shooting a 20-gauge pump shotgun with target loads, versus a larger 12-gauge shotgun and more-serious "hunting loads." J. took a good deal of pleasure in having me try out his 12-gauge with the biggest hunting-load shells he'd brought along, which near about ripped my arm off when the shotgun kicked back. Here's the bruise I have at the moment, which will undoubtedly get far more colorful tomorrow:

Want to know something surprising? I was pretty good. I hit my very first target, and then hit about 75% of them from there on out. No one was more shocked than I, though J. and P. were close.

Here's film of me at the end of the afternoon hitting three in a row. You're not going to be able to see the targets disintegrate with YouTube's low-quality video, so you'll have to take my word for it. On the last one, I'd forgotten to pump the shotgun, so I missed my first shot. I then pumped it, fired, and hit it on the second try:

[Please excuse my undoubtedly myriad serious safety violations.]

What P. is saying, as the film ends, is, "I find it very hard to believe that this is your first time doing this." It made my day. I'm attributing it to good coaching from J. and P., and from hundreds of hours over the years of playing first-person-shooter video games.

I was very pleased to have been asked along, and more than a little glad that I didn't embarrass myself in the process. I was also pleased to be able to tell the kids about it and not have to tell them I'd killed anything.

The list of things I've gotta do before we leave Fargo is getting shorter.

Crime Report...

2007-06-11T21:00:00.000-05:00

Well, we had a great weekend going to the rodeo and then to the city pool all afternoon Saturday and Sunday.

The only glitch – and I'm only reporting this out of an obligation to make this deployment blog complete – was that we accidentally left the van unlocked Saturday afternoon, and Jen's purse was stolen out of it.

There was hardly any cash in it; we were able to cancel all the credit and debit cards and stop payment on the checks Jen was carrying before anything else happened. (The lack of activity on the cards makes me think that the person simply wanted the cash and ditched everything else – which adds up to a lot of trouble on our side for their gain of $20.)

Still, Jen is out a driver's license and a cell phone. The Fargo cop to whom Jen gave her report said not to worry about it, to tell anyone who pulls you over that your purse was stolen. We'll see how that works. In the meantime, Jen received a call back from a very unexpectedly nice and helpful person from the Maryland MVA who will get her set up with a temporary 45-day license to tide her over until we return to Maryland's warm and humid embrace.

The cell phone is a bit more of a pain. We've been dying to finish up our two-year contract with the ever-pleasant-to-deal-with Cingular, which is up this fall. If we get a replacement phone from them, we'll have to either pay full price for it or get a mildly subsidized phone stapled to an ironclad brand-new two-year commitment. I think I may pick one up used on eBay instead.

Or: Jen suspects I am less than fully upset about the loss of her cell phone because I figure she might let me buy one of Apple's upcoming iPhones (right) to replace it. And while that may now be the case, I can honestly say it didn't occur to me until she said it out loud.

In related cell-phone news, Cingular has very thoughtfully has placed "Off Network" on the main screen of our phones these past few months to remind us on a daily basis that we're costing them money by not being in an area where they provide their own service. When I called to get Jen's phone deactivated, several Cingular folks gingerly raised the issue; I replied that when I'd called them before we left Maryland and asked whether we could get out of our contract because we were moving to North Dakota, they had said, "Oh, no, no, no...." So the daily reminder that it's costing them dearly to transmit our calls on other people's networks has actually been a happy part of each of my days.

Watch out, Utica!

2007-06-11T20:55:00.000-05:00

Jen got a kick out of this.

Entering West Fargo on 13th Ave. South, you see this sign:

...which reminded her of an episode of The Simpsons, which features an educational 1950s film bearing an eerily similar title:

Ro-deeee-o!

2007-06-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

Last week, Judge B. and I were discussing the family's trip out to the western Dakotas. One thing I was hoping to see while we were here was a rodeo, I said; he immediately suggested the Hawley Rodeo, a local institution held in June each year. I didn't get around to Googling it until Friday, and lo and behold, it was that night and the next!

Jen was a little dubious, but responded to the argument that since I had agreed to go to the Fargo Star competition against my better judgment (and ended up enjoying it immensely), she should return the favor.

The weather looked to be gorgeous Friday night, and looked a little iffier for the rest of the weekend, so we, uh, seized the bull by the horns and took off for Hawley, about 20 miles east of Fargo in Minnesota. The rodeo featured seven events: Bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding...

...tie-down roping of calves, steer wrestling, team roping, barrel racing, and for the big finale, bull riding.

We saw our buddy Erin at the rodeo. She grew up nearby and used to barrel race. "It's a girl thing," she said, and indeed, most of the barrel racers were women. They had two breeds of "barrel racers": national and local. What's a barrel race? Well, here's Shannon Porch from Wanblee, S.D., one of the national racers, tearing it up:

The national riders made it look easy; the local riders provided a better idea of how difficult it is to get a horse to make those kinds of turns.

During the internission, they had sheep riding for the kids. We all thought, "Oh, how nice! Like pony rides, but on sheep." You had to sign up in advance for it, which we did not do, and then they picked a few names. Ellie was moderately distraught about not being able to do it.

We should have known – it's not at all like a pony ride. It's more like a bull ride, but kid-sized. They had to wear helmets, and the idea is to see who can hug the neck of the sheep the longest – and not fall off – while the sheep wander around, not really minding their riders. The event led to some colorful spills (right; click on the picture for more detail).

The kids crowded the fence to watch. I thought once Ellie saw all these kids getting tossed off their animals, she would reconsider her desire to do it, but no, she went from moderate to quite acute distress – distress so severe it could be cured only with a few cookies.

The only off note was a full page in the rodeo program entitled "A Sad Parallel" comparing the mess birds make when you put out a feeder to the mess made by those allowed into the United States through our immigration policies. (Though the piece wasn't specific, I think it was referring to our Mexican brethren, not Canadian.) One complaint: "Corn Flakes now come in a bilingual box." Oh, the humanity! I had no idea the people of Minnesota wanted so badly to have those migrant farm work jobs for themselves. It was perhaps the most unfriendly thing I've seen since I've been here.

The finale was the bull riding, and it was everything you'd expect. Some cowboys barely made it out of the gate before being tossed high; some made it to the buzzer. The kids crowded the fence again, and were thrilled. I think even Katie liked it; she is taking animal cruelty pretty seriously right now, and was not a big fan of the calves being lassoed, yanked around by the neck, and tied up. But the balance of power in bull riding clearly shifts to the bull – the men seem quite outmatched. At one point, I believe the announcer said, the score was "Bulls 7, Cowboys 4."

About 840 people attended the rodeo on Friday with us. It is the biggest annual event in Hawley, a town of a little less than 2,000 souls. The five of us sat on a blanket and ate quite reasonably priced hot dogs and nachos for dinner. As Jen and I strolled across the grassy hill in search of some food, she graciously admitted she was enjoying herself.

It was a beautiful night, and the rodeo was a great excuse to be out in it.

Dark and stormy night...

2007-06-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

Yikes! If this is the last Fargoing post, you'll know why:

Flood!

2007-06-05T20:06:00.000-05:00

The rain that fell on us on our trip to the western Dakotas also, apparently, fell on Fargo while we were gone. As a result, the city is in a state of emergency.

Well, technically. All the emergency declaration seems to mean so far is that the city spent the day building a dike between the Red River and City Hall:

Down on the south side of town, where we live, the river is also impressively high:

The Forum is doing its civic duty in this moment of crisis:

That's right: Please do not destroy the dikes.

The reason we had no mosquitoes last year was that Fargo had an exceptionally dry spring. This spring is exceptionally wet. I just can't wait to see how thick July's cloud of bugs is going to be.

Westward Ho!

2007-05-28T08:30:00.000-05:00

We're headed out for a week's trip West, to South Dakota's Black Hills and Medora, N.D. This is our one big shot to see the rest of this region; with Katie taking off East at the end of June, our time here as a family of five is drawing to a close. We'll be back in Fargo sometime Saturday.

Monday
We managed to get out of the door at 8:30 a.m. Monday. We got off to a slow start – "It'll speed up once we're clear of the city," I told Jen. "This is why you shouldn't leave during rush hour," Jen muttered through a smile:

Neither Jen nor I had been to South Dakota before today; the kids had gone with their Doc and Nanny last weekend to Sioux Falls to see its zoo. In fact, I don't think I'd been more than 10 miles south of our house down I-29, and I'd only been that far because one day a few months ago, I thought, Geez, I haven't ever been south of our house on the interstate highway – I wonder what's there? (Answer: uh, not much.)

We headed south, into S.D., and turned west just before Sioux Falls. It was a little unsettling – all the signs for I-90 had big orange signs on them: "CLOSED" Wait – the exit? or the interstate?

Later signs provided details on a detour. I-90, once we got on it for our long shot west, was pleasant – and, for a stretch in there, pink. "Very pretty," Jen said.

This is a funny part of the country we're headed into. Though the farmers seem to be quite busy going about their business, everyone else seems utterly devoted to nabbing the attention and dollars of travelers just like us – people headed to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. Wall Drug is the most obvious (and make no mistake, we're going to be stopping there), but it has plenty of company.

The first big attraction that drew us in was in Mitchell, S.D.: the Corn Palace. It's a multipurpose arena for local residents and tourist attraction for the rest of us, a minaret-cornered and dome-topped building decorated with thousands of ears of corn:

As a sign inside explained, the idea was to attract people out to Mitchell to live. It was also part of an unsuccessful effort by Mitchell city fathers to wrest the state capital from Pierre; for some reason, the giant corn-covered castle failed to seal the deal. Mitchell needed the help, having been singled out by Lewis & Clark as a place where no man could earn a living farming.

Some billboards along I-90 reveal a simmering battle between those who favor animal rights and those opposed. Someone financed a series of signs dissing the animal-rights movement (one read "Keep nature in balance – wear fur"), each of which is dutifully vandalized presumably just as high as the person with the spray-can could reach.

...

Wall Drug was largely the same as it was when I was a kid. It's the quintessential tourist trap, with thousands of signs for it posted along roads all over the world (we spotted 98 along our stretch of I-90), and the promise of "free ice water" that has been luring travelers off the highway since the 1930s.

The place is a massive collection of kitsch shops and, yes, a surprisingly complete drug store. Its cafe seats 400, though we opted for a little more formal service at a restaurant across the street. The knickknacks were nicely priced – they don't seem to be in it to gouge anyone. We picked up a couple of decks of Wall Drug playing cards that were tucked away in a corner, on sale for 50 cents apiece. We also snapped a few pix in what passes for a 'sculpture garden' – here are the kids astride a jackalope:

As tourist traps go, it is definitely on the friendly side (versus abusive). We were happy we stopped.

We sped west for another hour under threatening skies, then Jen ran into a Rapid City Wal-Mart to pick up a few groceries for the next few days while I stayed outside with the kids. I'm also happy we stopped there, because after a few minutes, the radio station we were listening to went into Emergency Broadcast System mode, warning of a line of storms with 60 mph wind and nickel-sized hail. I don't think I've actually heard the EBS kick in for real before. We were advised to take cover and avoid windows.

I hustled the kids inside, intercepted Jen, and we waited out the storm in the Supercenter. I spoke to a woman, soaked head to toe, who said her husband had been called back to the Air Force base that evening to haul the planes inside to avoid the hail. She said it had indeed been hailing when she dashed into the store. When the storm was fully upon us, the wind was blowing rain horizontally straight into the front doors of the Wal-Mart – very impressive.

Once the storm passed, we set out for Custer State Park, where our cabin awaited. We ended up taking the scenic route in the dark in a light rain, and Jen navigated some extremely impressive switchbacks and single-lane tunnels:

We pulled into the cabin at 10 p.m. mountain time. It looks deceptively rustic on the outside, but is nicely finished inside with two double beds and a set of bunkbeds in a single room. It even has a flat-screen TV, which is a nice space-saver, because it is a little tight in here. Ellie is thrilled to finally get the top bunk. Good night!

Tuesday

Delicious Wall Drug donuts for breakfast. It's raining this morning, and it will rain all day. Jen is keen on hopping on a horse with Katie sometime this week, but the trail rides are cancelled for today. Maybe tomorrow.

We set off for the Crazy Horse monument, the absolutely enormous tribute to the Native American chief that after 60 years sits about a third finished in the Black Hills:

At the base of the mountain is a complex of museums, shops, and restaurants with a Native American theme, though the dessert menu featured strawberry-rhubarb pie and kuchen, a German pie-type item that serves as the South Dakota state dessert.

The monument really is something else. It was commissioned in 1939 by Native American leaders who liked what they saw at Mount Rushmore and decided they wanted one of their own. They found Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor who had just won an award at the New York World's Fair.

Korczak – everyone calls him Korczak – spent a summer working on Rushmore to see what was what, did some models, took some time off to fight WWII, then spent the last 35 years of his life working on Crazy Horse before dying in 1982. The visitor-center film detailing the project shows how he went from urbane-looking artist to wild-looking mountain man in the interim. His wife and seven of his ten children are still on the job. In its interviews with Korczak's children, the film hints at a little tension between the kids who stayed and those who left.

The monument is financed by sales from the shops, and the $25 per car they charge to visit the thing. The theme of the place is "follow your dream," with the unspoken corollary being, "...no matter how nutty it is."

That done, we headed to Mount Rushmore, the granddaddy of mountain-defacement projects. No, wait – that's not quite true. The grandfather of all of these would be Stone Mountain in Jen's home state of Georgia. I was noodling around before we left on this trip, trying to learn a little about the region we were about to visit, but found the details around Stone Mountain to be ever-more fascinating.

This is off-topic, so I'm going to keep it to one (long) paragraph. The airbrushed version of history is that Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum was lured away from the Stone Mountain project. The truth is, he left Stone Mountain in a you-can't-fire-me-I-quit kind of huff. The project had been commissioned by none other than the Ku Klux Klan (of which Borglum was an enthusiastic member) to mark the spot where the modern Klan had been reborn in the early part of the century. The federal government and the Klan financed the first phase of the project, with the feds minting a coin Borglum had designed to raise funds. The coin was apparently ugly and did not sell well, leading to the rift. The Klan all but abandoned the project after Borglum left and scraped everything he did off the mountain. It was reborn in the 1950s during the fit of Southern pride that Brown v. Board of Education inspired throughout the region. The state of Georgia eventually took over the site and, years later, had to condemn the entire thing to void the perpetual easement the Klan had been granted to hold meetings up on top of Stone Mountain. This story pleases me mostly because it irritates Jen.

Now, where were we? Right, right, Mount Rushmore:

The thing was dreamed up by a South Dakota tourism person, who decided to not be resigned to the fact that South Dakota had nothing to see (remember, this was before Wall Drug). He brought an idea to Borglum, who changed it entirely but did succeed in creating a one-of-a-kind tourist destination out in the middle of virtually nowhere.

Rushmore was carved until 1941, when (a) WWII got rolling, (b) Borglum died suddenly in Chicago, and (c) they ran out of money. The instruction was given to wrap up the faces, drag the equipment off the mountain, and that was that. The plan to carve the four presidents down to their waists was abandoned. While Washington's face is lovingly well-defined, Lincoln's face barely emerges from the rock. A huge pile of rubble, never cleared away, sits right below the boys.

Something I did not know before today was the explanation for why Teddy Roosevelt is perched in the back row. It turns out that the sculpture was supposed to be the four of them jowl to jowl, but weaknesses in that section of the rock forced Borglum to push Roosevelt back further and further into the mountain. I can just visualize Borglum & Co. after each layer of rock was blasted off: "Damn it! Take it back another foot." They're lucky they didn't run out of mountain.

The funny thing is, Rushmore was turned over to the feds at some point, and is now a National Monument, with copious federal spending surrounding it. The site is treated like a shrine of some sort, as if it were to us as the Pyramids are to Egypt or the Wailing Wall is to Israel. The truth is a much better story – it's a half-finished publicity stunt embraced by a young country more willing to see the dream than to shake its head at the execution.

I'd lay money on a bill going before Congress someday that would pay to complete the monument – as long as Reagan were added next to Lincoln.

It's around 4 when we head back to the cabin, and we decide to take the scenic route, returning to the road with the hairpin turns and single-lane tunnels. This time, we turn off to the "wildlife loop" in hopes of seeing some local fauna. I don't know how the park arranged this, but we're not two miles into it before a herd of buffalo crosses our path:

The kids are absolutely thunderstruck. Ellie can barely speak. We snap about a hundred pictures and then drive on. The kids emerge from the car a little later to snap a few shots from a safe distance:

We next encounter elk (we think – maybe large deer), burros, and wild turkeys. The batteries on two out of three cameras are dead by the time we get home – a sure sign of a good outing.

Jen and I feed the kids PB&J sandwiches for dinner, set up a movie on the laptop, and sneak out to the Blue Bell Lodge, about 200 yards away, for a nice, quiet dinner for two. The menu there features USDA choice beef or "Genuine Custer State Park buffalo." I ask the waitress, Really? and she confirms it – some of the buffalo roaming the park are selected to become quite tasty burgers and meatloaf. This is a detail I will not share with the kids unless they read the blog. (Sorry, kids! It sounded too tasty to resist!) As we return from dinner, it is still light out, and we spy a buffalo visiting a neighboring cabin. We drag the kids out to see it:

Wednesday

This turns out to be the best possible week to be here. The season began last weekend for Memorial Day, and it sounds like things were pretty crowded, but then everyone went home, because most schools are still in session. So this week everything is open, but no one is here.

All five of us start the day with a two-hour horseback ride. It's a little chilly, and some dark clouds waft by every once in a while. But by and large, it's sunny and gorgeous. Here is Jen with the kids all helmeted up and ready to go:

Ellie, once again, is up front with the guide leading her horse, and has the time of her life. Everyone does well, and looks good on their horses:

Two riders pass us about halfway in; one of them, a cruel, cruel, woman, leans over to Ellie, and says, smiling, "Are you having fun? Would you like your Daddy to buy you a horse?" "Hey!" I yell, from five horses back.

The highlight of the ride is not two minutes into it, when Jen's horse, which is directly behind Katie's, comes up close to Katie's horse and turns slightly to the left. Katie's horse then poops on Jen's jeans-clad leg.

This ride is a little different from others we've done because we cross water six times, which is quite a bit of fun. Joey is on a pony, which is quite a bit shorter than the horses, and he gets a little wetter during the crossings.

It looks like the park suffered a major fire about ten years ago. The mountains along the trail are a beautiful mix of stark, burned trees and new seedlings. It's a great demonstration of how an ecosystem renews itself:

After the ride, we head south to Hot Springs. We stop several times to gawk and photograph the buffalo that sidle up to the roads we're driving along:

Hot Springs is a beautiful little town that we are told boasts a daily high of about 60 degrees – year-round – thanks to the warm river coursing through it. The river never freezes, steams all winter long, and frosts all the nearby trees.

We go swimming at Evan's Plunge, the town's large indoor pool – the kids judge it a little chilly to swim outside. There has been one pool or another at the mouth of the springs for a hundred years. This one is very large, with two slides, and different areas roped off for the small fry. One slice is reserved for those trying to swing across the pool on a series of rings. I acquit myself reasonably well on those.

The pool is so much fun that we're shocked to find out it's 7:30 as we leave. Jen all of a sudden has a hankering to shoot past our cabin and see the evening show at Mount Rushmore. So we do. It has gone from "a little chilly to swim outside" to "genuinely cold" – not winter-in-Fargo kind of cold, of course, but we've really only brought summerweight clothing. We bundle up as best as we can, and head down to the amphitheater in front of the mountain.

The show is a spoken presentation by a park ranger on the importance of the four presidents, then a pretty slick movie about the importance of the four presidents. I like Teddy Roosevelt as much as the next guy, but you can tell they're straining a bit to justify his presence there. The Father of our Country! The Father of the Louisiana Purchase and the Declaration of Independence! The Savior of the Union! And, um, a guy who really liked parks!

The movie is kind of a standard government-issue airbrushed version of history. Most glaring is that slavery is only mentioned glancingly, even as the Civil War is discussed at length. And you get the feeling that it'll be a long, long time before Sally Hemings gets added.

I was under the vague impression that all this was building up to a laser show on the president's faces, but Jen whispers, No, no, it's Crazy Horse that has the laser show – this is just lighting up the mountain. What?! But, indeed, as the movie draws to a close and they make us sing the national anthem, the mountain is bathed in a medium-dim light. The kids are just happy to be getting back to the car before they lose any fingers or toes.

In our haste to get to Rushmore for the night show, we didn't stop for dinner. We dropped by the restaurant at the mountain for a quick meal of yogurt, Sun Chips, and hot chocolate. Not perfect, but it worked. It turns out that everything closes – even the bars – at 10 p.m. around here.

We stop at the only establishment selling food within 20 miles – a convenience store – get back to the cabin, and put the kids to bed. Jen and I end the evening with a candlelight dinner of apples, pears, cheese, crackers, a few beers, and potato chips with sour-cream dip (the last two being the bounty from the convenience store). Mmmm.

Thursday

We sleep in, say goodbye to our fine cabin, and head north to Medora. We leave Custer State Park via the quite beautiful Needles Highway, so named for the thin rock formations jutting into the sky. The highway was personally plotted out by a South Dakota governor on horseback in the 1920s, and he did a very nice job of it. It features things like the Hole in the Wall, (right), which lives up to its name. One of the one-lane tunnels is only eight feet and change wide:

Jen holds her breath and gets our six-feet-and-change-wide van through it like a champ.

Next stop is Deadwood, home of the cursingest HBO show on the air. I'm not sure what kind of regulatory perfect storm swept through to create the modern Deadwood, but it left behind a sort of old-West-themed mini-Las Vegas. Just about every storefront in town is some flavor of casino.

We eat a late lunch at Kevin Costner's sports bar, upstairs from his casino and downstairs from his fancy restaurant, "Jake's," where the high rollers presumably eat dinner. The place is encrusted with memorabilia, costumes, and photos from his movies. Man, he's been in a lot of movies. When they were good, they were very, very good; when they were bad, they were horrid. I still cry every time I watch "Field of Dreams," so Kevin's okay with me.

We commission an old-timey Western family photo that turns out pretty well and will be shipped home for us. A quick stop in Sturgis to pick up a few bandanas in this motorcycling paradise, and we're on the road to Medora. It's raining pretty hard, and we are in the middle of absolutely nowhere:

A question that has been plaguing us while we have had no ready access to the Wikipedia is whether bison are the same thing as buffalo. I've been telling the kids I think they are, but I am proved wrong as we approach the North Dakota border:

[For the record, the Wikipedia further proves me wrong: "In American Western culture, the bison is commonly referred to as 'buffalo'; however, this is a misnomer. Though both bison and buffalo belong to the same family, Bovidae, the term 'buffalo' properly applies only to the Asian Water Buffalo and African Buffalo."]

We pull into Medora around 9:45 p.m., after miles and miles of nothin' but grass (see above). We haven't seen much of the town yet; the part near our motel appears to consist mostly of bars. The first place we stop looks promising, but when we draw close, it turns out to have a big sign on the door barring entry to anyone under 21 – the restaurant part of it is closed. The bartender directs us across the street to the Iron Horse, which he thinks might still serve food. It does – but just barely. The Iron Horse's bartender tells me her cook left hours ago, but she can still fix some pizza. That'll do, but it's a close call – it's pretty terrible pizza. The beer is cold, though. Jen and I get to drink our first Moose Drool, which we've seen poured at a lot of places out here.

The Iron Horse is a pretty honky-tonk looking place, kinda dirty and loud, but not particularly dangerous. A fair number of yuppies mixed into the dusty cowboy hats. Still, I laugh when I realize that my parents never, ever walked into a joint like this with their kids.

We're there a few minutes when someone turns the jukebox up so loudly that you can't hear the person next to you. Katie and I head over to the jukebox with cash in hand, and find that someone has left a bunch of credits unspoken for. If the music's gotta be loud, at least it should be something we like. We risk a beating by punching in some Dixie Chicks songs and a lot of The Fray, Jen's all-time fav band at the moment. The jukebox, surprisingly, plays them all in a row, which risks us another beating. Hmmm... I thought jukeboxes played their requests in random order.

Jen brings Ellie along when she bellies up to the bar to pay the tab. The drunk guy at the end of the bar looks down, surprised to see someone so short, and takes a break from buying the bartender shots to offer to pick up Ellie's tab. Time to go!

Friday

The Medora Badlands Motel is clean and seems well-run, but man, stepping into the room is like stepping into 1960. A note by the door instructs us not to turn the light switch off, as it controls every outlet in the room, including the TV and the alarm clock. It's in a very nice setting, however:

It's nice in the morning as we head downtown for breakfast at the excellent Cowboy Cafe and then go to see "The Cowboy and His Horse," a free talk given five mornings a week by "Cowboy Lyle," a long-time employee of the foundation that runs everything in Medora, along with his beautiful horse Chocolate. Today's topic is "Grooming," and we learn how one cleans a horse:

We then take off into the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We check out TR's Maltese Cross Cabin, which is in kinda original shape, but has been moved all over the country over the years. We then embark upon the park's 36-mile nature drive, where we see field after field of prairie dogs, lots of buffalo, and some wild horses:

The views are amazing, and even the kids seem impressed:

About halfway into the drive, we run into a buffalo traffic jam. Six buffalo decided to wander down the road, flummoxing the human drivers on either side:

Jen finally decided to break the logjam, and snuck past them:

We were supposed to have a full evening of entertainment, but rain got in the way. The "Pitchfork Fondue," a steak dinner where the meat is stuck onto a pitchfork and boiled in oil, went on as scheduled, but the "Medora Musical," a "mix of modern country, western, gospel and patriotic music" with "historic, patriotic themes dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt," was cancelled.

I'll admit to mixed feelings about the musical's being rained out. On the one hand, whenever I said we were headed to the western Dakotas, the first thing out of every Fargoan's mouth was, "Are you going to see the Medora Musical?" On the other hand, I'm not sure it's really my and Jen's style of entertainment. On the third hand, the kids would have loved it. On the fourth hand, the rainout policy is to only give half your money back. grrr....

Saturday

We catch another episode in "The Cowboy and his Horse" series, this one slyly called "Ranch Dressing" – cowboy clothing:

Cowboy Lyle took us from hat to boot. Interesting if true: Cowboys originally didn't have belt loops in their pants, preferring to wear them tight at the waist instead, until the rodeo circuit got going, and they needed to have a way to display their prizes: Belt buckles.

We also learned how to properly tie and wear a bandana. Speaking of bandanas, Ellie has been wearing hers from Sturgis on her head, and it gives me a start every time I look over at her. It really is surprisingly tough-looking, even on a little girl. I wasn't quite able to capture the effect; this is the closest Ellie would come to providing a "mean face" for the camera:

We jump in the van for the straight shot back East. We make the turnoff for the "Enchanted Highway," a collection of giant sculptures along a road. We drive a few miles, then look up the details online and find out the highway is 32 miles long, ends 32 miles out of our way in the tiny town of Regent, N.D., and has just six sculptures along it. We turn back, and decide to snap some shots of the world's-largest sculpture that actually sits on I-94:

We next stop in Bismarck for lunch and to check out the tallest building in North Dakota, the State Capitol, the "Skyscraper on the Prairie." I'm disappointed on our quick drive by it; whatever Art Deco charms the building has must be hidden away on the inside:

The rest of the drive is uneventful. Our big Western adventure is over. Asked what they liked most about the entire trip, Katie and Ellie replied, "The bison!" while Joey, being contrary, said, "The buffalo!"

The end is near!

2007-05-26T11:20:00.000-05:00

To mangle Winston Churchill, this is not the end of the beginning. It is the beginning of the end.

Joey and Katie's last day of school was this past Thursday. Soccer, tae kwon do, guitar, and ballet have wrapped up. I finished my last bench memo for Judge B. yesterday. We've given notice to our landlord, and there's a "For Rent" sign out front. We're starting to kick around the logistics of moving back to Maryland.

And yesterday morning, halfway into the drive to Ellie's last day of school, I realized with a jolt that she and I had reached the very end of our daily ritual. Fifteen minutes a day, all by ourselves, where the girl and I could talk about life, sing songs, and just be with each other. Next year is going to be very different; she'll head off to kindergarten, and I'll be working long hours at the law firm.

What really stung was the thought that we may never get that kind of daily quality time ever again. Life doesn't lend itself to such things.

May Catch-up...

2007-05-26T09:22:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy few weeks around here, and I have neglected my blogging duties. Here's what we've been up to:

Dick Beardsley 5K
Growing up, I had heard my dad tell of a legendary marathon, where two runners (one of whom was Alberto Salazar) were neck and neck at about Mile 18, then ran 4:30 miles for the rest of the race, and finished just seconds apart. But I didn't know the details.

The details came to Fargo! The newspaper ran a big story on a new business in town, The Dick Beardsley Running Company. Turns out Minnesota native Beardsley was the other runner in that race, the 1982 Boston Marathon. His post-running career consists of conducting running camps, speaking motivationally, and, now, pasting his name onto a very nice new Fargo shoe store.

As part of the store's grand opening, Beardsley was holding a 5K fun run, and none other than Salazar – who would have been my running hero had I ever for a moment in my life thought I had any running ability – was going to be on hand for it.

John Brant, the author of a book on that marathon shootout, Duel in the Sun, was also there, and the three men very kindly signed books and posed for pictures:

(from left: Salazar, me, Beardsley. Sorry, Brant) Salazar's post-running career is training runners for Nike and promoting the swoosh. (He signs "Just do it!" with his name.)

It was kind of a thrill running the 5K with the two of them (um, particularly Salazar, with whom I'm much more familiar). They both took it quite easy, and though I finished behind Salazar, he was in sight for most of the race.

Wendy's Wedding!
We all drove down to Knoxville for the wedding of one of Jen's cousins, Wendy. She's great – we would have gone just about anywhere to get to her wedding. Knoxville ended up being a mere day and a half's drive. The wedding was completely gracious, and Wendy was a lovely bride. It was good to catch up with Jen's extended family.

The tricky part was that I had to be in St. Louis for court the following week. So I flew out, and Jen had to drive everyone back by herself. (Once again, the fleet of Nintendo DSes that Danny and A.J. bought the kids for Christmas bailed us out.)

As soon as Jen arrived home, friends and family began to converge on Fargo for....

The Fargo Marathon!
We'd been fearing the logistics of this week for some time. Lots of people were showing up from all over, staying with us and at area hotels. I wasn't getting home until Friday night. The marathon was Saturday morning. Adding to the mix was Ellie's year-end ballet recital, with an hours-long dress rehearsal midday Saturday, and Saturday-evening and midday Sunday performances. Plus two soccer games Sunday.

In the end, since I had wussed down to the half-marathon, getting Ellie where she needed to go became a lot easier. My Judge and his wife had very kindly offered to take Ellie for the morning, since just about everyone else was running one of the events.

Running the full marathon were: Jen, her sister Allison, and our Rockville pal John Hoddinott, a veteran Ibuprofen Warrior. I ran the half. Running the 5K were: a bunch of Jen's parents – Judith, Nancy, and Ken; her sister, Brenda; my dad; and Joey and Katie.

The marathon was everything we'd hoped it would be – exceptionally well-run, very flat (I think the biggest incline during the half-marathon was coming out of a railroad underpass), and not too windy. Unlike the Marine Corps Marathon, which mostly goes past monuments, the Pentagon, and all sorts of businesses, the Fargo Marathon winds through the residential streets of the city, one front yard after another. Many of those yards were filled with Fargo residents cheering us on, bearing hard candies, tissues, and fruit. We particularly appreciated the makeshift water stations.

After dragging everyone out to our place, which is in a fairly unattractive part of the city, it was good for our guests to spend a morning padding through Fargo's most totally gorgeous neighborhoods. It transformed their view of what this city is all about.

John (right) had done so little training for the race that his lovely wife Jane worried his heart would give out during the race. But John is irritatingly well-built for long distance, and posted a great time. Had he realized earlier how well he was doing, he could have kicked it up a notch and possibly qualified for Boston.

Allie (right) also finished in fine form. I was very proud of Joey and Katie, whose racing had been limited to one-mile runs up until that point. I'm not sure Joey had ever run 3.1 miles before; Katie had at least done a little training with Jen. It was the first race ever for Judith, Nancy, and Brenda.

I am exceptionally proud of Jen, who met her personal goals of (1) finishing in less than five hours and (2) for the first time, not throwing up at the finish. Jen trained right through a long and windy winter that defeated my hopes of running the full race.

Here are Allie and Jen at the finish line, with my dad and John in the background:

We made for a pretty good team shot the next day:

Ballet Recital!
All of us but John (who was excused – there's a limit to what you can subject your friends to) poured ourselves into auditorium seats the evening of the race to watch Ellie's ballet school recital. The show ran about two hours, with 25 different dances. Ellie's class danced in the third number, and only the third number. Our guests were very good sports.

I found myself unexpectedly teary-eyed during Ellie's dance. We've been thinking of her as such a big girl these days. She reads! She writes! All these things. But she was so little and vulnerable on the stage with her classmates as they tottered from corner to corner. I think it just really hit me at that moment that No, she's not quite a big girl yet, but it's just a blink away.

Here is the prima ballerina after her show:

Marketplace for Kids!

2007-05-06T10:58:00.000-05:00

Katie's teacher has been tearing her hair out for weeks getting her class ready for "Marketplace for Kids," and on Friday I found out why. Every kid in Katie's class prepared a tri-fold display of a product or service they wanted to present. Some were fanciful (an origami service, anyone?) and some were more prosaic (rain barrels).

It looks like every fifth-grader in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area was invited to do the same, and most of them showed up:

(Katie's fourth-grade class was an unusual participant; apparently, her teacher overachieves in this department!)

This appears to be a huge program, held in sites throughout the state. It's sponsored by the state's department of education, its agriculture commissioner, and one of its U.S. senators, Kent Conrad.

"We believe the future of our state's economy lies in the entrepreneurial spirit of our children, the next generation," the program tells parents. "At Marketplace, we want to plant the seeds of innovation in today's students – the civic and business leaders of tomorrow."

Each kid's project was listed in the 44-page program:

As promised, Katie presented the Lego robot she had built as part of her TechGyrls program, and sang the praises of the program:

Katie's exhibit drew big crowds. Predictably, though TechGyrls was meant to lure girls into engineering, most of those whose eyes popped out at her demonstration were the boys. This is Katie in demo mode:

Note that the tall person to the left is Sarah, an engineering student at North Dakota State University who very kindly agreed to accompany Katie to Marketplace for Kids, and helped sell TechGyrls. I think I can safely say Katie was the only kid in attendance with an engineering department backing her up.

Katie's robot featured two independent motors which had to be programmed separately, and a light sensor. Katie made it run a maze with great precision. Here's a close-up:

It was an all-day event. Katie and her classmates presented for about an hour, then went off to three classes, one on inventing stuff, one on North Dakota agriculture, and one on storytelling. Katie was thrilled that the storyteller brought and played a guitar.

Catching Up: Easter

2007-05-06T10:41:00.000-05:00

Easter was April 8, but the photos just came off the cell phone. We headed north to the Children's Museum for an egg hunt. Note how well the Easter Bunny is camouflaged:

Ellie, as usual, had a great time:

The egg hunt was fun, and interestingly done. The museum held the hunt several times over the weekend. They basically just tossed the eggs out on the snow, then let the kids skitter scross the snowpack retrieving them. They were all empty; the drill was to snag as many as you could, then dump them into a giant bin, for which you were rewarded with a goodie bag. Very efficient, though it took the kids (and us) a while to figure out why every egg they found was candy-less.

It's been so beautiful here that it seems like it's been a long, long time since we had snow on the ground, but this was only a month ago. I'll amend that – it's been beautiful until the last day or so, when it started raining almost nonstop. All soccer games were cancelled this weekend. It's just windy at the moment; Jen and I hope that it'll stay a little nice for the 5k we'd like to run this afternoon. More on that later!

North Dakota Cinco de Mayo

2007-05-05T13:10:00.000-05:00

Two words: Deer fajitas.

Soccer begins!

2007-04-28T21:50:00.000-05:00

Red River Soccer is up and rolling again as of this week for its short spring season. The practice schedule is great – Joey and Katie both have practices at the same time on the same days on fields pretty close to each other.

The game schedule, not so good. The spring season is oddly compressed – they have to start it late enough to have a fair chance of not having snow-covered fields, but they have to wrap it up by the time school ends, May 24. Ordinarily, parents shiver under blankets during the first few games of the season, but it was about 80 today and perfect.

For some reason, Joey has 3 games this weekend; he had one today and has two tomorrow. Here he is on the field today:

Katie's schedule is a little more rational, but she has to miss a few games in there, and I think will only play in three this spring. Here she is today:

And for some reason I can't seem to resist Ellie on her bike this spring:

Fargo Star!

2007-04-28T20:36:00.000-05:00

It's not usually my kind of thing – I've never watched "American Idol." But the local newspaper, The Forum, is trying hard to staple itself to the ongoing national talent-show fad. It created a local version, "Fargo Star." And each week a chunk of the lifestyle section is taken up with online polls asking readers to weigh in before "Idol" airs, then giving the blow-by-blow afterward.

For "Fargo Star," contestants submitted videos of themselves singing, which were placed online and voted on by newspaper readers week by week. The top 10 of the lot sang live at The Venue last night. Jen, Katie, and Ellie were totally hooked; we'd had friends e-mailing with subjects like "Subject: I need your help!!" to gin up votes for their pals. Also, tickets were free. We had to go.

The Venue itself is a pretty nice venue – reminiscent of Washington's famed and fabulous 9:30 club, with a large standing-room-only main floor and a wraparound balcony. Well, the 9:30 club isn't attached to a casino – there's a difference for ya.

I don't expect that Jen and I will be able to catch an actual concert there in the time we have remaining here. (ooo... wait – looks like "Five For Fighting" is playing there next Friday. We may have to work something out... oh, wait, damn it, no, I'm looking at the 9:30 club's Web page, not The Venue's.)

The singers were... OK. The winner, Kallie Frost (right), was a big jump ahead of the others with her version of ABBA's "Mamma Mia."

"I think she's been doing this all her life," Jen says, evidenced partly by the one judge, a Fargo modeling-agency owner, who clearly seemed to go way back with Kallie. She was so poised that we were shocked to find out today in the paper that she's a 15-year-old high school sophomore from across the river in Moorhead.

Kallie won a day in a local recording studio to produce a demo CD, and a trip to next season’s “American Idol” tryouts. The runner-up, who won a $700 microphone (and placed second in the voting largely with the assistance of the vocal mob of friends she had the audience), said as she won that she'd really been hoping for the microphone.

The judges – all local folks (the modeling-agency owner, a musician, and a choreographer) – seemed to be under orders to mimic "Idol" in one unfortunate way by being unnecessarily mean to the contestants. It seemed profoundly un-Fargo. I didn't like it, and neither did the crowd. It really didn't add anything to the proceedings.

Here's the lineup; click on it to see them larger. They're a pretty Fargo-looking group:

Fargo 911!

2007-04-22T21:50:00.000-05:00

I hit the road this afternoon for a training run – a short one, since Fargo's winter has defeated my dream of running the full Fargo marathon. The half should work fine. (Jen – the strong one – has not surprisingly powered through, and is on track to slay the full race on May 19.)

Since I don't have the nifty iPod + Nike training device Jen attaches to her shoe to track her mileage, I have to figure out other ways to do it. Jen suggested I drive the car away from the house half the distance I wanted to run, then run home and back.

Perhaps it was not the best way to celebrate Earth Day, but it worked. Mostly.

I has hoping to run 10 today and drove the truck just two and a half miles out, down the arrow-straight gravel road that shoots south just a block away from us. I pulled the truck over far into the shoulder, not near any of the few houses way out there.

The fields were brown and the sky was gray. But it was nicely cool and not too windy. My tiny iPod obligingly started my run well by picking some Tom Petty: "Well I started out /down a dirty road / Started out / all alone."

I felt okay for the first two-and-half-mile segment, great the second one back to the truck, and not quite okay the third one back to the house, where I succumbed to Jen's kind offer of a beer and a salami sandwich. Which was fine, except that the truck was stuck way out in the middle of nowhere.

Jen wanted to get a few miles in today, so she strapped on her shoes and headed out. When she arrived, she found this tied to a windshield wiper:

(For the record, I digitally removed the officer's number from the scan of the tag.) Man, these guys work quick! I think only three or four cars passed me the entire time I was on the road. Jen theorizes that the cops are out in force this prom weekend, and had our car been full of passed-out revelers, it probably wouldn't have been the first they found.

Spring springs! (reprise)

2007-04-17T20:55:00.000-05:00

OK, it's beautiful here now. Ellie's school sent her home with her snow pants the other day, promising they would no longer be needed. The kids are out biking at the moment; Ellie has mastered her training wheels:

Winnipeg or bust!

2007-04-17T20:50:00.000-05:00

The five of us spent a lovely weekend in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, after a late-Friday-night snap decision by me and Jen to flee the country for an overnight trip. We'd been lukewarm on the idea until we mentioned it to the kids, all of whom immediately seized upon the concept that none of them had ever been out of the United States.

"Will we be able to understand them?" asked Ellie. I explained that while some Canadians spoke French, they all spoke English as well. "And Spanish?" Ellie asked, hopefully.

Knowing that the paperwork requirements were toughening up, even regarding travel to our northern friend, I made sure to bring Jen's and my passports along. We set out Saturday morning after Ellie's ballet practice for the four-hour trip. Katie noted that we were ditching Fargo on its first nice weekend in months.

As we crossed the border and approached the Canadian immigration booth, Katie piped up from the back with a tidbit she'd heard the night before from our beloved Canadian-native relative: "Uncle Seth said kids need birth certificates to get into Canada." "No [kidding]?" I thought.

No [kidding].

We were waved aside and told to go into the main office. The Canadian border official there explained to us that we needed some sort of documentation for the kids, not so much for his purposes, he implied, but for those mean guys on the American side of the border, who might very well not let us back in without it. He asked us a ton of questions, including where my parents lived and their phone number. But he was firm – we needed some sort of paperwork. Without it, we would have to turn back.

Crap. We didn't have a scrap with their names on it. Not even their YMCA cards. This is Jen, waiting moderately patiently for this to be worked out:

What we ended up doing was calling Maria, the lovely woman who stops by to take care of Indy when we travel overnight. She very kindly agreed to swing by the house, retrieve the documents, and fax them up. Jen explained where all the documents were (right).

Maria found birth certificates for Katie and Ellie, but Joey's was nowhere to be found. The only thing with his name on it there was a savings bond with his Social Security number on it.

Maria trucked over to a supermarket faxed it all from there to the immigration office, and it worked. After about an hour and a half delay, we were free to go (left).

While we were waiting for the faxes to arrive, the immigration official called my father. I knew it had been a mistake to cough up his contact information. I think it is only because Jen and the kids were with me that he resisted every impulse in his body to tell the official something that would have fulfilled his lifelong dream of landing me in a foreign prison. In the end, the only mildly smartass thing he said was to confirm that his daughter-in-law was Jennifer Moore, but to also note that he has three daughters-in-law named Jennifer Moore.

Once we were on the road again, Jen patiently explained to Joey that because we hadn't found his birth certificate, we might have to leave him behind when we crossed back into the United States. "This is my dream come true," Katie said softly. This is why we had three kids, I told Joey, so that we'd still have plenty left over if we ever needed to leave one behind.

Ellie was also all for it, since in her estimation it would reduce the amount of fighting in the household. We pointed out to her that since there would be no one else for Katie to fight, "She'd have to fight you." Ellie wasn't buying it: "Joey always starts it."

Joey wasn't buying much of this nonsense either, though he did meekly inquire about it several times while we were in Winnipeg. He ordinarily knows better than to believe that sort of hassling from us, but I think he sensed that the stakes were so unusually high that it did make him a little nervous. Perfect – I can almost never make him nervous anymore.

We arrived in Winnipeg around sunset, checked into the lovely Inn at the Forks along the river, ate dinner, and turned in.

In the morning, Jen went for a long run around downtown while I took the kids to the Children's Museum, a nice facility that was literally across the street from the hotel. The coolest thing they have is a real diesel locomotive sitting smack in the middle of the building, with a full-size passenger car behind it.

We left downtown, hit one of Winnipeg's two Costcos, then swung around the northeastern edge of the city to the Miracle Ranch for a trail ride:

Ellie was certain she wanted to ride her own horse until about five minutes before the ride started, when she lost her nerve. She managed to regain it just in time to jump atop Sugar, and did very well:

We were out for an hour through the scrub of the ranch itself, with a curious detour through the adjacent strip mine:

For the record, that's Ellie right behind the leader there, and Joey, Jen and Katie bringing up the rear. Joey's horse was "Radigan," and Katie's was "Fudge," which she found significant, since the last time she went riding with Auntie Meg, her horse was "Brownie."

On the way back, the very nice American immigration official accepted the fax of Joey's savings bond without comment. In the end, the only hiccup was the delicious salami we'd bought at Costco: No Canadian beef is allowed across the border. I fetched it from the cooler and found it was pork salami, which we did not have to surrender.

As we returned to Interstate 29 headed to Fargo, Joey was congratulated all around.

Photo update

2007-04-17T20:45:00.000-05:00

This is Katie and Joey watching the Eighth Circuit's oral arguments two weeks ago in Minneapolis. They were so good – it was so boring. Even most lawyers don't get any thrill from arguments on collateral estoppel and res judicata:

And this is what it looked like on our trip back to Fargo later that day in the snowstorm. The sun was striking:

Spring: Hold that thought.

2007-04-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

It's odd; I think Jen and I may have outlasted the natives this winter.

Last weekend, we visited with our great friends the Hoyes in Minneapolis. I stayed over a day with Joey and Katie to catch the Twins' home opener in the Metrodome and to see the Eighth Circuit hear cases at the University of Minnesota Law School the next morning. After a very nice luncheon following the arguments, Joey and Katie and I headed over to Minneapolis' Costco to stock up.

We then set out into what ended up being a pretty good snowstorm along I-94 – lots of tractor-trailers jackknifed in the medians and in ditches, and cars sliding all over. But visibility was good, and Jen advised us that the weather Web sites suggested the worst of it was over. Good enough. So we plowed through, aided by the magic traction-control system on the van, and made it home without incident. Fargo ended up getting about seven inches, though with the wind, drifts in some places were hip-high.

What really surprised me and Jen was the reaction of the natives to this latest snowstorm. We heard from a lot of people about it, and they clearly seemed disappointed and deflated, perhaps having taken our earlier stretch of 70-degree days as a sure sign winter was over for good. Jen and I, however, having feared all along that Fargo's winter would last until June, were not nearly as surprised by the April snowstorm.

My colleague J., a native, clarified it for me. He said he was "fed up" with the weather, not so much because it snowed in April – he expects that – but because it didn't melt promptly; usually, Fargo's April snows don't last long. This one has stuck around for a week, and is expected to be topped off with another six inches of snow this afternoon. The first few flakes appear to be falling now.*

And it'll stay cold – we're not expected to crack 50 until next Monday, and lows will be in the 20s each night until then.

* Editor's note: For the record, a few flakes is all that landed. The predicted six inches turned out to be flurries. Dang.

That tatt...

2007-03-26T21:31:00.000-05:00

OK, this marks a difference between when Mom is here and when Mom is away. I was dimly aware that Ellie's old pirate tattoo had finally worn off completely, and that Joey had kindly transferred another to her arm. But I didn't take a close look at it.

And in the picture we took down by the river, I was so struck by the fact that all three kids were actually looking at the camera that I didn't notice Ellie's exposed arm until my colleague P. pointed it out on the blog this morning.

My, that's some tatt. It's not exactly clear in that photo what the design of the tattoo is, but you're seeing what you think you're seeing. And the truth is, it's worse close up. It is indeed a sword going into a skull, and upon closer inspection, you can see that snakes are going into the skull's eye sockets as well:

"And Ellie is a member of what gang?" her Grandpa Ken inquired gently.

Hmmm... I think that even for me that crosses a line of what I'd like my four-year-old daughter to be sporting. Hopefully the Montessori folks didn't see that today. I'll see if I can't scrub it off in the morning.

Spring springs!

2007-03-25T22:35:00.001-05:00

The one sure sign of spring around here is flooding. The Red River is cresting at about 22 feet today or tomorrow, with anything over 18 feet officially being a flood. We drove over to the river today to see what was going on, and found the park there to be full of water.

Above, you're seeing the Red River gently spilling from its banks, with us in North Dakota and that barn on the right over in Minnesota. There was still a bit of ice on the river, which I think combined with today's warm temperatures to cause that cool foggy effect.

[Note that Ellie has just one sleeve pulled up, apparently to show off the pretty tough tatt she currently sports on her left arm.]

It's funny, though – Fargo is totally blasé about this level of flooding. The Forum published a short article last Tuesday going through the motions, and explaining that nothing was happening. The basin by the river was going to flood, and Elm Street between 14th and 15th avenues was closed, as it always is this time of year.

It looks like the high was around 66 at the airport today, though it felt warmer where we were. One bank we drove past pegged it at 71 degrees. Katie announced that we should eat leftover pasta outside for dinner, which was an excellent idea. She wiped a winter's worth of grime off the patio table and chairs, and we had a very nice meal in shirtsleeves under the big sky. The sun set at about quarter to 8, and as darkness fell we were quickly reminded that we were still in North Dakota in March.

At dinner, we amused ourselves with a word game Katie had learned. The game involved going around the table and building this sentence word by word (and repeating the growing list each time): "I am going to my grandma's beach house with my aunt, balloon, car, dog, elephant, firefly, goat, hamster, ice cream, Jack, kangaroo, lion, Mom, noodle, octopus, pizza, queen, rhinestone, stable, Thomas the Tank Engine, umbrella, violet, water, xylophone, yo-yo, and zebra." (Bonus points if you can figure out who was sitting where at the table.)

We picked up the pace when the temperature started dropping – the final rounds can be very long. I was very proud of Ellie especially – she totally understood the game, participated well, and did an excellent job rattling off even the long list.

Damn Everything But the Circus

2007-03-24T20:11:00.000-05:00

Last night the kids and I hit the Shriners' circus at the Fargodome. The kids bore free (!) tickets from a local bank. Only the cotton candy, icy treats, candied almonds, programs (x3) and my ticket cost us anything. (hmmm...)

I knew the evening was going to be a success when Ellie turned to me about five minutes in – when nothing particularly spectacular was happening in any of the three rings – with her face agog and exclaimed, "I cannot believe my eyes!"

We enjoyed ourselves. Was it Ringling Brothers? No. It was definitely circus on a smaller scale. But seeing such a thing as an adult lets you sit back and soak in the time-honored elements any decent (non-Soleil) circus will have within three rings: trapezes, big-cat tamers, clowns, ringmaster, elephants. In some ways, it's a limited – but entertaining – palette circus producers are painting from.

When we headed out to the concourse at intermission in search of restrooms and snacks, we were spied by a courthouse colleague of mine, G., who was, quite conveniently, selling cotton candy on behalf of one of her children's activities (the band?). It was typical of our outings in Fargo. We hardly ever wade into a crowd of people these days without knowing someone.

Shriners have had a bit of a hard week. A big story on Monday in The New York Times detailed how some local chapters can get a little careless with the money they designate for their children's hospitals versus what they spend to stock the bars at their temples. So it was with some interest that I noted the tickets and the program had plastered all over them: "Proceeds benefit Shrine Temple Operations Only."

A tune was going through my head most of the evening: "Damn Everything but the Circus," by The Story. It's a beautiful, haunting song about a young girl who joins up with an outfit I'd always imagined looked like the Shriner show does:

So step right up
to the small town big top
One way out
of a small town’s
the big top

Turns out it was also, first, a pretty good e.e. cummings poem:

Damn everything but the circus!

...damn everything that is grim, dull,
motionless, unrisking, inward turning,
damn everything that won't get into the
circle, that won't enjoy, that won't throw
its heart into the tension, surprise, fear
and delight of the circus, the round
world, the full existence...

I Still Love a Parade

2007-03-23T08:25:00.000-05:00

The circus is coming to town this weekend (we hope to go tonight; I'll report on it later), and organizers decided to march the troupe down Broadway yesterday, the first time Fargo has seen a circus parade there in 20 years.

It was sunny and near 60 at 6 p.m. when the Shriners began proceeding down the middle of the street in a variety of small vehicles.

For the first time in forever, we debated as we left the car whether we should leave our jackets behind (we didn't; we should have).

Walking over to Broadway, it really seemed like winter is over. Nothing is green – anywhere – but the chill seems to have left the air.

Jen's out of town for the next week; she's been gone since Wednesday, flying that day to D.C., then driving to N.C. Her visit yesterday to Davidson College to guest-lecture on philanthropy issues went very well, and today she's driving to Atlanta. Sunday she'll drive back up to D.C. with her mom, will work on her newspaper's deadline, then return here Thursday morning. Kind of a crazy itinerary, and an awfully long time to be gone. But she's catching some gorgeous weather along the way, and can use the break.

Kapow!

2007-03-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, Joey graduated from being a white belt in tae kwon do to a "yellow stripe" – kind of a halfway point between the white and yellow belts. Most of the skills he was tested on involve memorization of impressively complex "patterns," which are tightly scripted series of movements, each with a range of punches, twists, and kicks. Joey's also learning more Korean than I would have thought (well, the numbers, anyway).

For his big finale, he did get to break a board with a side kick. Here he is preparing:

And, because he kicked through it faster than I'd expected, here he is with the splintered result:

Master Carter, who runs the tae kwon do academy, very graciously signed and dated each of the boards, noting with his Sharpie what kind of kick had conquered it. As he explained to me the next day, he has a big stack of broken boards from his early days in the sport, and he has no idea where any of them are from. He's trying to spare the next generation this trauma.

There's rather less physical contact between students than "The Karate Kid" led me to envision (none, at Joey's level), and Joey seems to be making poor progress toward the goal I have set for him, which is to learn to break people's necks with his mind. Still, the boy is having a good time, and hopes to continue next year back in Maryland.

New Fargo, Old Fargo...

2007-03-15T08:13:00.001-05:00

The above photograph graced the front page of The Forum yesterday. "Ewwwww!" Katie said – she is still gratifyingly grossed out by anything that has anything to do with sex.

"No, no," I said. "They're calling it 'Naked Sushi Night,' but that's just an illustration.... wait."

To my surprise, "Naked Sushi Night," at a local bar tomorrow, will indeed feature sushi eaten from the bodies of (nearly-)naked models. “It’s not going to be a sleazy set-up at all. It will be classy and clean,” the bar manager told the newspaper.

Still, this is a clear break from the sleepy Fargo of yesterday to the mid-sized, adventurous city it's becoming.

My favorite part of the coverage of this is that the newspaper didn't leave Old Fargo behind – toward the end of the story sat a small sidebar: "So what is sushi?"

Another nice detail: The Forum also tells us, "According to a 2005 BBC report, the Chinese government banned the practice of serving sushi on naked women, condemning it as a violation of common decency."

Snow forts...

2007-03-05T22:12:00.000-06:00

In response to yesterday's post, our great friend Dan sent me a link to a story about more ambitious snow-fort building plans. I'm not sure I'm going to go out of my way to share that with the kids, since it looked like the possibility of death through structural failure was much higher than with their homegrown fort.

To see a real Fargo snow fort around here, I'd head to the North Dakota State University campus. Katie attends a program there every Monday called "TechGyrls" that teaches young ladies that you don't have to be male to be a nerd.* And boy, do they have one hell of a snow fort there.

Here's one view of it:

Here's another:

The NDSU architecture building, where the TechGrrrrrls meet, is in the background. On the quite possibly flawed assumption that architecture students had built a secure structure, I allowed Katie to slide into holes like this one:

...which led to a small, totally enclosed, room she had to crawl out of.

* Did you know Dr. Seuss may very well have invented the word "nerd"? I just learned that this morning, while preparing to go into Joey's class to read The Lorax for the good doctor's birthday.

Tunneling...

2007-03-04T13:05:00.000-06:00

Joey and Katie worked hard this morning, burrowing into the berm of snow the wind swept up near the front of our house. Here's Katie, hard at work:

...and here's Joey, after doing some head-first digging of his own:

"First, we were in the land of never-starting snow," Joey said as he walked in. "Now, we are in the land of never-ending snow."

Snowbound!

2007-03-02T18:19:00.000-06:00

Now, this is some snow:

Well, ok, ok, that's from a low perspective out the back sliding-glass door. Here's what it looks like when I'm standing up:

Still. The kids finally got their day off today, because high winds whipped the foot of snow that's fallen over the last three days into a thick blanket of blowing snow everywhere – "near-blizzard conditions," they're calling it.

In fact, we're under a blizzard warning until 9 tonight:

SNOW SHOWERS WILL COMBINE WITH NORTH WINDS OF 25 TO 35 MPH WITH HIGHER GUSTS THROUGH THE EVENING. THE COMBINATION OF STRONG WINDS AND SOME FALLING SNOW WILL PRODUCE NEAR ZERO VISIBILITIES AT TIMES...ESPECIALLY IN OPEN COUNTRY.What is a blizzard? I'd always thought it was "a hell of a lot of snow." No. According to the source of all truth, the Wikpedia, to be a blizzard, a storm must decrease visibility to a quarter mile, include snow or ice as precipitation, and have wind speeds of at least 35 miles per hour for at least three consecutive hours. You can get a "ground blizzard" if the snow is no longer falling but the wind is still kicking things up.

From our front door, it kind of looked like this today:

...and it's apparently not nearly as impressive in-town as it is outside of town. I dashed out midday to grab some traditional North Dakota snowstorm comfort food (tacos), and the driving was not bad at all. The winds are pretty high, but there are lots of objects breaking up the flow.

Jen is still en route home from D.C. at this hour. She has had trouble at every turn today: Her 7 a.m. flight out of Washington National was delayed until 10:30, and she almost missed that one because her rental car had a dead battery. Then she got to Chicago, and her 3:24 p.m. flight was cancelled outright. They say they'll put her on the 8:15, arriving here at 10:12 tonight, but I'm not holding my breath.

They've closed I-94 from Fargo to Bismarck, and current weather conditions “make it impossible” to say when it'll reopen. I keep meaning to get photos of the gates they have to block off every interstate entrance around here; perhaps when I go to pick Jen up at the airport tonight, I can get a shot.

Still coming down hard this morning...

2007-03-01T07:28:00.000-06:00

...but not even a school delay! The kids are shocked. The photo doesn't really do the current snowfall rate justice. Here Joey and Katie are, heading out into it:

A school bus had just passed by, emphasizing that we had not somehow missed a school-delay announcement.

Tomorrow holds out more hope; we finally got our storm warning:

OK, "near-blizzard conditions" should be good for a 2-hour delay, one would think. Jen's supposed to fly back into town around noonish tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

A Few Updates...

2007-02-28T20:37:00.001-06:00

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!

2007-02-27T20:00:00.000-06:00

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!

2007-02-25T21:57:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-02-25T13:54:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-25T13:49:00.000-06:00

Just past midnight about a week ago.

Sausage!

2007-02-25T12:29:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-02-13T07:20:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-02-10T10:25:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-02-04T17:19:00.000-06:00

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!

2007-02-04T17:04:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-04T10:50:00.000-06:00

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'...

2007-02-04T08:24:00.000-06:00

"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!

2007-02-02T13:47:00.000-06:00

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.

Sun Dogs & Moon Dogs!

2007-01-29T23:06:00.000-06:00

OK, here's something I hadn't seen before. Apparently, the conditions in Fargo are just right for the phenomena known as sun dogs and moon dogs.

When it's cold enough and the atmosphere is full of ice crystals, the sun and moon get rainbow halos around them.

I received a call at the courthouse this afternoon from my colleague J., who was out running an errand. "Get to a window," he commanded. The sun dogs were out. It was a little cloudy today, so the full effect was not seen. Also, I only had my camera phone, and could not get a good shot of them – the rainbow was overwhelmed by the sun.

I had better luck tonight, when Jen called me away from tucking in Katie (and called Katie, too), to check out the night sky. This is the lower arc of the rainbow that is totally encircling the moon here tonight:

I stuck the camera and tripod out the back door onto the porch into the zero-degree weather, and shivered while it took a 13-second exposure. Apparently, you only get moon dogs when the moon is full – lucky us!

When sun dogs appeared over Sweden in the 16th century, they were thought to be omens of God's forthcoming revenge on the Swedish ruler. I will avoid saying that America should be so lucky.

Halfway!

2007-01-27T23:11:00.000-06:00

Just out of curiosity, about two weeks ago I made up a spreadsheet counting the days we have left – not that I'm desperate to get out of here. I'm just a curious guy.

Today is the halfway point. We arrived July 12, 2006. If we stay until Aug. 15, 2007, it'll be exactly 400 days.

We've spent months getting to know Fargo and the surrounding areas, and now it's time to slowly turn those hellos into a long series of goodbyes.

Employed!

2007-01-27T22:23:00.000-06:00

It looks like this lawyering thing just might stick. I have accepted an offer from Latham & Watkins to join their D.C. office this fall. Very exciting. They're California's leading firm, and ranked in the top 10 nationally. The D.C. office is very well regarded, with a lineup of terrific litigators and, uh, now, me! They're known as perhaps the best-managed law firm in the country, despite recent hiring lapses.

It's a global firm, with about 1,800 lawyers worldwide, over 200 of them in Washington. They have offices in Barcelona, Brussels, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia, Orange County, Paris, San Diego, San Francisco, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as Washington, D.C. Milan!

The firm's biggest office is New York, with over 300 lawyers, then Los Angeles, with a few less, I believe. Only four in Milan. I wonder what they do, and if I can learn to do it also?

"So, can I accept a job offer during the clerkship?" I asked my colleague P., who is wise in these ways. "Sure!" she replied.

Terrific! Big law firms toss new lawyers surprisingly large amounts of money when they sign up – especially those coming from clerkships – and it'd be nice to pay off a few bills while we're here.

"You can accept the offer, but you can't take any bonuses until the clerkship is over," she elaborated. Damn.

It turns out there are a few loopholes – I can accept "reimbursements," which are technically not bonuses, but which look a lot like them to me. The firm will very kindly pay for the bar-prep class I already took, and the Maryland bar dues I've already paid. Those weren't cheap.

Jen's been hassling me to see "The Firm," the 1993 Tom Cruise movie about an extraordinarily generous but eventually quite sinister law firm. Ha ha ha.

What the Kids are Up To.

2007-01-27T21:29:00.000-06:00

Well, it's minus 2 out at the moment, with a wind chill of minus 25. What are the kids doing to keep active? you ask.

Well, nothing outside. Ellie is taking pre-ballet every Saturday morning at the Brant School of Dance Arts, a cozy studio up the road from us. We have ordered what sounds like a very elaborate costume for her spring recital, which, fortunately and unfortunately, falls on the evening of the day of the Fargo Marathon, May 19. The good news is, we'll have a big crowd of grandparents in town, many of whom are running some part of the marathon. The bad news is that we'll probably need spatulas to scrape us out of our chairs after the recital that night. Not clear how we're going to handle the 6-hour dress rehearsal she's required to do that day.

Joey is taking tae kwon do Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after school at Carter's Martial Arts Academy. It's going well, but Joey is making only slow progress toward the goal I set for him, which is to learn to break people's necks with his mind.

Katie and I are taking guitar lessons from Colin Blaine. If you Google "fargo guitar teacher," he comes up first. Colin plays in a couple of bands at night, and teaches a steady lineup of students all week long. We catch him at 5:30 on Fridays for an hour. I was advised that instruction like this is quite reasonable in Fargo, and man, is it – just $28 for the two of us for the hour! Folks' eyes in D.C. popped when they heard that.

Katie's on a 3/4-size Jay Jr. acoustic guitar, which she received for Christmas (right). I resisted buying her the pink model with a heart-shaped sound hole. I borrowed my Dad's guitar, which has sat idle for, oh, 25 years or so. When he handed it to me when we were back in Maryland over Christmas, I realized it was the first time I'd ever been allowed to touch it – it was one of the few items in the house totally off-limits to the kids when we were growing up.

Colin's very patient with us. I haven't seen him wince once when we hit a particularly ugly chord, which is several times a session. He is especially respectful of Katie's efforts, which goes a long way with me.

The picture above is from Colin's Web site, and, personally, it's what convinced me to go with him. A quick look at Colin and his site convinced my pal Mike. "YOU *MUST* SIGN UP. *RIGHT NOW.*" Mike wrote. "THIS guy, clearly, will set you both STRAIGHT on rock'n'roll."

Katie had her fingernails trimmed down short to be able to play, a sacrifice for her art I didn't quite grasp the magnitude of beforehand. Apparently, she took a great deal of pride in her longish girly nails – who knew?:

The lot of 'em are taking swimming lessons at the downtown Y every Tuesday and Thursday nights for a few weeks. Unlike in Rockville, where parents have to line up at 4 a.m. at the pool the day swim-class registration opens, we were able to slip the kids in with a telephone call at the last moment. They even all go at the same time! Amazing! Ellie's class is only 20 minutes long, while Katie and Joey go for 40 minutes.

Cold!

2007-01-17T07:42:00.000-06:00

About a week ago, I thought, man, we were told winter was going to start for real in October around here, and while we've had jabs of cold, there's been nothing sustained like I expected. And it's January already! I was thinking of writing a Fargoing entry that said, more or less, Hey! Bring it on!

Well, on it has done been brung. Last Friday brought a high of -9 and a low of -13 while I was out of town. Yesterday was a high of 16, and a low of -12. It's a balmy 17 right now (wind chill of 2), and we're expecting highs in the mid-20s for the next ten days or so. Lows are forecast to be in the single digits – much higher than the Weather Service has actually been reporting these past few days; we'll see who's right.

Here's how the cold snap is affecting things:

Windshield-washer fluid sprays onto the windshield and freezes there. There's some sort of trick to getting the glass clear, which I manage to do only accidentally and occasionally.
The radio knobs in the van are hard to turn.
Oh, and yes: The cold seems to have finally killed the alternator in the truck. It breathed its last on the interstate last night with Jen driving, Katie on board, and, fortunately, me just a few minutes away in the van to rescue them. Jen has her nightmares about winter here, but mine was pretty close to family members being stranded at night along a highway. I also have a blizzard nightmare that hasn't presented itself yet.
Best of all: the furnace in the house can't quite keep up.* I expected that cold weather would just mean horrendous energy bills as the furnace worked full-time to heat the house. It turns out that full-time isn't quite good enough; the house is running about 8 degrees colder than the thermostat is set. It's still comfortable inside, but I'm wondering what it will look like if we get a string of -20 days.

This weather is not hard to walk around in for short periods, though – it's not very windy, and the sun is shining brightly. If you have to get from a car to a school, say, it's not uncomfortable to make the walk with your jacket unzipped.

It's almost time to try the fun cold-physics experiments; if you blow bubbles in the cold, when they pop, they burst into shiny crystals. The kids have seen this; I haven't. The one I'm really looking forward to filming is throwing a bucket of boiling water into the air, and having it all freeze before it hits the ground.

* Edit: Change the filter in the furnace, and you'd be surprised how well it works. Oops. Glad that occurred to me before we froze to death or paid someone to come out and look at it.

Oh, terrific.

2007-01-12T13:51:00.000-06:00

Hey, it's 10 below zero in Fargo right now, with a wind chill of 34 below. Great time to get outta town, right?

Well, it turns out you have to pick your destination with some care. I've been in St. Louis with Judge B. and his staff all week, and made plans to enjoy the holiday weekend in a more temperate climate with some buddies.

Under a headline of "Ice storm threatens chaos," and a subhed of "Storm also expected to hit St. Louis, Missouri, hard," CNN.com is putting those plans, um, on ice:

"This is a one-in-maybe-15- to 25-year event," CNN severe weather expert Chad Myers said Friday of the forecast freezing rain, sleet and snow... Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, up to St. Louis, Missouri, could see "devastating consequences," Myers warned Friday. "You won't be able to get in or out of St. Louis tomorrow."

Here's a picture from The Weather Channel:

Geez! The guys have either landed here, or are about to, so the weekend is safe, even if we have to watch hotel TV for the foreseeable future. Getting out might not be so easy.

Return to Central Time

2006-12-31T17:00:00.000-06:00

"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

2006-12-25T17:02:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-07T06:37:00.000-06:00

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!

2006-12-07T06:34:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-03T17:18:00.000-06:00

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...

2006-12-03T16:24:00.000-06:00

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...

2006-12-03T15:43:00.000-06:00

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.)

BREAKING NEWS!

2006-11-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

I don't know why the mainstream media hasn't made a bigger deal about this. Perhaps it's so obvious it doesn't even merit a mention.

But in case you're reading this from beyond our solar system, you should be totally alarmed to learn that while Earth's sun still seems to be providing light, it no longer provides any heat.

Yes, down from a record-breaking 62 degrees the other day, it was 17 degrees today at mid-morning when I went out to do my 4-mile run. Wind chill? Thanks for asking: 4. It was also 17/4 when I returned from the run almost an hour later.

Fortunately, I stocked up on cold-weather running gear just yesterday, and was ready. Here's what it takes to survive:

Head: A full hood and face mask, which did a marvelous job of keeping my lungs from being frostbitten. Atop that, a hat that comes down over the ears. (I didn't wear the jacket's hood while running – my blazing speed would of course tear it right off...)

Shoulders: Four layers (all black, naturally -- we're going to do this in style...): tee shirt, magic Patagonia foam long-sleeved shirt, knit long-sleeved shirt, outer shell.

Knees: Undershorts, long johns, with outer shell above. All black.

Toes: Barefoot, because shoes are for fancy Eastern city folk.

The gloves bear special mention:

They were super-warm, and notice the terrycloth along the thumb? That's to wipe your nose with. How thoughtful!

The only parts of me that were exposed were my eyeballs and the area immediately surrounding them. Those parts of me seemed to do just fine, but if it were much colder, I'd probably want to wear some sort of sunglasses or goggles.

I'm in miserable shape, so I can't say I was really enjoying myself, but as far as temperature goes, I was quite comfortable. As I was running, I was thinking, "OK, I could probably go another 20 degrees colder with this outfit on." When the time comes, I'll let you know if I was right.

The gloves, hat, and hood were the new purchases, and they ran about $25 apiece, for a total of $150 between me and Jen. Eeek! Jen didn't blink an eye when I brought them home, given her near-death running experience two weeks ago.

I Love a Parade!

2006-11-22T20:50:00.000-06:00

The annual Fargo-Moorhead Holiday Lights Parade snaked its way across the two cities last night. What's apparently usually an exercise in frozen toes and picking thrown candy out of snowbanks was a totally pleasant experience this year, with the temperature in the high 40s and not a snowflake in sight.

We stood on Broadway about two blocks from the courthouse and watched the world go by. Tootsie Rolls were the currency of the evening for the most part, though the Fargo Marathon was handing out tee shirts (which we did not get) and little foam beer cozies (two of which we nabbed). How cool is that? These guys understand marathoning.

The parade was heavy on the utility equipment; I thought it was particularly appropriate that the electric company's vehicle was lit spectacularly:

You figure that truck's got a hell of an alternator. The city snowplow that went by got big cheers. People know which side their bread is buttered on around here. The plow was a massive beast – I imagine it gets the job done just fine.

The parade featured more local businesses than I expected; here was H&R Block's entry:

Most heartening was the fleet of eight well-lit red Miatas toward the end of the parade, a reminder of the little car we've left behind (a little car that has melted its difficult-to-replace differential while we've been away and faces an uncertain future)...

After the last of the floats went past, we walked up a block for the really fairly impressive fireworks show the city put on atop the US Bank building. The kids sipped hot chocolate we bought from a woman selling it from a folding table on the sidewalk in front of her apartment. Very handy.

The weather has been odd – this afternoon, it was 60 and sunny here while it was 38 and miserably rainy back in Rockville. But reality looms. We're supposed to get a little snow here late on Thanksgiving night, and we're expecting lows in the teens over the weekend.

The training has begun!

2006-11-19T17:13:00.000-06:00

The Ibuprofen Warriors marathon team, of which I am the captain, has begun its workouts, training for the May 19, 2007, Fargo Marathon. We were all supposed to do 2 miles last weekend, 3 this weekend, and so forth up to about 10 miles, when we alternate long and short runs.

Here's my report to the team on my uneventful workouts and Jen's quite exciting one:

...I have just returned from a glorious 3-mile run on a North Dakota gravel road, accompanied by my trusty GPS and Katie on a bike. It's only about 3 degrees cooler here than it is in Rockville -- a balmy 43 degrees. The run was uneventful, but, man, it's going to be a long road to May. My legs are in reasonably good shape, but my chest has nothing to give.

Last week, I did my 2-mile workout in the basement on the treadmill that one of last year's Fargo clerks, with almost unbelievable kindness, left us on his way out of town. What the workout lacked in scenery changes, it made up for in heat.

Jen's been sick all week, and is putting off her run. Last week, however, she and Katie had quite the adventure. Katie didn't want to bike on the gravel road, so they took off north instead. Unfortunately, they got lost. Unfortunately, when they refound themselves, they were still several miles from home. Unfortunately, Jen had no cell phone or money with her. Unfortunately, it was in the low-20-degree range, and, finally, unfortunately, they had to do the segment into a ferocious headwind. And, by the end, in the dark.

Jen couldn't feel fingers, toes, or jaw by the time she got home. She was starting to think to herself, 'This is what I feared when we first started talking about coming to Fargo. I'll get stuck outside in the cold somehow, totally inadequately prepared, and I will freeze to death.' Ha, ha! What a kidder.

Eating Well Dept.

2006-11-18T17:05:00.000-06:00

My colleague J. dropped off a cooler full of frozen venison this afternoon. He and his sons hunt deer in Minnesota in a "high-intensity" area. Usually, hunters get to bag one deer apiece, but in a high-intensity area, where state officials are really trying to get rid of a lot of extra deer, hunters are allowed five deer apiece.

"Absolutely not," said J.'s wife, who is still emptying her freezer from last year. This came up in conversation one day about a month ago at the courthouse, and I offered to take a deer's worth of meat off J.'s hands if he needed the help. His eyes lit up. He and his boys ended up shooting a few extra deer (not 15), and we are the beneficiaries.

J. promised some meat to another friend, and so we ended up with 8 loin chops, 3 tenderloins, and 13 packages of ground meat (venison mixed with some beef, because venison is so lean):

"What kind of meat is this?" Joey asked when it arrived, and looked a little too quickly at the labels. "Lion meat!"

The sausage and jerky is still being worked on; I'll get the final processing bill from J. once it's done.

A few weeks ago, J. also, very kindly, brought two pheasants into work for us. We cooked them up while Jen's parents were here. Mom browned them and cooked them up in a wine sauce. Totally delicious.

I failed to get pictures either of the frozen birds in the courthouse freezer (the thought of which tickled me every time it wandered through my brain), or of the prepared dish. Jen's dad Ken asked if J. had any extra pheasant tail feathers around (to stick in a hat), and J. brought in some fine ones.

The List

2006-11-18T13:03:00.000-06:00

This morning, Ellie has been compiling a list of the things she likes and doesn't like about Fargo. Here it is:

Things Ellie Does Not Like About Fargo:

1. No Chick-fil-A.
2. She misses her friends.
3. She forgot her cradle back in Rockville.
4. She forgot to bring some money she had in Rockville.

Things Ellie Does Like About Fargo

1. Having P. (my colleague) here.
2. Having ballet.
3. Having school.

If you don't believe me, you can read it here yourself:

The Deer Hunters...

2006-11-11T12:34:00.000-06:00

I thought about posting a preview to this before we left, something like, "Hey, my colleague P. has invited us along to go deer hunting with her family on Friday!" But I knew I'd get impassioned e-mails, calls, and, perhaps, visits from my kids' outraged grandmothers, any of whom would be more than happy to shake me around by the throat, yelling, "You're thinking of doing what??? with my precious grandchildren, little man?"

So instead I decided to write about the whole thing after we got back safely, which we did last night. For the record, Jen was fully informed of this plan, and approved it. I was particularly proud of Katie on this outing. She wasn't wild about the idea of aiding and abetting the murder of Bambi, so I pitched it this way: "We're here in North Dakota to see and do things we wouldn't see or do in Maryland. This is one of those things." This convinced her, which is one of the reasons she's such a good kid – she's game for just about any new experience.

Deer season lasts about two weeks in North Dakota, and started Friday at noon. It's difficult to express fully how deep-seated deer hunting is around here. Let's put it this way – as we bounced around the countryside yesterday in trucks, a great number of the radio commercials we heard were for taxidermists.

We took off Thursday evening for Edgeley, N.D., home town of P.'s husband T., which is about 130 miles southwest of Fargo, population about 600. T.'s folks raised 11 children in a previous home, and still have beds scattered all over the place. There was plenty of room for us, and for T. & P.'s two sons (J. and E., for the record).

I woke up early the next morning to go scouting with T. This involves driving around the area, drinking coffee, checking out which land is posted "No hunting" and which is available, and finding out where the deer are running. I think it might just be an excuse to get out early and enjoy the countryside, which was fine by me. We saw a few deer flitting around, clearly not aware of how bad their day was about to get. A bunch of pheasant roosters also sprang up alongside us; T. moaned about how he had his deer rifle, not his pheasant shotgun, in the truck with us. We returned to the house, and T. swapped his rifle and me for his shotgun and a newly awake son, and they went out and shot a bird. They sent Joey inside with it (above).

Apparently, no day of hunting in the area is complete without a preparatory shot of "Red Eye," a concoction of 4 parts water to one part grain alcohol, with some cherry juice for color and flavor, and a little burnt sugar added. T.'s father said laughingly that a 4:1 ratio works just fine, but that when you go 3:1 or 2:1, people get messed up in a hurry. I was relieved to find out that those shooting that day don't get any Red Eye – it's for the rest of us.* It was indeed warming.

Deer hunting is also very big in Minnesota, but the sport is completely different. Minnesota has those, whaddya call 'em, trees, and they provide enough cover for hunters to sit in tree stands and pick off deer that wander by, which hardly seems sporting. In North Dakota, because the terrain is much more open, hunters "walk the fields," scaring deer from their resting spots, then taking shots at them as they run away.

The task of those of us without weapons is to walk along with the guys with guns across fields and along tree lines (thin lines of spindly trees that separate one field from the next and combat erosion), helping rouse the deer. The first thing we had to do was orange up, to avoid getting shot:

I went to a store Thursday afternoon to buy Katie's sweatshirt; there was so much bright orange in that section of the store that I thought I was going to burn my retinas.

It was a beautiful day, crisp and clear, and cold, somewhere in the low 20s. Standing around was tolerable; walking the fields was actually quite pleasant – you warm up in a hurry.

Because the terrain is so open, there's no firing blindly into brush; you have a good idea of where everyone is before a shot is taken, and it tends to be taken into an open field.

I told Joey he'd score extra points if he tackled a deer by hand. He was gravely assured by one of the guys hunting he'd be "a legend" if he managed to do that.

The glaciers that wiped North Dakota clean didn't do a perfect job, and here and there in unexpected places there are small dips in the land that hold moisture -- sometimes standing water, sometimes dampness that allows patches of cattails and tall grass to grow:

They're usually good places to find deer. The cattails themselves were dry, and when we walked through them, they exploded into a cloud of tiny seeds that filled the eyes and mouth of the person unfortunate enough to walk behind you.

I'm told this isn't unusual on the first day of the season, but we did not see a whole lot of deer. Most of those we did see, we did not manage to shoot. I told J. he didn't need to miss on purpose to spare my children the sight of a deer being killed. He laughed. A. Little. Bit.

Toward the end of the day, T. did shoot a doe I was told was "nice-sized." Newly dead deer have to be "field dressed," that is, gutted, pretty much where they drop. Field dressing a deer preserves the meat, which otherwise gets spoiled by the deer's organs. It's a ritualized process that leaves a big pile of guts on the ground (not buried, as I thought, but left on the surface to be feasted on by coyotes soon afterward). I shall spare you the details, both verbally and visually (well, except for the strip off to the left).

Katie decided she had had her limit, and declined to watch. Joey, on the other hand, stood to one side and took it all in:

I had no idea Ellie was so bloodthirsty. Katie and Joey were willing to just watch events unfold, but Ellie was a murderous chatterbox all day long. "Why didn't we shoot that deer?" "We really should have shot that deer." And: "When we run out of bullets, is it time for lunch?" When the time came, she was forbidden to leave the truck while the deer was being gutted. I wasn't sure which would happen: Would she be really upset, or would she really upset me by enjoying it?

* Edit: It is now my understanding that this is more of a guideline than a rule.**
** Edit of the Edit: It is now my further understanding that everybody gets one warm-up drink, but that's it.

A Fargo Halloween!

2006-11-06T07:22:00.000-06:00

As requested, here are the pictures my father-in-law Ken took of the kids as they prepared to go trick-or-treating. Again, Joey was Anakin Skywalker, Katie was Dorothy (with Indy as Toto), and Ellie was Snow White:

Of course, a picture of three cute kids in their Halloween costumes is not what this blog is about. However, a picture of three cute kids, as dressed to actually go outside in the 20-degree Halloween weather Fargo provided, is:

Apparently, if you want to make an impact with your costume around here, you have to do it from the knees down. Sparkly shoes are a good choice.

Bennett Fall Festival!

2006-11-05T21:53:00.000-06:00

Jen flew out to D.C. Thursday afternoon, abandoning us for a full week. The kids and I decided to go to Bennett Elementary's Fall Festival Friday night.

It was quite a production. The gym was filled with kids dashing from one corner to the next, bursting through the lines of other, better-behaved, kids waiting to get into one of the two moonbounces (princess, or Superman, depending on your preference), or the giant obstacle-course/slide:

Ellie managed to climb up the 20-foot slide very well (left); I don't know why I was concerned.

Elsewhere, door prizes and bags of candy were being handed out (not exactly what kids need on any Nov. 3; perhaps the extra will just get lost in the overwhelming post-Halloween sugar rush). They had all sorts of games and activities – basketball shooting, football tossing, and so forth.

A call had gone out for parents to send in a plastic soda bottle that had been cut open and refilled with some sort of fun stuff for kids. At the festival, kids picked a number from a hat and were given the corresponding bottle. Katie and Ellie were given beautifully elaborate bottles (left), which delighted them (note the dollar bill in Ellie's!).

Joey was even more thrilled by his bottle (right). My guess is the organizers thought they were going to run short, and a local supermarket came through with extra bottles. Terrific. I think that bottle of Dew contains more caffeine than Joey has consumed in his entire life. He was very understanding when I insisted that I had to replace it with a bottle of non-caffeinated soda the next time we went to the grocery store.

Bennett's principal was there, and asked me how Joey and Katie were adjusting to their new school. Very sharp! I had the feeling that had the answer been "not very well," she would have known that already.

Winner: Tale of Triumph!

2006-11-05T19:25:00.000-06:00

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." Both Meg, my lovely sister, and I received the good word on Friday that we passed.

So now I can forever tell the story of leaving my bar-review course early, packing the house, driving two days to Fargo, unpacking the house, spending the weekend at my judge's clerk reunion, studying for two days, flying to my brother's wedding in Texas, flying back to Maryland, studying for one more day and then taking the bar exam with a smile on my face, rather than a grimace.

The bar's a funny thing; it's like my grandmother's adage about housework – people only notice when you don't do it. It's not that passing the bar is such a terrific achievement; it's more that failing it is such a giant pain.

The Eighth Circuit is sitting in Omaha, Neb., for a week in December. On my way there, I have to fly in to D.C. a few days early to put the finishing touches on my Maryland bar application. On Dec. 7 and 8, I'll be submitting to my character interview with a lawyer in Bethesda (which has to be in person), and taking my daylong ethics class in Baltimore (which has to be in person).

This trip is actually free to me, thanks to an odd but not unwelcome quirk in the federal government's travel rules. The feds will pay for up to the full, unrestricted Sunday-out, Friday-back, fare. From Fargo to Omaha, that's a whopping $904. My Fargo-to-DC-to-Omaha-to-Fargo nonrefundable fare, which includes a Saturday stay, is $440, which does not whop. It's called a "triangle trip."

I could actually have done a "rectangle trip," and flown back to D.C. for Christmas and then back to Fargo around New Years' after the week in Omaha for less than the $904. But on second thought I decided that perhaps it was not such a good idea to have Jen and the kids drive two days from Fargo to D.C. in December and back again in January without me. Not that I'd be a lot of assistance if something dire came up, but I'd feel kinda bad if they froze to death in Wisconsin and I weren't around.

Last few weeks' wrap...

2006-10-31T23:25:00.000-06:00

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!

2006-10-31T22:14:00.000-06:00

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...

2006-10-11T19:06:00.000-05:00

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

Is this the best you got?

2006-10-11T07:32:00.000-05:00

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

A year of Fargoing...

2006-10-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-10-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

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

A Night at the Symphony...

2006-10-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-10-04T23:43:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-10-04T20:06:00.000-05:00

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.

The week's wrap-up...

2006-09-23T10:07:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-09-19T09:56:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-09-17T17:21:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-09-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-09-05T12:33:00.000-05:00

...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!

2006-09-03T20:52:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-09-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

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.

Bagels

2006-08-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

I was so excited. We new clerks had library orientation yesterday, and as at any respectable event in Fargo, we were fed first. Front and center was a basket of bagels from a nearby bagel bakery. Hooray! Salt bagels! They're hard to find sometimes even in D.C., and here were some to start my day:

It's a good thing I asked. Those aren't salt crystals you see on the tops of those bagels – they're sugar crystals. Apparently, there's no kind of baked good that can't be made more like a German dessert here in the Midwest. I sense hundreds of Jewish grandmothers spinning in their graves.

I opted instead for the jalepeño bagel (lower left), which sported cheese and a little grilled vegetables and was virtually a complete meal in itself, and only nominally a bagel. I know, I know, grandmothers would do a similar grave-spin over it. But it was quite tasty. Sacrilicious.

My second mistake...

2006-08-30T07:39:00.000-05:00

While the fishing thing will injure my wallet, at least it could be fun.

Here's the mistake that won't cost much, but will make me suffer all winter and spring: In an extremely ill-advised fit of optimism, I issued an invitation to a bunch of people, among them members of my marathon team, The Ibuprofen Warriors, to come up here in May and run the Fargo Marathon on May 19.

The race has been well-attended by the federal clerks in the two years it has been run – Ann of crunchy blinking eyeballs fame ran it, for one. And many of the court security officers, who, enviably, have to keep in shape as part of their job, will be running the marathon or some portion of it this year. My Fargo colleague has been introducing me around the building as "the runner," though I haven't been much of one in two years (and even then wasn't much of one...).

So far, 30 or so of the 38 people I invited are on the "Yes" list. A more conservative count, listing only those who have actually said "Yes," instead of those who have not unequivocally said, "Hell, no!" puts it at 7. I think I can grow that number a little, and we should field a respectable team. But oh, man, it's going to be some long cold days on the treadmill this winter.

The race itself should be as nice as a marathon can be. They had about 1,000 finishers last year, the last rolling in at around seven hours, so I should be able to maintain my personal goal of never coming in dead last. And it appears to have been a very well-organized and well-supported race. If you're interested in being a Warrior, drop me an e-mail or a comment on this post! We have great tee shirts.

My first mistake...

2006-08-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm probably going to regret this at some point. I've done reasonably well in staying away from the things in life that are enormous money pits – gambling, "fixer-upper" homes, recreational drugs, and so forth. And fishing – until now.

I called up the Minnesota parks folks this morning, and Katie and Joey and I are headed to Itasca State Park the weekend of September 15. We're going to backpack to Desoto Lake, about five miles away from the main lodge. It sounds beautiful – only two campsites are on this lake.

I googled the lake, and found a blog that said this: "We camped at the DeSoto lake, which had the clearest water I've ever seen. Chris brought his fishing rod, and caught a large-mouthed bass."

Oh, man! I could go fishing there!

I've had a few false starts on the fishing thing. It never was part of my upbringing -- my dad has some unexplained and possibly unexplainable aversion to fish in general and fishing in particular. I didn't even eat much fish until I went away to college.

I became interested in the sport about two years ago – I'm intrigued by the idea of catching my own meals when out in the wilderness. Jen's folks kindly bought me a few books and videos on how to do it right. But I haven't really been in the right place at the right time since then.

But next month, I will be! So I headed over to Scheel's, the enormous sporting-goods store in town that has absolutely amazing fishing and hunting sections. (It also has a full-sized Ferris wheel in the middle of the main part of the store – the whole enterprise will be good for another entry another day.) They would have been happy to sell me rods for hundreds of dollars, and reels that look like they've been forged with lasers. But hardly any of their rods broke down small enough to strap onto a backpack, and I was kind of intimidated by the whole setup, and I left without buying anything.

So tonight I headed over to every cheap sportman's friend, Wal-Mart, and found just what I was looking for. I had a gift card from my sister Katie in my pocket, and it ended up paying for a serious chunk of the 2-piece rod (one piece of which is pictured above), fileting knife, and fishing tackle that I bought. Thanks, Katie! (On the other hand, I suppose it's kind of like paying for someone's first rock of crack – they're thankful that day, but end up regretting the whole thing later.)

I need to check the state regulations, but I think I can eat any fish I catch when we're at Itasca. I'm certain Joey and Katie will be horrified, but we'll have plenty of macaroni and cheese for them to eat (I'd be willing to bet that I'll be eating mac & cheese that night as well...).

It looks like Lake DeSoto has panfish (a term, I learned today, that refers to a bunch of types of small fish that tend to be caught by guys with rods and reels, and the fish can be cooked up in a frying pan); if any Fargoing readers know anything at all about fishing for such beasts and would like to share a little of what they know, please feel free to leave a comment.

[And for the record, the title of this post doesn't refer to "my first mistake" ever – it's my first of two big ones this weekend. It's also a small play on a cool Lyle Lovett song title, "Her First Mistake." A report on mistake number two is coming up...]

Take me out...

2006-08-26T23:44:00.000-05:00

We had a very nice time at the ballpark tonight, catching the next-to-last regular season home game of the beloved Fargo-Moorhead Red Hawks. Newman Outdoor Field is just south of the airport, on the North Dakota State University campus, and adjacent to the Fargodome where, sadly, the Dixie Chicks did not play tonight.

I'd been hoping to make a Red Hawks game ever since we received their schedule tucked into the welcome packet of information the courthouse library sent to all new clerks just before we moved to town.

We were given a ride from the parking lot by a kindly usher in his GEM electric car (right). GEM is a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler, and it turns out they build their vehicles right here in Fargo.

The game was sold out, with standing-room-only seats available for $3.00. We actually ended up sitting on a very comfortable and immaculate stretch of concrete on the concourse down the first-base line, with a terrific view and a good, if unrealized, possibility of catching a foul ball.

One of the cool features of the park is its hand-operated scoreboard, complete with hand-updated scores from other games. The Miller Lite scoreboard girl introduced herself to the crowd while I was buying hot dogs, and then took up her perch in left field:

Meanwhile, I was having a very good time buying dinner. I was very pleased to see how inexpensive the hot dogs were ($1.50) until I noticed the price of the full kids' meal – dog, chips, and small drink ($2.00). Two dollars! Two footlong dogs for Jen and me were $2.50 (plain) and $3.50 (with chili and cheese). Giant beers were $4.50 apiece. Not a lot has been cheap in Fargo, but this evening was.

Jen was aghast later that I brought her what she ordered – a hot dog – instead of knowing instinctively that she would want the Wisconsin cheese soup ($3.00) they also had on the menu.

Newman Outdoor Field is about 10 years old, and looks like it opened yesterday, a feat of maintenance I'm beginning to take for granted around here. Though it felt a lot smaller than our hometown Frederick Keys' Harry Grove Stadium, Newman's capacity, at 4,500, is only 900 less (and actually scored a better grade than Frederick from BallParkReviews.com...).

Oh, yes, we dropped the game 4-3 to the hated Edmonton Cracker-Cats, a team we whipped soundly as recently as last night (5-0). We'll get 'em tomorrow.

Potato Days!

2006-08-25T22:01:00.000-05:00

Barnesville, Minn., estimated population of 2,295, lies about 30 miles east of Fargo along I-94. Their annual big festival is Potato Days, and it's today and tomorrow. Jen's been looking forward to this for quite some time. When she and I married sixteen years ago, I was given a variety of potato mashers by various members of her family, with the instruction that mashed potatoes were pretty much all she needed to be a happy woman.

We went this afternoon, because two top events were being held tonight – the french-fry giveaway and, more importantly, mashed potato wrestling (right). Some show called "Odd America" was taping at the beginning, and they sent two of their guys into the ring to wrestle some Minnesota guys. The general tone was closer to pro wrestling than Olympic wrestling. For some odd reason, most of the matchups were husband vs. wife, or boyfriend vs. girlfriend (though the two pictured are local high-school female softball players...).

The web site of the festival takes pains to point out that it's not real mashed potatoes: "Actually, it is the floor sweepings from a plant, which are not edible, or outdated flakes that are no longer saleable. No food is being wasted, as the leftover potato mixture is fed to local cattle." I'm actually kind of glad they told us that – Jen mentioned it as we were driving there, and I, having not seen it before, was relieved – it seemed out of character for farmers to just toss that much food in a ring.

We also took a relaxing hayride on a tour of historic Barnesville. We saw many of Barnesville's oldest homes, churches converted into homes, and Blue Eagle Lake, constructed during the Depression by WPA workers and so named after the blue eagle in the National Recovery Administration logo (right). Kind of touching, really – I have difficulty imagining a place in America nowadays that would choose to name something like that after a federal agency.

The free "French Fry Feed" was also good, though just before they started handing them out, a cloud of flying ants descended on downtown Barnesville. And you know how much the kids love bugs. As we stood in line, the five of us swatted bugs off each other and shared a delicious potato sausage wrapped in lefse, as if it were a burrito. We left pretty soon after that. Did I mention that the kids hate bugs?

Skeeters

2006-08-23T08:16:00.000-05:00

Something we've apparently missed out on this Fargo summer is the swarm of giant mosquitoes that usually descends on the region. The spring was so dry that the eggs just didn't get laid, and we're reaping a tiny harvest of them now, which makes going outside these days just about perfect. The Forum runs a little box every day on page 2 (right), the "Skeeter Meter," which has limped along at one skeeter all summer long. I'm not sure how high the Meter gets, but we seem to be in no danger of topping out this year.

Nothing comes without a price, however. What's bad for mosquitoes is good for wasps. The northern part of town is infested with them. Woodpeckers drill holes into wood, and then the wasps move in. Since all we have here on the south end of town is drought-stunted corn, instead of trees, we seem to be immune to these pests.

The only bug really on our minds these days is crickets. They seem to like our garage, and like sneaking into the house whenever the kids leave a door open. Jen has a surprisingly tender heart toward them when summoned for removal duty. She shoos them onto a baking sheet now dedicated to the purpose, and carries them out the front door. I whap 'em good with the sheet.

The kids absolutely detest the crickets. They seem to only live in the lower level, where the kids' rooms are. Ellie crawled into our bed at 6:30 this morning, crying that one was in her room – she can spot them from across the house. Sadly, though Indy was game to eat spiders on command back in Rockville, we can't get her to eat the crickets. I don't understand it – Wired reports that if you "sauté them with a little olive oil and some spices[,] they are surprisingly edible, with a nice crunch and a subtle nut flavor."

End of Summer: Aug. 19.

2006-08-19T21:15:00.000-05:00

We headed to the city's downtown pool today – it's the last weekend it's open. The pool was surprisingly empty; you'da thought a lot more people would see out the outdoor swimming season; you'da been wrong.

Katie and Joey each took a jump off the high dive, a brand-new experience! Katie went first, which really surprised me; it's not really her thing. Joey's following her didn't surprise me one bit – if Katie jumped off a cliff, Joey would be next up just to show he could do it also. They were both very brave.

Ellie decided to dry off on the only spot she could find that was sufficiently warm – Jen:

Happy Man Dept.

2006-08-18T08:16:00.000-05:00

Hotdish for dinner on Wednesday, hotdish for lunch on Thursday, and hotdish again for lunch today. Yum.

The vial of red liquid you see there is extra-spicy buffalo wing sauce, which makes it even tastier.