I've got dogs, and I'm not afraid to use them...

The end of this post made me laugh, because I can so see myself doing the same thing. In fact, I did something similar last March. At least, I think it was March because there was still snow on the ground.

Hym got up early to go to work. His shift usually starts at 5 AM, and I heard him get up and then I fell back asleep. I woke up again a few minutes later because I heard him talking on the phone about, two guys...yes, they're across the street...one is yelling...I don't know...our address is..., etc. I realized he was on the phone with the cops, and then I heard him go back downstairs.

I laid there for a few minutes in a semi-alert fog, but figured if it was anything serious he would wake me up. I heard the garage door open and close, and I assumed he had left for work. But now I couldn't sleep. I got up and looked out of the bedroom window that faces our street, and saw that there were two guys across the street and one of them was yelling at the other, who was on the ground. In the snow. Knowing that the police had already been called, I laid back down and waited. Frankly, I was kind of shocked that he had left for work with some sort of situation going on this close to our home.

As I lay there in the dark, I heard a sound come from one of my dogs. We keep them downstairs behind a gate at night because one of them is the kind of dog who likes to get into shit just because she can. Now, I am accustomed to a whole host of sounds from my dogs, but this particular growl from a particular dog freaked me out. I got up and ran down the stairs, and all three of my dogs were standing at the glass door in the dining room. Growling. Not barking, which is their default noise,  but growling those kinds of growls that get under your skin.

A smarter person would have not moved towards the door. I, however, went to the glass door and looked outside. I could see a light to my right. I didn't even have time to process what was going on, but figured it was either a cop or not-a-cop, and if it was not-a-cop, I was turning the dogs loose. I did what any sane, responsible, person would do--I opened the door, with the dogs behind me, and said, WHAT THE FUCK?

I didn't say who's there? or get out of my yard or I have big dogs and I'm not afraid to use them. I said, WHAT THE FUCK? 

The answer was, Police officer ma'am. Please close the door and go back inside. I'm sure he was pleased that I was precariously holding back three large dogs with my foot.

They had a guy, in my back yard, cuffed. Before I had a chance to close the door, the other cop said, wait, do you have a gate?

Yes, but it's locked and I don't remember the combination. Let me call my husband. 

While I was looking for my phone, I heard the garage door open. I went outside, and Hym was there. I said we need to open the gate. 

He'd been there the whole time and had already talked to the cops in the front and was opening the garage door to the backyard to bring the guy through that way.

Here's what happened. Hym was getting ready to leave for work, and he sees these two guys across the street. One is on the ground, and the other is yelling at him to get up. He called the cops. Then he went ahead and pulled his car out of the driveway, and parked at the end of the street to watch what was going on. He hadn't left for work after all. That's what I get for doubting him.

When the cops showed up, the guy who was standing tried to flee. He hopped my back fence. When we told the neighbors this story, they all said, oh, it's too bad Shotu wasn't in your backyard. Shotu is the dog who was making that sound. He is a chow. He is a big fluffy sweetheart to those who know him, but I wouldn't try to flee into his territory.

Turns out that the guys had wallets and stuff from a few streets over. They'd robbed a few houses. There was a third guy, but he had already disappeared by the time Hym saw the other two outside. The guy who was on the ground apparently passed out drunk, but then had to be taken to the hospital because his friend had beaten on him trying to wake him up.

There were cops on our street for the next two hours combing the neighborhood for clues about the third guy and/or stuff that had been stolen from other houses. None of the neighbors even woke up! The police were incredibly thorough. Of course, they probably didn't have anything better to do on a Sunday morning in Grand Forks, ND.

After the fact, I wondered, what the hell was I thinking opening the door? What if that had been a really bad person on the other side?

The point is, I wasn't thinking. I wanted to know who the hell was in my yard. I was used to this kind of tomfoolery in Phoenix, but I would have never opened the door like that. Here, it was so out of the ordinary that I was just plain pissed off that someone would have the audacity to hop my fence. Plus, I have three big dogs. I feel safe with dogs, and am sure that at least one of them could be a badass if necessary. Dogs will fight for the ones they love. It's their most admirable quality. I can't imagine living without one.

So I completely understand where Mani was coming from, and I laughed out loud even though I'm not sure it was meant to be funny. I think we may have the same kind of temper...and apparently we don't like our sleep disturbed by assholes!

Core

Air cutting through me,
blades of spectral ice
slice my soul to bone.

Winter

Dressed in their space suits,
toddlers in the snow.

Stumbling, falling, laughing, crying--
Winter has arrived.

Food on Your Face

When winter started sneaking up on us this year, my hands suffered badly. No matter how many times I put on lotion, they still end up red and speckled and cracked. I mentioned this to my Introduction to Psychology course, with a request for suggestions on how to win the battle between my hands and the cruel winter air (and I know, it would help if I actually wore my gloves all the time, but the Vitamin D has to leak in SOMEWHERE).

A student emailed me today with a few questions about our most recent study guide, and she also sent me a link to Crunchy Betty. I think I am in love. Here is a post about dry hands, and by golly, it gives me hope! She's got skin care suggestions, household cleaning suggestions, etc. I especially love the subtitle of the site: You've Got Food on Your Face.

This recent post made me laugh, in addition to providing some general advice to live your life by:

Sometimes You Have to Pee In the Snow, Just to See What Happens.

Indeed.

I want to meet Betty some day.

Stranger in a Plains Land ~ 3

Of all the things I have discovered here, the magic of frozen fog is my favorite.

As I was leaving my office one evening last winter, it was foggy, but the temperature was well below freezing. It was probably -20 degrees Fahrenheit. As the fog hit my face, it felt like teeny tiny ice petals brushing across my skin. The fog was frozen. It was such a strange sensation. The next morning was my initiation to the magic of frost.

The picture above was taken at my favorite playground in town--Sherlock Playground. It's all wood and castle-like. Very Scandinavian.

A friend of mine told me that what you see in these pictures is hoar frost, but I think some of it may actually be rime frost.

I am no meteorologist--though I am obsessed with weather--so I can't reliably tell the difference in types of frost. I do know that it's beautiful.

I can tolerate day after day of freezing weather to be rewarded with this. These pictures were all taken last year, but we had a pretty good frost day a few days ago. I just couldn't find my camera...

When the frost visited us a few days ago, I told the boy that the frost faerie had painted all the trees.

He asked, where did she go? Can we see her?

I said she was very tiny and maybe even invisible and probably very tired from all the frosting she had done.

I said we should be thankful that she visited us. 

We can add the frost faerie to the other lies I've been delighted to tell him.

Although these pictures are beautiful, they do not do the frost justice. I wish I had a better camera, or better editing skills. I always feel like I'm cheating if I mess with the image too much...

...so I feel compelled to confess that I played around with the color on the picture below. It was actually taken right outside of the Psychology building.

The picture below is one of the trees in our front yard. I think it's some kind of crab apple and the berries stay on through the entire winter. It's nice to have that little splash of color when you are surrounded by winter.

Admittedly, I feel lucky because we get many blue sky days and sunshine. Those clear, sunny days mess with my head because it looks warm and inviting inside, and then when I walk outside, the air screams GOTCHA and laughs.

I'd like to learn how to cook something with this fruit. It makes a terrible mess in the spring.
The berries litter the sidewalks, and then the tree blooms again.

Frost fingers...

Stranger in a Plains Land ~ 2

Here are some more terms I've become familiar with since moving to the Nodak:

Lutefisk ~ "It is said that about half the Norwegians who immigrated to America came in order to escape the hated lutefisk, and the other half came to spread the gospel of lutefisk's wonderfulness." I haven't tried the stuff because I've yet to encounter it. I'd try it if given the "opportunity" to do so.

Dinner vs. Supper ~ Dinner is the meal that you eat in the middle of the day. Supper is what you eat in the early evening. Where I come from, you eat lunch mid-day and dinner in the evening. My mother is from the South, so I knew these meals were called dinner and supper in the South, but didn't realize it applied to the Midwest as well.

Church Supper ~ increasingly less common, sadly, from what I hear. Here's a nice article from the 1940s. I might be an atheist, but I'm still a big fan bringing big groups of people together, especially over food.

Lefse ~ It's like a potato tortilla. In fact, I prefer to use these as tortillas rather than the things that pass as tortillas, but they are spendy--about $1 each. I'm going to have to learn to make tortillas. I think if I could do that, lefse would soon follow.

Hotdish ~ Hotdish is pretty much anything that you mix in an oven-safe dish and bake. It typically contains some kind of starchy food, some kind of protein, some kind of vegetable, and it's mixed together with a sauce, i.e. canned soup.

What's that you say? You say that the thing I have described is called a casserole? Oh no--you are mistaken. A casserole is the dish you cook stuff in. Hotdish is the food in the dish. 

The most ubiquitous of the hotdishes (or at least the one I keep hearing about) is tater tot hotdish. Mmmm. You had me at tater tots.

Stranger in a Plains Land ~ 1

I'm going to do a series of posts about terms, foods, and objects I had either never heard of or knew nothing about prior to moving to North Dakota. Here's the first few:

Uff da ~ All purpose expression of Norwegian origin. Can be used as a substitute for any number of words that I am no longer allowed to say because my son will repeat them at school.

Round bacon ~ Also known as cottage bacon. The only bacon I'd ever known as "bacon" is the super-fatty strips of stuff that comes in plastic packages in the grocery store. That bacon comes from pork belly. I discovered round bacon at my local butcher shop. Round bacon is made from pork shoulder and is far more lean.  It is not the same thing as Canadian bacon, despite our proximity to the border. Round bacon is what ham slices wish they could be. It's like the other bacon, but better, because it's easier to cook, slightly healthier, and is perfectly sized for BLT sandwiches

Buffalo berries ~ According to Lewis and Clark: "A berry resembling a currant except double the size" with fruit that was "deliciously flavored and makes delightful tarts". I have not had the pleasure of eating Buffalo berries fresh, but I have tasted jam and wine made from this fruit.

Choke cherries ~ Choke cherry is the official fruit of North Dakota (as of 2007)! I think I might have heard of these before, but I'd never tasted them. I had the, ahem, opportunity to taste a "ripe" chokecherry right off of the bush last summer. It was sweet, but then it lived up to its name. It was the most astringent thing I have ever put in my mouth and the pucker response in my throat made it feel like my throat was closing off. Hence the "choke" part of the name. It was worth the experience for sure, but in the future I'll stick to things like chokecherry wine, syrup, and jam.

How I (didn't really) learn to stop worrying and love the bomb (in a creepy, dark, fetish kind of way)

I was fascinated with atomic bombs as a child. Terrified and fascinated. When I was 8, I wanted to write a letter to the President to express my concerns. My mother convinced me to write a letter about some national scholars program, but I wasn't happy about it.

I watched movies about the bomb. I watched news footage from WWII about the bomb. I listened to audio documentaries about the bomb.

Did anyone else see the movie Nightbreaker? I LOVED IT. I wish it were available on DVD because I just can't bring myself to order VHS tapes that may or may not work. After I (repeatedly) watched that movie, I had a whole new fascination with nuclear testing and the conspiracies lies and abuses associated with it. I dreamed about nuclear testing--that I was hiding, running, whatever. These weren't nightmares. I wasn't scared, just fascinated. Eerily fascinated. I was kind of a strange girl anyway--I frequently had dreams of being in wars, war games, war simulations, etc.

I still can't look away from footage of bombs, even though it makes me queasy. All of that RAW POWER. We did that. Humans did that. It's amazing. Of course it's horrifying. Of course its an abomination. Of course its blasphemy against nature. But it's also unbelievable. We split nature in two. Wow.

My (step) Grandpa was a physicist back in the day and worked with nuclear stuff. I'm not sure exactly what he researched and if he was a part of all the testing that went on. I don't know if the things he knew were things he learned from being directly involved or things he learned from being a voracious reader. He once told me that pigs were used for nuclear tests because their organ structure was similar to ours and their skin, in particular, is remarkably similar. He told me about tests where they would put pigs in mailboxes and different types of shelters and set off bombs. For years, I thought maybe he was exaggerating or just plain crazy (you never could tell with him). Now, I can read about it on Wikipedia or elsewhere. I found this video online, which is fascinating, but not for the faint of heart. This quote is from a website about nuclear testing in Nevada:

"Experiments on mice, dogs, and other animals were conducted during atmospheric testing. The animals were subjected to the atomic blasts and then analyzed by biologists, veterinarians, and medical personnel. In 1957, for the Plumbbob series, pens were built near the Mercury highway to keep 1,200 swine that would be used for various experiments. They had been specially bred due to the similarities in pig and human physiology. For some experiments, pigs were outfitted in various types of clothing material, including military uniforms. For the thirty-seven-kiloton Priscilla test on June 24, 1957, more than seven hundred anesthetized pigs were placed in stations at various distances from ground zero to better understand the effects of atomic weapons on human beings."

I wish Grandpa were alive today so I could ask him more questions. At the time, I didn't know what else to ask. Today, I wouldn't know where to stop.


Because of this sordid fascination with evil, I was admittedly excited when I found out that I would be visiting a decommissioned missile alert facility as part of the new faculty bus tour this year. I mean, I was already stoked that my hubbie could come with me this year, but husband + nukes = uberexcitement.

Did you know that at the height of the Cold War, North Dakota was the 3rd largest nuclear power in the world? Or so the tour guide gold us. Russia and the United States (minus North Dakota) were #1 and #2 (though I'm not sure which was first and which was second) and then there was the state of North Dakota.

North Dakota had two missile fields with 150 missiles in each. If I remember correctly, each of the fields contained 15 missile alert facilities, so that each alert facility controlled 10 missiles. We toured the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility (now named the Ronald Reagan Minutemen Missile Site). It was part of the Grand Forks Missile Field. Do you remember the movie War Games? Grand Forks was one of the first targets in the game. Um, yeah. That's where I live now. Voted one of the best places to raise your kids. Minus the nukes of course. Why so many nukes in the Nodak? I have heard a few different reasons. First of all, the big target when these silos were built was Russia, and the shortest distance to many Russian cities was over the arctic circle. Second, since it's landlocked, it could be harder for weapons to be stolen, or accessed in the first place. Third, land was cheap and the population scarce, so there were less people to object to having nukes in their backyard. The fourth reason seems to be simple math. The current population of the entire state is 646,850. This means less collateral damage. If the missile fields were attacked, fewer people would be killed than if the fields were located elsewhere.

The facility was closed as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991, and then opened a few years later for tours. Touring the facility was simultaneously anti-climatic and overwhelming. It really looked like the props that would be used in a 70's sci-fi movie, but it was real. I actually have a picture of myself in that chair, but I got in trouble for it. Turns out, you're not supposed to sit there, and I wasn't listening when the tour guide told us that. I was too busy taking pictures and tripping out. She could have confiscated my camera, but instead made me promise not to post it online somewhere. I took a lot of pictures that I will upload another time.

The Minot AFB Minuteman Missile Field is still active. It is composed of 150 Minutemen III missiles. Each of these missile has three warheads, hence the III as part of the name. From Wikipedia, "The current Minuteman force consists of 450 Minuteman III missiles^[1] in missile silos around F.E. Warren AFB, Wyoming; Malmstrom AFB, Montana; and Minot AFB, North Dakota." That means that there are 450 nuclear warheads in North Dakota, and 1350 warheads total among these three states. I don't know what else to say after that.