100 years and counting…
It isn’t easy to stay in business for 100 years, especially given that in the past century, any business to survive that long had to endure the Great Depression in the 1930s. But there are two businesses that have daily impact on many North Dakota residents and both businesses are radio stations. One of them […]
Norsk Høstfest
MINOT–It happened while my family was at Logger Fest over the weekend. I was standing to the side of the bouncy-house obstacle course, waiting for my son to come down the final slide, when I heard foreign speech behind me.In another place I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But this is Minot, and visitors […]
She’s Not From Around Here: Trash Christmas
My favorite biannual holiday starts on Monday.That’s right, I’m talking about Trash Christmas.I know a lot of new folks have moved into Minot since the last Trash Christmas, so I thought it only fair to write about it again. (Read my first article on Spring Trash Christmas, here.) Isn’t letting all these newcomers know about […]
Upside Down Under: Honoring an icon…
For the past several days the news has been dominated by the loss of Queen Elizabeth II and rightfully so. She was probably the best known person on the face of the earth. And while some people believe it has been overdone, there are plenty of Americans, plenty of North Dakotans, who have been mourning […]
A View From Our Side: Around Town…
Fall Festival Provides A Great Opportunity It was a nice day on Saturday, a bit cool in the morning, but by afternoon we had partly cloudy skies with a bit of sun and really nice temperatures, and as many people pointed out, no wind!At 9 AM there were well over 130 classic cars lining the […]
Participation and Enthusiasm
Last Monday, I went to the Soggy Doggy Pool Paw-ty at Roosevelt Park Pool. My sons and I found seats on the bleachers to watch dogs jump from diving boards and wade in the kiddie pool. As I sat there, reveling in the wonderous thing it is to be alive and living in Minot, North […]
Harvest and the prairie skyscraper…
Now that harvest is in full swing, a lot of things come to mind, but there is one thing I doubt many people think about and that is the loss of the old, wooden elevators, sometimes called prairie skyscrapers. On Sunday, we made a trip to Bismarck to purchase a lawn mower and went through […]
Continuing to Talk Like A Farmer
A few weeks back we introduced you all to some of the local vocabulary at harvest time. I realize that there are a fair number of Minot AFB personnel that have grown up on a farm the Midwest, but then there are a lot of new Airmen and families, and I just want to make […]
She’s Not From Around Here: NoDak Bar Culture and a Perfect Bar Recipe
“Are you willing to bring a pan of bars for the after-funeral luncheon?”This sentence was written in a now nearly-decade-old email.As I read and reread that first request for bars, I could surmise the term was referring to dessert. What on earth was a pan of bars? I tried to imagine what a funeral luncheon […]
Upside Down Under: Terrific explosion revisited…
Some locals in the Carpio area still talk about an explosion on a nearby farm that happened 100 years ago on Aug. 31.This was no ordinary explosion like you would think. It wasn’t gasoline and it wasn’t spontaneous combustion. This bomb went boom when 500 pounds of steam in a threshing crew boiler caused the […]