Category: Minnesota

Ten Signs the School Year Is Nigh

Ten signs that the start of the school year is nigh:

  1. Big and small clusters of athletes are wandering between the sports facilities, the dining hall, and the dorms.
  2. The faculty members who have been contemplating those distant September grant-proposal deadlines are now either fishing or cutting bait.
  3. The squirrels are aggressively securing every acorn they can.
  4. The grounds crews are working at 125% speed getting everything ready for the arrival of the new students and their donors parents.
  5. Staff on part-year contracts are suddenly back in our midsts.
  6. The hungry and the thirsty wander past the snack bar all afternoon, reflecting on the injustice of its closing just after lunch each afternoon.
  7. Rather than getting a dozen email messages on a busy summer day, I’m getting that many in a busy hour.
  8. Colossal stacks of textbooks are making the lower level of the bookstore into a pyromaniac’s dream.
  9. I’m obsessively checking and re-checking the dates on which we’re supposed to be notified about the results of springtime grant submissions.
  10. The oaks are slowly losing their lustrous green.

Tour de Fagen

One ride, which I’m calling the Tour de Fagen (map), accounts for a good chunk of my recent cycling mileage. Covering 16 miles, mostly on hilly gravel roads, the ride starts by going straight east of our house – and I mean straight, on a road that’s as plumb as any dreamed by Thomas Jefferson – over some rolling hills and off the pavement. Now gravel but still perfectly straight, the road – 100th Street East – goes down a long, ridiculously sketchy hill (here, looking back at it, way off in the distance)
Looking West up 100th Street East, Northfield, Minnesota

over the line between Rice County line and into Goodhue County, about which I know nothing except that they are good about marking abandoned townsites, as with this sign commemorating the town of Fagen. I have no idea if Steely Dan ever plays here.
Fagen, Minnesota

There, perhaps because it’s now free of the oppressive hands of the Rice County commissioners, the road changes its name to 350th Street, passes some verdant soybean fields
Soybean Irrigation

and starts to bob and weave over some nice ridges, some of which appear (judging by waterlogged roadside signs) to be untouched by human hand.
Warsaw Township Nature Reserve

Warsaw Township Nature Reserve

The road struggles and then finally succeeds in heading south, now as 10th Avenue,
Hayfields on 365th Street, Warsaw Township

and does so pretty much all the way to Iowa.

My rides haven’t gone that far, stopping a few miles on, at the paved east-west highway, Dennison Road, where there is a pretty little farm.
Dennison Road Farm

I’d love to continue south, all the way to the little burg of Kenyon, eleven miles further south and making for a nice 38-mile round trip.

Hooky Ride

Wednesday afternoon, I decided things were quiet enough at home and the weather was good enough outside (read, “very quiet” and “verrrrrrrry nice”) that I could take a long bike ride down to Faribault, partly for the fun of it and partly to have the guys at Milltown Cycles do a minor tuneup on the new bike after its first hundred miles. The tuneup took about half an hour; the rides about 55 minutes each way over some great roads: good pavement, light traffic, excellent scenery.

Lyman “Lake”

Thanks to the rain, Monday morning marked a full week since I last biked through the Arb. Ho hum. Trees, new gravel on the path, nice repair work on the little bridge behind Bell Field, holy cow the lake is empty! Mai Fête Island is now just a lump of lawn in a mud skirt!
Mai Fete Island

Lower Lyman Lake

Turns out, it’s an elaborate erosion-control measure. Tricky, right? No water, no erosion! Actually,

Wednesday, August 12, work began on the Lower Lyman Lake/island shoreline restoration project. The first step was to drain the lake. Then the shoreline will be re-established with erosion control materials, planted, and back filled with soil. We expect to replug the dam and return to full depth of water by the time students arrive on campus.

*whew*

Riding Around

Riding Along

Thanks to the great weather and a relatively open schedule, I managed to do two long rides this weekend. (Long for me, that is.) Both were fantastic fun: tiring, sweaty, scenic, occasionally tough, satisfying. The new Surly bike is acquiring a nice layer of grit, but rides wonderfully, especially on gravel roads. On Saturday, I rode west and north away from town, on flat or gently rolling country roads.
Country Roads

On Sunday, I headed east and south, over some significant rolling terrain toward a notorious hill near the hamlet of Sogn. (It’s supposedly a mile long with a grade of 8% or 9%.) I’ve long wanted to try to climb the hill, but never had the bike for it.
Sogn Valley Climb

Today, I did finish the climb (that is, I rode from the first spray-painted “KoM” line at the bottom to the second one at the crest), though my runners’ legs didn’t like the new challenge. I’m sure I looked more lanterne rouge than polka dot jersey, but I enjoyed it anyhow. I also enjoyed – in a Beavis-and-Butthead way – riding through this place, which isn’t much more than an intersection and a township hall. Heh heh heh.
Wangs, Minnesota

Sinking Ships

For at least a year, this inflatable attention-getter has been moored at a car dealership in Clearwater, Minnesota, a little town along I-94 northwest of the Twin Cities.

The thing is bizarre, both in scale (huge) and in purpose. The stern of the ship reads “Titanic,” and here it is at a car dealership. Is this a joke on people who buy cars here? “We don’t sell lemons, but drive away from icebergs!” Is it a comment on the American auto industry, going to the bottom and taking a lot of people with it? Is it just a funny thing to have in the corner of your car lot? Who knows.
Car Dealer Attention-Getter.

Apostrophe Catastrophes

Since I’m too car-shocked (like shell-shocked, only caused by car travel with children) to blog anything substantial, I’ll follow up last night’s post on Fargo-Moorhead signage atrocities with this photo of the sign at the restaurant where we had a very nice extended-family dinner on Sunday.

To answer the sign’s question, what would be good for me would be better punctuation! But I’ll make do with Julia’s inadvertently apt misspeaking: as she tries to understand the differences between commas and apostrophes, she frequently asks if a particular mark is a “high prepostrophe” or a “low prepostrophe.” This sign is definitely a high prepostrophe.

Fryn' Pan

Fargo-Moorhead Signs’

Fargo-Moorhead has some great crazy signs. Here is some evidence (with more to come later). The theme is “Ways to Misuse Apostrophes or Marks That Look Like Them.”

The marquee for a strip mall on the commercial drag out by Fargo’s big mall.
Fargo Promenade

(Sorry for the bad shot – I took it while the car was stopped at the next light.)

The sign for a copying/printing shop near my in-laws’ place. Would you get your company’s stationery made here?
Kopy Kat, Moorhead

(Again, apology for the bad shot, which I took through the windshield during a rainstorm.)

Made It

Happily, the trip up to Moorhead was nowhere near the low bar set on some previous trips. It wasn’t pleasant, exactly, but – even while continuing their streak of not napping on car trips – the girls did better this time than they’ve ever done before. We went 55 minutes before someone (Vivi, this time) asked if we were at Nonna and Bopppa’s house yet, and it was really only in the last hour (after three stops) that the girls started improvising on the theme of “I want to get out of the car!”

All in all, I give the trip up north a B-, in other words: a solid pass, but lots of improvement is siill possible. Now that we’re here, though, we can get down to the business of some vacation-esque activities like playgrounds and parks and of course celebrating Genevieve’s third birthday on Saturday!

Tunnel of Love

On Saturday, I proposed to the girls that we go to the Arb and walk through the funny little underpass that runs beneath Highway 19 and connects the Upper Arb to the Lower Arb. Much to my surprise, my two hikers agreed – their interest in taking their (Disney Princess) lanterns and my flashlight along apparently trumping any concerns over the darkness of the tunnel. I expected one or both to balk at actually walking through the tunnel once we actually got to it, but no, they both went right through – holding hands most of the way and even hugging when one stopped to admire the art on the wall. Then they went back and forth a few times.