Last fall, we paid to get half of our house waterproofed. The goal was to prevent minor seepage that consistently occurred along that side of the house ( Read more... )

I celebrated 16 years in my house by paying off the mortgage. To my surprise, if you look at all the places I have lived, my house is now the one that I've lived in the longest.

In second place is my primary childhood home in North Dakota, which my parents moved out of in 2018 after just shy of 34 years of residence. I personally lived there ( Read more... )

The first memory I have of paying attention to professional sports was in the fourth grade. I've read that most people become sports fans because of their parents, but my baseball obsession certainly did not come from my parents. My father was happy to play catch with me in the backyard, but that's as far as his interest in baseball went, and that ( Read more... )

My family moved into our house in Thompson, North Dakota back in November 1984. Yesterday, the movers packed up the relatively few things that remained after my parents spent the better part of half a decade purging their unneeded possessions. Their house is on the market, but hasn't been sold yet. A neighbor's teenage sons have been contracted to ( Read more... )

The big chocolate shop near my hometown in North Dakota is a old family store called Widman's. I don't honestly remember getting chocolate from there with any frequency when I was a kid, but after college when I went home there was often a package of their signature item, Chippers around for dessert. Chippers are chocolate covered potato chips, and ( Read more... )

I landed in North Dakota on Thursday. It was a beautiful summer evening, warm and comfortable, with a gorgeous sunset. On a day like this, I will think things like "I should move back to North Dakota ( Read more... )

So back when I was a kid in North Dakota, there was a group that often performed at various high school events, usually things like the state basketball tournament or the like. The group's performance was very simple. There would be 52 kids, each of whom would be carrying a flag pole. 51 of those flag poles had the flags of the 50 states and ( Read more... )

It's really weird and quite enjoyable not being woken up by either an alarm clock or my dog. I spent most of today eating my mom's food (more than makes up for missing Supper Club), drinking ice tea, and generally relaxing. Which is all fine, except that dad & I should have spent some of it packing for the BWCA, since we drive down to Ely tomorrow ( Read more... )

Well, Passover ended tonight. xhollydayx had our first leavened carbs at Dave & Buster's after we donated blood (37 pints and counting; I might be able to get my 5 gallon pin this year). Tomorrow I don't get breakfast because I'm having a fasting cholesterol test done at this mini health fair we are having at work ( Read more... )

and I'm used to ridiculously cold temperatures. Temperatures that never got above freezing December through February were practically the norm, and we usually had a week or two where it never got above 0 degrees F. Fortunately, it was only a two block walk to school ( Read more... )