Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

We have had really bad weather the past two weeks. It started out with 14 inches of snow with tempestuous winds, and now we are dealing with really cold temperatures and wind chills as low as -35. I don’t have such a hard time getting around, although I find I am more fatigued than usual at the end of the day. Husband has a harder time of it, since he has to drive 100 miles north every Tuesday to work on the Fort Berthold Reservation.  The road there is curvy and remote, and fills in easily with snow the minute the wind gets above 20 mph.  The water pipes have all frozen up in the small trailer the tribe provides for him to stay in when he is there.  He has been quite stressed, even when he gets back home, and he is driving me crazy with unnecessary grocery purchases and compulsive baking of rye bread.

I would describe his mood as panicky, and he is even more fussy and particular than usual. He acknowledges how silly he is being.  This is also the time of year when our freezers are all full of this year’s garden produce, and our goal must be to eat out of the freezers so that there is room for more produce next fall. You can see from the photos that we have very little room in the freezers  for more food. I admit that two people do not need to have three freezers (four if you include the freezer that is part of the fridge in the basement. I admit it, we have two fridges, too).  I should add that we gave away pounds and pounds of produce this summer, and we still had too much to put up. The minute we take something out of the freezers, it seems we put more in because we bought bulk ground round, or we baked, or we made too much soup. I refuse to disclose how much butter I bought for Christmas baking. We needn’t discuss that here, but I admit it is substantial. After all, Family Fare had Land O’ Lakes butter on sale for $3.00 a pound!

Husband stored the beets from our garden in coolers packed in sawdust. He decided yesterday that we needed to use the beets, and he wanted to roast them. I love roasted beets, and would be content to eat them, all by themselves, with sour cream and butter. Husband insisted that we had to have them with salmon fillets and russet potatoes. That meant buying salmon. I reminded him we had good sea bass in the freezer, so why buy more fish. He insisted, since that was just how it had to be to fulfill his notion of how to serve the beets. Then he double checked  everything I told him we needed to buy at the store.

When we got to the grocery store, he said that since we had too much cheddar cheese in the fridge, he was going to get some apples so he could have cheese and apples. He insisted they had to be Haralson apples.  There were no Haralson apples to be had, and he wouldn’t consider any other apple. He noticed that the pears looked good, so he decided to get pears, which meant we had to buy Brie, because that is what you are supposed to eat with pears. Now we have too much cheddar as well as Brie. We arrived home with Brie and salmon, and announced he was too tired to cook.  He had microwave popcorn for supper. Then he mixed up a rye sponge, and went to bed.  We’re glad we have a strong marriage.

The high temperatures this week are predicted to range from 4 to -9.  I don’t want to think about what the wind chills will be.  We certainly have enough food to eat. We won’t starve. I just hope the freezers don’t break down.

What’s in your freezer?  

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

Early in November, Husband and I spent a Friday in our church basement making lefse. We were there for about 7 hours rolling and frying. In addition to sore and tired backs and arms, we took away a strange new sense of perfectionism that I hope ends soon.

It is exhausting us.

I am not a perfectionist, not really, especially when it comes to housekeeping and baking. As long as it tastes good and there is nothing for the cats to eat off of the floor, I think I have success. I have learned since the new DSM-5 has come out that people like me,  who chew their nails,  have an official diagnosis of Other Specified Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have to think about that more carefully regarding my own psychological makeup. I don’t know if I accept it yet. I fear that it is true.

Now, the lefse ladies in my church basement are perfectionists! We were set at different stations around the kitchen, and the lefse manager had the nerve to tell me that my first lefse sheet wasn’t thin enough. My standard for lefse thinness is that you can read the words “Bethany Pastry Cloth” through the lefse before you take it off the cloth and fry it. Her standard is that you roll the 1/2 cup of lefse dough into a round that is at least 12 inches in diameter. All the other lefse rollers were doing it, so I swallowed my pride and rolled thinner. I also was put on notice that I was far too splashy with the flour, and that I had better sweep up the flour I got on the floor before someone slipped on it. My lefse didn’t stick as I rolled it out, but no one had as much flour on the counter, the floor, and themselves as I did.  My critic also complained that the flour on the edges of the lefse was going to make edges lefse hard. Well, we can’t have that now, can we, so she made a point to brush the flour off the fried lefses as they came off the griddle. We rolled almost 700 sheets of lefse that day.

Ever since we had our lefse day, Husband and I have been cleaning the house in strange and finicky ways. We spent the whole day after lefse Friday cleaning out all our kitchen cupboards and cabinets, meticulously wiping down the cabinet fronts and interiors and every spice jar and objects contained therein.  It wasn’t planned. We just started to do it at 6:00 am and didn’t stop until nightfall.  The next week I cleaned the basement carpets with vinegar water, and we washed windows for the first time in two years. All our stray papers and mail got sorted and put away. I have been dusting like a fiend.

I think we caught the Creeping Perfection Virus in the church basement. I am hopeful that it will start waning now that we are doing our Christmas baking, but I still wince every time I touch a cabinet front with floury hands, and everything that comes out of the cabinets gets wiped off before they go back in. I never realized how addicting perfection is. After all, how can you argue that something is too clean?

What symptoms indicate the onset of YOUR Creeping Perfection Virus?  

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

North Dakota doesn’t have a native son who became president. I think the only president who ever lived in North Dakota was Teddy Roosevelt.  We have clasped him to our collective bosom, however, and his only presidential library is due to be built about 4 blocks from my house, on the former rodeo grounds at our local college.  The Theodore Roosevelt Center At Dickinson State University website tells us:

“Theodore Roosevelt established two ranches in the badlands of western North Dakota: one called the Maltese Cross seven miles south of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883) and the other called the Elkhorn, 35 miles north of the village of Medora, North Dakota (1884). Roosevelt never owned a single acre in North Dakota. Like most other ranchers in the badlands, he was a squatter on lands that still belonged to the public domain or the NP Railroad. The Maltese Cross (Chimney Butte) Ranch had already been named by the time he invested in it. He named his second ranch the Elkhorn after he found the horns of two male elk interlocked at the site. The elk had been butting heads in a struggle for primacy when their horns became locked. Unable to extricate themselves, the elk died of starvation. This appealed to Roosevelt, who regarded life as a Darwinian struggle.”

“At the Elkhorn Roosevelt ranched and played cowboy, went on long solo horseback rides, often for many days at a time, and hunted for elk, mule deer, white tail deer, and other quadrupeds. He also grieved for his mother and his first wife Alice, who died together in New York City on Valentine’s Day 1884. In fact, at the Elkhorn TR wrote the only tribute he would ever pen for Alice, who died two days after giving birth to Roosevelt’s first child Alice. He also wrote parts of two of his 35-plus books at the Elkhorn.”

The plan is to rebuild the Elkhorn Ranch house next to the library. For that purpose, large cottonwood logs have been collected from the area, and local ranchers are encouraged to donate logs to rebuild the 60 x 30 foot cabin. A builder from South Dakota has been hired to build the cabin by hand using only tools that were available to Roosevelt’s builders. You can see some of the logs that have already been hauled to the grounds.

It will be quite a job, and I look forward to seeing progress on the cabin when I drive to work each day. The Legislature set aside many millions of dollars to build the library, as long as the TR Center could raise 3 million more. They have a ways to go, but are optimistic that the library and the cabin will both get finished.

If you could design a presidential library for any president, what would you do?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

North Dakota is noted for honest elections and ease of voting.  You don’t need to register, and all you need in order to vote on Election day are one of the following:

• ND Driver’s license
• ND non-driver’s license ID
• Tribal ID

My paternal grandfather told me that he voted for Warren Harding the first time he could vote. He also told me he never forgave himself for that, and voted for Democrats from then on.

Husband will vote before he travels to the reservation on Election Tuesday. I will sneak away from work sometime during the day to vote.  I don’t plan to listen to election results, but will turn on NPR in the morning to hear the results. I won’t be able to stand the suspense.

What are your Election Day plans?  

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

We drove to Minot last Wednesday to attend the Norsk Hostfest and hear Emmylou Harris perform.  We have lived here for 28 years and never once attended the Hostfest. It was quite an experience.

The Hostfest is a celebration of all things Scandinavian, and is a major trade show, community reunion, cultural celebration, and entertainment venue. I counted more than 200 vendors of food and crafts. About 55,000 people attend annually. Tourists  come from the Scandinavian countries to  attend. It has all the kitsch you would expect (hence the Rosemaled toilet seat and the Cream of Lutefisk Soup), really wonderful Scandinavian textiles and arts, comforting food, and music all over the place.

The bigger concerts like that by Emmylou are held in “the Great Hall of the Vikings” which is a hockey arena that also serves to show livestock during the ND State Fair. In the various halls named after Scandinavian capitols are smaller stages  where various groups play traditional and modern music. There is adequate space for those who want to polka. Hardanger fiddlers, Danish folk musicians, Norwegian Country-Western stars, and Meti musicians play in the hallways and staircases. We missed hearing Ragnarokkr,  who bill themselves as Vikings with Guitars. Outdoors are demonstrations of Viking games, crafts, and arts. Many people are in costume. People in troll costumes wander the hallways.

The food is interesting.  You can sign up for a six course dinner prepared by fancy chefs imported from Norway, or else visit the food booths. Most of those are sponsored by local Lutheran churches. You can get potet klub, lutefisk and meatball dinners, lefse, Finnish beef stew,  sandbakkels, and aebelskiver.  There is a lefse making competition that lasts 4 days. Nordic Ware puts on cooking classes. My favorite was the class that taught how to make traditional Viking fare like kale porridge with smoked herring. For some reason, the Germans from Russia were selling Kneophla soup and brats, and there were a couple of places to get baklava and gyros.

Artisans teach classes in making Arctic flutes, making Sami bracelets and rings with spun pewter, felting, knitting, making your own wool using a drop spindle, weaving, and carving a Dala horse.

I suppose this pales in comparison to venues like Ren Fest, but Hostfest has its own charm. It is local and international, sophisticated and silly, all at the same time.  I like that one of the Minot banks had a booth where you could write a cheque for cash even if you were from out of town and had your account at a different bank. I like that people were encouraged to go up to strangers and say “Hi, and where are you from” in the hopes that the stranger was a Mystery Viking who would give you $100  I like that many people have been at every Hostfest  since it started 39 years ago, and many people stay for the entire 4 days. Emmylou was in good voice.  We saw an honest to goodness whooping crane in one of the prairie potholes south of Minot on the trip there. The weather was sunny and warm. It was a good day.

Describe (or invent) a festival that you would go out of your way to attend.   

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

I have had some pretty stressful weeks at work lately, mainly due to the seriousness of some of my cases, and I have neglected to look around me for humor. Humor is an essential component of my self-care.  A conversation with my husband last night provided me with some giggles, and I  wanted to share it.

My husband and I don’t get out much. We seem to be constantly busy with gardens, cooking, or cleaning the house. I work until 7:00 pm three nights a week.. We are tired by the time Friday rolls around, and, quite honestly, we live in a small community where we know lots of uncomfortable truths about many people and/or their relatives. It doesn’t make us the most popular couple in town.

When we meet people and they find out that we are both psychologists, the usual remark is “You two must stay at home and analyze each other all the time”.  Well, we certainly don’t do that. We have lots of conversations, though. I realized last night as we were talking that some of our conversations would probably sound positively bizarre to most folks.

Husband has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He is a deep thinker and has a myriad of interests outside of psychology.  At one point last evening he was talking about “Health care justice and its relation to Constitutional Monarchy” (I think we were talking about the Canadian and British health care systems). He then scampered to the history of political philosophy, described a history of the Second World War he was reading by John Lukacs (not George Lukacs the Marxist, he was careful to point out), and ended the evening with the pronouncement “The French Revolution was not universally blessed”.

Taken out of context, I think this all sounds terribly funny. It also would confirm to many of our town folk that husband and I are more than a little odd. We both had a good laugh last night when I pointed out what egg heads we sounded like. I hope tonight’s conversation can give me the giggles, too. It has been a hard week.

What’s your conversational style?