Old Lefse, Priceless Memories, Last Patrol

by Dakota Noel

Recently we got a quarter beef and my wife thought it would be a good time to clean out the freezer. Tucked away in a corner, she found a package well and carefully packed by my mom probably nine or ten years ago. It was the last lefse that we had from my parents. The last lefse made in their basement from potatoes grown in their garden: an art they shared with my daughters that Christmas before my dad was diagnosed with cancer, that Chrirstmas before he died.

We thawed the package of lefse in the fridge for a few days and then I was brave enough to try some. It was surprisingly well preserved...a bit dry and a not as tasty as I had remembered, but still tastier than the store-bought lefse we've been eating the last nine years. Besides the taste, it had the consistency and brown-spot pattern that distinguished my parent's product.

The fact it had been so well preserved was in stark contrast to some recent store-bought lefse which got moldy in the unopened plastic package. The mold today also serves as a segway to a story my dad told about his service in WWII.

After graduating from high school, my dad entered the Navy and ultimately ended up on a submarine in the Pacific. The relatives back home in Minnesota wanted to send a piece of home to my dad and had packaged up some lefse. Without refrigeration in the humid tropics, the precious cargo didn't arrive in edible condition, but the thought was appreciated.


My dad joined a submariner's veterines group and for several Memorial Days in the late 1990s, our family trekked to the town they lived in. My dad would put on his submariner hat and jacket and we would go to Memorial Park for a brief ceremony remembering the service of our veterans.

So today I will eat some old lefse in honor of those who are serving today and separated from family as well as in honor of those living and dead who, like my dad, have served our country in times past. Thank you for your service.

Androids and iPads and Kindle! Oh, My!

by Dakota Noel

Quite a bit has been announced and transpired since my last post on the topic. OS 4 for the iPhone and iPad was announced. My iPod Touch is too old to take advantage of the multitasking, but in general it looks like a good upgrade. Steve Jobs also made it explicitely clear that Flash won't be coming to iPhone and iPad any time soon due to its performance and design for keyboard and mouse. Will be interesting to see if Android and others, when they support Flash, benefit from Apple's hard line stand on the subject.

Last week in Moline I got my first hands-on with an iPad and then took my wife to Best Buy on Sunday for a test drive. She is looking for an easier way to do email than booting a PC and using AOL web mail. I think the iPad would fill that role well. I was pleasantly surprised by the on-screen keyboard. I was more effective with it than the keyboards on my Touch and Droid, but then when every-other keystroke isn't a wrong one, that helps. The display was crisp and responsive. Ebooks looked nice. In fact, the bigger screen as a whole was nice. Weight is OK.

So while the temptation to get an iPad is greater than before the hands on, it's not enough to overcome the possibility of a fuller featured, lower cost Android tablet at some point in the next couple of years. It's definitely a "nice to have", but with my current stable of consumer electronics devices, it's not a "need to have".

Road Trip

I made my first Fargo to Moline road trip of the summer with a couple days in Des Moines. It was also the first outing in a while for Mavis, my Garmin personal navigation assistant. I reactivated my Audible audio book account and got a couple Patrick Lencioni books for the drive: Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Both were in his engaging fable style and very edifying to pass the miles.

Support for Audible is still lacking on Android but not iPhone. It was just announced that Kindle is coming to Android this summer, so maybe I'll need to get some additional Kindle books to supplement my paper-based summer reading. I've got plenty of paper to get through. I think Amazon has played the eReader situation well by not restricting Kindle books to the Kindle reader, but supporting a variety of platforms.

Bringing Mavis on a road trip is an invitiation to adventure. An invitation I took up on the Worthington MN to Des Moines segment when I was told to exit I-90 shortly out of Worthington and head south on MN-86. I succombed and confirmed that Mavis doesn't know anything about stop light delays in Spencer, Iowa or any other town. I would have been better off taking I-90 and I-35 as planned. The cross country route did allow me to see white cap waves on lake Okiboji on a cold, grey, windy day.

I also got an adventure when I directed Mavis to guide me to Panera Bread in Coralville, Iowa. Instead of the eatery at the Coral Ridge Mall, I was taken through parts of Iowa City I had never seen to the Panera at the Sycamore Mall. This time I wasn't late for a meeting and didn't mind the extra sights.

Wired

Since I knew I was going to be at least an hour late for my Des Moines meeting, I prepped to call in from the road. Last weekend I did some hurried research on Bluetooth speakers and headsets only to conclude that wired earbuds were already in hand and would probably work better than the wireless version. I was not disappointed. Same was true of listening to audio books on Mavis: wired beat out the FM transmitter (hard to find an empty channel) and the built-in speaker. My Mazda 5 doesn't support the preferred audio input jack or cassette adapter to the vehicle sound system.

In fact, I am so enamoured by the crytsal claity of wire that I recently bought a wired speakerphone for my early morning calls to India. I was tired of the wireless handsets that sound like a bowl of Rice Crispies on steroids in the crowded 2.4 GHz Digital Den. I suppose the next step of regression beyond wireless to wired is to vacuum tubes.

Oh, Sweet April! Where Art Thou?

April 2010 was the nicest April I can remember. That should be the case since it was the warmest April in fargo since 1881. We had sunny warm (60s and 70s) afternoons which made for great lunchtime walks and wonderful evenings on the patio. Warm, sunny, little wind, no mosquitos: life doesn't get much better in this northern town.

Then the last couple days of the month it got cool and rainy...about an inch of rain. And we've had rain, it seems, every day since. The winds have been stronger and the temp has dropped. Today it was rainy and in the upper 30s. At least we've avoided the snow of central and western North Dakota.

Assuming we don't get snow tonight or tomorrow, we'll continue towards our record of a no measureable snow spring (March, April, May). The first time that would have happened since record keeping started.April was only the seventh April since records were started in 1885.

I really liked my April 2010 and I want her back.