The third and final of my Leaving Northfield posts, this one was easily the toughest to write.  It's easy to list off five things to eat - who can't do something like that off the top of their head?  But this, this I found hard; lots of things happened, lots of perspectives have been shared, lots of people have been involved.  But June 30 (today) is the last day in my rental contract, and after this I become an Outsider, neither a Townie nor a Gownie.  I am become Katherine Kersten and it chews me up inside.

Continuing my set of departure posts from yesterday, here are The Five Best Foods in Northfield, my adopted hometown...

My eight years of living in Northfield is coming to an end. Before I go, I'd like to document a handful of things about my adopted hometown. First up: My five favorite places in Northfield...

I got a letter today from a good friend of mine, Tim Hardy.  Tim just returned from a trip to the Gunflint Trail way up in northern MN.  His letter was so awesome that I asked his permission to reprint it here...

From last weekend—we were heading back from Gunflint lake along the Canadian border up by Grand Marais.  It’s very rare to see a moose, this was amazing.  There was a big swamp along side the highway.  I looked, here was a big moose eating and standing in the swamp.  I cranked the wheel and pulled the truck over and we started taking pictures.  After a few pictures, the moose started calling---there was another cow nearby.  Shortely after that I saw a baby mooose come down, swim across the swamp, and over to it’s mother.  It was pretty amazing to see three moose like  that.

I checked with the locals, apparently you don’t see the bulls hang out with the cows & calves after mating season.   My guess is the bull moose is out fishing or taking in a Twins game.

And the pictures...

Many thanks again to Tim Hardy for the pix.

Many thanks to my cousin Jo for the heads-up.

Author's Note: This is a really old article that I'm bringing back to life for a different project. If you've read this before, ignore.

I've outgrown the "Gotta have that thing on TV!" syndrome that you have as a kid.  Call me jaded, but I simply believe almost nothing that I see on television any more.  "Local News" is an abomination, I don't really need the nifty new Zocor/Valtrex/Ambien (ZoVaxAm) triple pill, and the women on Deal or No Deal have so much plastic in them that they could be recycled into some sort of meta-ironic credit card.

That being said, the only thing that I can recall seeing on TV and going "HULK MUST HAVE" in the past decade is that speckled epoxy garage floor coating.  How boring am I?  Yeah, I don't know why, but when I first saw it demoed it was as if cupid sprang out of the TV and shot me in the cement portion of my heart that I wasn't aware of before.

And this lead to that pining heartbreak we're all so familiar with.  While I did have that two components that one needs (a garage, $50), the garage was being used as... well, as a garage.  And as such, it had a car, bikes, a lawn mower, tools, various half-inflated basketballs, an old set of lawn jarts, and the like.  There were corners of the garage that I hadn't seen since we moved in in 2000.  Furthermore I was married, which meant that I couldn't simply turn the garage inside out and dump everything on the lawn for a week.  ("Hon, the reason you have to park a half block away is that the driveway is filled with the snowblower, winter shovels, and the broken kiddie pool that I've promised to fix for two years now so that I can put some speckled paint on the garage floor.  Also, it will take one week.  Hon?  Where are you going?")

So I spent several years mooning over the boxes in the hardware store.  I have this abject fear that products I want will be discontinued before I get a chance to try them.  And so every so often I'd wander over and confirm that yes, the boxes were still there.  I'd button hole the employees with insane badgering questions - "You're going to restock the Qwik-Crete Slate Gray Epoxy Dura-Coat Finish 001-425 soon, right?  Right??!"

And then we bought a different house.  And the skies cleared, the sun came out, and God came down and gave me a high-five.  People would ask me what I liked about the new house and I'd say "The unfinished cement floor in the garage."  The time had come.

It's good that we've got a few weeks before we move in because this sh*t is involved, boy-o. Here are the steps to a proper epoxy-ied floor:

1. Sweep out the garage completely.
2. Wet floor.
3. Apply de-greaser/etching compound.  Vicious, nasty stuff.
4. Scrub compound in.
5. Wash compound out.
6. Allow this to dry for 24 hours.
7. Re-sweep garage.  Nature abhors a swept floor.
8. Mix two part epoxy compound.  Stir for at least three minutes.
9. Wait 30 minutes for some sort of mystery chemical reaction to happen in the paint can.
10. Paranoia sets in as I resweep yet again.  How many leaves can blow into a garage in thirty minutes?  Answer: one million.
11. Clock starts ticking.  I've got 2 1/2 hours to apply the paint before... well, it doesn't say.  It only says you've got 2 1/2 hours.  Considering that the paint can is boiling like a witches' cauldron I don't doubt it.
12. Paint garage floor.
13. Sprinkle those little color flakes.  Worry about randomness.
14. Let dry for three days.

So I'm currently at day 1 of step 14.  The work is done, now I just need to summon the patience to do nothing for another 48 hours.  It's not easy.  But it's done.  I couldn't be happier.

Time to start watching commercials again.  I'll be looking for my project for 2014.

2008-05-16 -- (Now featured on Graffletopia)

About

Anyone who knows me knows I have a thing for playing cards. I’ve been a junkie since I can remember. I’ve had relatives pull me aside and recount stories of me forcing them to play “Card Sharks” when I was 4 or 5. After that it’s been years of cribbage, smear, speed, whist, hearts, spades, canasta, hockey, poker, you name it. Naturally, this bleeds over into my other great passion, computers. I’ve created a stencil for OmniGraffle with drag-able, drop-able cards.

Screenshots

Here’s what the stencil looks like: !http://static.flickr.com/19/100670617_008fa361cf_m.jpg!

…And here it is ‘in action’… !http://static.flickr.com/31/100670616_85f025e967_m.jpg!

Download

• Playing_Cards.zip

After that…

Shuffle up and deal, bro.

If you are experiencing 'Page Not Found' errors in Drupal, consider checking for existing non-drupal subfolders on your domain with the same name.

Found this after creating an 'admin' folder on a site and then getting letters as to why site.com/admin has stopped working in Drupal. Took me a week to put one and one together.

You see that blurry house with the blue marker in the driveway?

That's our new place:

Ahh, I get so few opportunities to use the HTML <address> tags.

Stop by and visit some day. We're still in the townhome until sometime in June.