2009 Year In Review

If you read this blog all year long, you'll find nothing new here, but just in case you haven't caught all of them this year, here's the very condensed 2009 King Year In Review!

Happy Holidays to our Family & Friends!

2009 was another busy year for us!  Our year started and ended in North Dakota where Nathan continues winter work with Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  In between, we visited a combined eighteen states plus the District of Columbia.

Amber continues working for IBM, where she leads teams in the U.S. and China.  She completed her Project Management Professional (PMP) training in May and filed her first patent the same month.  Amber is taking her office on the road and is working remotely full-time as of November.

Nathan worked at Pipestone National Monument over the summer.  The work was both challenging and enlightening.  The site is used today as it was in generations past, for the collection of a sacred stone used for making smoking pipes.  You can learn more about Pipestone and its significance on the web at www.nps.gov/pipe.

Amber spent a long 4th of July weekend in Colorado with her friend Sara, where they visited Rocky Mountain NP, Garden of the Gods, and saw the famous Greeley Stampede rodeo.  Yee haw!

The most fun we had this year was going to the Eastern U.S. to attend Amber’s sister Samantha’s wedding in North Carolina in October.  Along the way, we visited Chicago for a live taping of Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me and got to meet the cast, then headed to Gettysburg NMP, Washington D.C., Shenandoah NP, Blue Ridge Parkway, Appomattox Court House NHS, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania NMP, Moores Creek NB, Great Smoky Mountains NP, and Mammoth Cave NP.  We hiked to the top of the two tallest mountains in Shenandoah, down into the longest cave in the world, and walked the hallowed grounds of Civil War battlefields.  Our favorite hike was to Ramsey Cascades in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In July, Nathan’s mom passed away from complications of multiple myeloma.  She was 53.  Nathan misses her every day and thinks of her often.  We are grateful for the continuing love and support of our friends and families.

Next year, we will be moving to Kansas for at least half of the year.  Nathan was hired for a permanent status job at Fort Larned National Historic Site, a well-preserved fort along the Santa Fe Trail.  We plan to sell our house in Minnesota in 2010.

We wish everyone a happy holiday season and a great 2010.

Amber and Nathan at Ramsey Cascades

Adventures of the Waning Days of Summer

Various people have started to wonder aloud why I haven't posted in three weeks and the answer is I can't keep up! Much has happened since the bat incident, which followed a perfectly fun weekend in Pipestone with my grandparents and parents. We spent a lot of time in Luverne, MN, visiting the Jim Brandenburg Gallery (he's amazing!) and Blue Mounds State Park. The highlight of that visit (besides seeing everyone) was hiking to the Visitor's Center, which is built right into a cliff with a beautiful look-out tower that used to house a writer's study. One whole side of the house is a quartzite wall, and that includes the bathrooms!

The Cliffs at Blue Mounds with some Contemporary Rock Art

The family - minus Grandma who is hiding behind the camera

The next weekend, ten of us headed back out to Split Rock Creek State Park for what promised to be a great camping trip. Good friends, tents, delicious camping food, kayaks, and yes, even a few perfectly legal beverages (if you're outside the park). However, reality hit when we couldn't leave our tents Saturday morning because of the rain. It finally subsided enough for the creation of what was henceforth known as the "party pod", which was my tent plus two giant IBM umbrellas plus four people MAX plus games! I got to introduce everyone to the best game on the planet, Werewolf. This is a psychological game I learned about from my colleague, Dirk Spannaus, in Tanzania. With a group of no less than nine people, you split the crowd secretly into wolves and villagers. The wolves silently kill one villager per round and the villagers discuss amongst themselves, trying to figure out who the wolves are. It's way more fun and interesting than I can make it sound, so if you help me gather up nine people sometime, you can try it out for yourself.

It was nice for everyone to finally go on a tour with Nathan at the park and Jess, Jackie, Amanda, and Danny earned their Junior Ranger Badges (lovely pictures of pipes and wildlife were produced by all)!! Later that night, the rain, thunder, and lightening were so horribly close, I decided to bail and headed toward our dry apartment in Pipestone at 12:30am.

Amanda, Jackie, Jess, & Danny with their Badges

Everyone, including Marie & Kris, had fun taking their pictures with the ranger

And that brings me to this weekend! Friday I went to Madison for lunch with my friend, Jas, who I hadn't seen in 500 years. The day was a PERFECT day to be there. After a two-hour lunch outside on State Street, I wandered around campus and enjoyed some delicious Babcock Hall Ice Cream on the terrace. I really miss that city.

Bascom Hall

I took a trip with my parents up to Horicon Marsh on Saturday. What a spectacular place! The scenery is beautiful and if you're into bird watching this place is heaven. We saw Sandhill Cranes and Egrets among a plethora of other birds. There were also frogs parked every 10 feet on the trail, a muskrat that ran a few feet in front of us, and a pair of River Otters in the marsh.




On our way back, we stopped at an unlikely roadside attraction: the Honey Acres "Honey of a Museum". Complete with a 70's era video that taught us everything about bees and beekeeping, this place was kind of funny, but kind of sad. I guess after visiting so many National Parks, I expect interpretation to be a little more artfully done, but I do admit that I learned something and will probably check for the Honey Acres label when I buy my next jar of honey. You can try out some honey and stare at a working beehive if you can get the little kids out of the way first.


A little preview of what's coming up soon - we've got a two-week vacation planned in October to the East Coast and I'm bringing my laptop to blog. Lucky you.

1 Batty Bat

I woke up at 4:30am Sunday morning to what I thought was a strong wind brushing past the blinds in the Pipestone, MN loft bedroom we're renting for the summer. I didn't think much of it until a minute later with the most monotone expression, Nathan sighed, "There's a bat in here."

My first thought was not one of disgust or horror. In fact, I think bats are pretty cool. No, my first thought was, "great, now we're going to have to get rabies shots". When I was getting my shots for going to Tanzania last year, one of the recommended doses was your first three rabies shots. Recommended, but not mandatory and luckily, Dan, the very cute immunizations nurse at Olmsted Medical Center readily talked me out of getting them. If I had gotten bitten by anything, I could always fly to the nearest Western Hospital (by the way, that was half a continent away in South Africa) and get all of the shots at once. "However", he said, "if you ever wake up with a bat in your room, go and get the shots."

I've never forgotten that and here I am in just that situation. As I'm wondering if he only said that because African bats are more dangerous, I decided I would hide under the comforter. The bedroom has a very low ceiling that curves and the bat, needing a bit more space, was flying about a foot above us. Nathan somehow got up, so I was stuck in the room with the circling bat hoping he could get it to leave so I could come up for air. He didn't do it fast enough because I suddenly felt it brush my head. Then the deafening silence of the lack of constant wing beats that we'd been hearing for the past few minutes. "Nathan!! I think it's near my head!" I decided to move and sure enough, it took off...right off my head!

After several minutes Nathan came back having banished the bat to an attic crawl space closed tight by a munchkin-sized door. Good! Now we can just wait for the bat to die and get it tested for rabies!

I did a little research the next day. Sure enough, even in the United States, if you are in the room with a bat for any period of time where you are not fully conscious, you need to assume the bat has bitten you. It probably hasn't, but bat bites can be small and pain-free, so you may not have noticed those tiny vampire teeth sinking into your neck and you might not see the mark. Only 1% of all bats actually have rabies and there was a very small chance one of us had been bitten. The verdict - if you don't have the bat, go and get your rabies shots within three days. Bummer!

I decided that since I already had to get shots, I had nothing to lose by trying to find the stupid bat and capture it for testing. I went down to the hardware store and bought some thick gloves, then decided that the empty juice pitcher would be the perfect place to imprison the bat. I put on long sleeves, a baseball hat (like that's going to protect me), the gloves, and grabed the pitcher and flashlight.

I winced as I opened up the door - so far so good, no bats flew out. The crawl space was actually quite spacious and recently painted white, so it was easy to find the one tiny flying mouse in the corner sleeping like it should during the day. I got two steps in and decided to call the Pipestone County Sheriff's Office instead.

They sent out a really nice officer, equiped with a net and great resolve. They extract bats from houses all of the time apparently and he fearlessly went into the crawl space and came out with the bat in his hand. I asked him where to take it for testing and he said, "I don't know, we've always just let the bats go!" The internet had scared me too much to let the poor thing go, so we stuck it in an empty gatorade bottle and off he went.

I drove the bat-in-a-bottle to Pipestone National Monument for some help in figuring out what to do. The poor thing was so cute and so very scared - I really felt bad for it. After showing it off to some kids in the Visitor's Center we figured out that the local vet would take it in for testing. We dropped it off.

"Great!" I was thinking all night that the bat would be tested, it wouldn't have rabies, we wouldn't have to get the shots, then the vet could release it from its harrowing journey to meet up with its family once again. Later that night I asked Nathan if he made sure to tell the vet we wanted her to release it when done, Nathan said, "I think they're going to euthanize it." WHAT?! I tried to get him to call the vet and make sure she knew to let it go, but he just laughed at me and asked, "Don't you know what the test for rabies is? I think they need a brain sample."

Again, I consulted the internet and then cried for the next 30 minutes. I can't believe that we actually paid someone to kill a bat, just to avoid the pain and side-effect of a few shots. I'm still pretty sad about this.

However, we did avoid the shots as I found out yesterday that I do not have rabies. Michael Scott would be proud.

I do owe the earth one bat. If anyone's got a bat I can save, let me know.

Watertower Festival

This weekend was Pipestone's annual Watertower Festival. It seems that every town in Minnesota has a festival - I'm convinced it's part of the MN constitution that before your city can be incorporated, you have to set aside some time each year for a big party. For instance, Rochester had RochesterFest this past week, which included lumberjack competitions and a SPAM vendor selling my new favorite fair food: deep fried SPAM curds. The festival that takes the cake and that I have yet to experience is Viola, MN's Gopher Count where they'll still pay you $1.25 per pair of gopher feet you turn in during the festival. I'm sorry, but does this remind anyone else of The Simpsons' Wacking Day episode?

Here in Pipestone, MN, no animals are harmed during the Watertower Festival. Named for the town's castle-like watertower, it seems appropriate that this year's festival theme was "Nursery Rhymes & Fairytales".

The Watertower that Makes it all Possible!

It technically started on Friday night with a street dance. I thought that sounded fun until, by the time Nathan got home from work at 10pm, our downstairs retirement-aged neighbor had declared that he was going down there to get "stone drunk" and the band had stopped playing songs like Black Hole Sun and moved on to imitating dying cats. Needless to say, we decided to sit out the street dance.

The next morning, a parade started at 10am. Glen, the park's superintendent, said they had so many entries that the parade was twice as long as normal - one whole hour. Actually, it reminded me a lot of the Brown Deer 4th of July parade - just with more men in drag. You had your normal community organization floats and high school bands, but Pipestone's parade went one step further to include, liteally, men in tights and giant farm equipment. This entry from Titan Machinery was pretty amazing - yes that is a normal, one-story building in the background!

Titan

Typical Themed Float

Not Everything Was For Kids

Nathan had been in charge of the Pipestone National Monument Float. This was the first time they'd ever entered one and true to its preservation theme his float was minimalist, recyclable and pulled with an electric truck, which topped out at around 27 mph during the parade.

Nathan's Green Float

The one thing I think they'll have to add next year is candy. EVERYONE throws candy at this parade - even the dentists.

Would you accept candy from a guy wearing a gas mask?

After the parade you could head over to the City Hall front lawn for some delicious grilled foods, a flea market, and a lucky spot under the big tent to listen to a teenage Kiss cover band. For lunch we got a pretty good seat watching the fire department's version of Tug O' War, using a barrel hoisted in the air.

Despite the festival, my favorite place in town is still the park. Saturday was the first time I got to see it when it wasn't raining. Even this snapping turtle took advantage of the sunny day.

Next year, I'll make sure we hit the festival rodeo too. Whoever said small towns are boring? They've obviously never been to Pipestone or Medora.

Pipestone Part II

While I've been in Rochester for the past two weeks, I left off a whole day from my Pipestone trip, so this is a make-up.

I got to do the Pipestone Loop again on Saturday under cloudcover, but in better light than Friday night. In the following pictures you can see the sign that greets you at the road, Winnewissa Falls (the highlight of the tail) and proof that Park Rangers are trustworthy since their vending machines in the back room are just boxes stuffed with food.

Winnewissa Falls

Something tells me the real Vikings weren't so trusting

Just inside the park, you will meet the "Three Maidens". Large stones where quarriers will make an offering of tobacco or other precious substance before taking Pipestone out of the park. Off limits to non-Natives there is a sweat lodge and sun dance area for sacred ceremonies. I also found out that the Pipestone owl necklace I bought can mean anything from death to change is coming depending on what tribe you're affiliated with. The folks that actually made the necklace think the latter, so I am free to wear it without fear of death.


On Sunday, I decided to check out the two nearby State Parks. Split Rock Creek was the closest, but an unfortunate sewage spill upstream kept me from staying long. A group of ten of our friends will be camping there in August, so I'll have plenty of time to explore it later.

Twenty miles down the road is Blue Mounds State Park. I still yearn for my Rocky Mountain hiking, but Blue Mounds has 15 miles of hiking trails, beautiful quartzite cliffs, bison, a swimming beach, and rock climbing. I had to kick myself for not coming prepared to hike. With no water, I only got to do a two-mile loop - a very pretty one starting in a prairie along the base of the cliff, climbing steeply through the trees to the top of the cliff and back to the parking lot. I'm excited to strap on my pack and go back. The entire 15 miles will at least keep me busy hiking for one day...


I'm headed back to the park next weekend for its Watertower Festival. Nathan is now in charge of the Pipestone National Monument float, which I hear will include a giant caterpillar.

As promised last time, here are some photos of our loft in Pipestone. They demonstrate why I could never be a real estate agent.

Living Room

Bedroom

Bathroom

Kitchen

Getting Stoned

I'm visiting Pipestone, MN this weekend and, although it's a small town of 4600 people, that is 46 times more people than Medora had in the winter and I expected there to be a lot to see and do here. I'm not disappointed.

I left work at 1:30pm Friday to start my trip to the other side of the state. The scenery was a little disappointing as there were too many farms and not enough signs for Wall Drug, but the amount of windmills in the area was impressive and only driving 3.5 hours instead of 10 or 24 to get to one of Nathan's parks is a treat. I did get a chance to stop in Blue Earth to see the Jolly Green Giant, who I kind of feel sorry for. Poor guy has to live outside in Minnesota without any pants, plus there is a little platform right between his legs were you can stand an impressive 6 extra feet off the ground and look at the parking lot or...um....up...what's that about?

On the way to Pipestone, MN, you take Hwy 75 through Luverne and past two state parks: Blue Mounds State Park and Split Rock Creek State Park. I hope to visit those tomorrow if it's not too soggy.

Nathan lives in the loft of a cute little house-turned-apartment near downtown Pipestone (pictures to come in an upcoming blog). The main strip, appropriately named Main Street, is only two blocks from his house. Just like any historic downtown, Pipestone has historic buildings and shops, except that here, they are all made out of the native, brilliantly purple/pink quartzite rock found everywhere around here. Downtown has a couple of clothing stores, a card shop, hardware shop, appliance store, a pub, and several restaurants including Pizza Ranch, where we headed for dinner Friday night.

Downtown Pipestone

Pub/Restaurant

Pipestone County Courthouse (1902)

Despite its Western theme, Pizza Ranch is located no farther West than North Dakota. It did, however, have a very nice small-town feel to it, exhibited by the fact that the cashier asked us if there were any particular kinds of pizza we wanted them to make for the buffet. After seeing their vision statement displayed prominently on the wall which read: To glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in, I did expect the pizza to taste a little more, well, heavenly, than it actually did.

After dinner we headed to the monument to hike the 3/4 mile nature trail. Nathan and I had a hard time not comparing it to Glacier as we walked. The good news is it reminded us a lot of it - there were lots of familiar plants, including my favorite anticoagulant, yarrow and the rocks made us believe that pikas would come sheepishly crawling out if we sat quietly long enough. The trail bends from a green prairie oasis, dotted with periodic quarries, into enchanted forest with pink rock walls and the famous Winnewissa Falls. I only regret that it was getting dark and I couldn't hold the camera still enough to get great pictures on the trail, so you'll have to wait for those too.


I did get to see some Pipestone, which you can see in the picture below - the deeper purple stone making up the floor and the bottom layer of the wall in this picture is Pipestone. The pink stone above it is the quartzite.

We got to see the quarry that one of Nathan's friends at the monument has been working on for 27 years. You have to have a permit and be Native American to quarry in the park and it doesn't look easy!


This morning I woke up to a downpour. Not to be detered, I foraged in the Alero for an umbrella and set off to explore the town. I didn't get very far when I landed inside the Pipestone County Museum. Two very nice women worked there and told me all about the surrounding town festivals, including the Watertower Festival coming up in Pipestone on June 27th, which includes a dance, craft fair, parade, and, although not mentioned on the Pipestone Event Website, plenty of drinking.

I enjoyed the museum! It was well-narrated with signs mostly explaining the origins of common phrases, such as 'deadbeat', which comes from the fact that old, empty railway cars made a different noise as they ran over the tracks than the cars that were full. That was called a deadbeat as those were the cars that weren't pulling their own weight (i.e. making money). They also had many displays of household items from the late 1800's through around 1950. The top floor was the Minnesota Room where they had pictures and articles explaining all of the "Minnesota State ________" - both official (Lady Slipper is our state flower) to unofficial (luckily Wood Tick is not our official state insect). There was even an article on supercomputing in Minnesota, which, to my horror did not even mention IBM, whose Roadrunner project, partially worked on in Rochester, MN, broke the petaflop barrier last year.

A couple of other noteworthy items were the large, gorey mural that was displayed in the kids' play area of Native Americans harvesting bison:

It's important that kids know where their food comes from

There was also a wooden, transportable toilet (an early Port-O-Potty if you will) that I really understood the value of after being without even an object as crude that on our Kilimanjaro Trek last year! Ah, to have a wooden toilet seat....


All-in-all Pipestone has been great - can't wait to take another trip through the park this afternoon!