Northern Word: May 2009 Archives

Writing Prompt: Snack Food

By Susan on May 30, 2009 7:31 PM | No Comments

There are two ways you can use this writing prompt. One, actually do some writing, and two, head straight for the fridge and procrastinate. Your choice.

Fiction: your character has a sudden need for a snack. Take this as far as it will go. If in nature, small rodents are acceptable. If in the city, larger rodents may be more commonly available. Or choose your own snack.

Nonfiction: If looking for a topic, find a snack food in the supermarket, and research its history. If possible, connect this snack food to your own life. Then eat several portions of the snack food and see if anything comes to you. If nothing does, go to the gym and work out until the snack food is no longer attached to your hips.

Below: giraffe snacking at the Minnesota Zoo last week. Giraffe in question was brought here via specialized Giraffe Truck, which apparently is an actual thing. Giraffe enjoys eating giraffe biscuits fed to him by tourists for $2.50 each. Giraffe goes back to warmer climes during the winter due to Minnesota's general incompatibility with Giraffes.

Floral displays

By Susan on May 25, 2009 11:40 PM | 1 Comment

with spring still blooming here in Minnesota, I caught some pics of local flowers at Coon Rapids Regional Park in Anoka County, North of the Twin Cities. The park has miles of bike trails through mature oak woodlands as well as along the Mississippi river.

Character study

By Susan on May 23, 2009 8:30 PM | 2 Comments

Today the family and I took a nice walk through a local park, and it was a lovely sunny day. The river flowed smooth and dark between edges of green spring trees. In the forest itself, the leaves are still a lighter, fresher green, as here in Minnesota spring is still underway and summer has not quite arrived.

At the riverside visitor's center I paused with my mother's corgi while mother took a quick bathroom break. Nearby, a clean-cut man in his thirties sat with an unusually large brown pit bull. He started chatting with me. "People think these dogs are vicious," he said in a pronounced southern drawl, patting his enormous pit bull on its flat head. "But it's just the training. It's like with guns. Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well all right, I thought, people kill people with guns. But that's neither here nor there. "She's a sweetheart," he said. "Never had any problems." I made some sort of comment about how even corgis can get a little grumpy sometimes (anyone who has tried to separate a corgi from a pork chop can attest to that) but their smaller jaws made them a bit less lethal.

And then the fellow opened up. "Oh yeah," he said, "Those jaws, they lock on and they just don't let go. She's two for two. Took apart a rottweiler."

"A rottweiler?"

"Yeah, guy brought over a rottweiler, and she ripped her up, they took the dog to the university and they worked on her all day but there wasn't anything they could do."

It was then I understood that I was being visited by a stranger from an alternate universe, one free of irony or logical malfunctions. I scooted the corgi a couple of feet to the left. "Wow," I said, and as Mom emerged from the bathrooms off we went.

Aaaah, sweet relief...and then comes the wind

By Susan on May 21, 2009 8:05 PM | No Comments

I've been sweating through a semester-long class and now that it's over, I feel like I've been let out of the fields and allowed a glass of lemonade. The blog has taken a backseat to the work, unfortunately. But here I am, ready for summer.

Yesterday here in the Twin Cities we had an unusual weather day: hours and hours and hours of 40 mph winds in 95 degree heat. It was as if Minneapolis had been put under a hair dryer, and all the trees and blades of grass began to wither as the wind went on and on and on. The flags at my office, all relatively new, shredded at the ends by afternoon.

When I moved to Minnesota from Northern California four years ago, Dad and I drove the 2,000 miles across the great American West and encountered our share of wind. By far the windiest place was wyoming, where it seemed everywhere we stopped had a steady 30-50mph wind, everpresent, unrelenting. The grass seemed short and the ladscape relatively treeless. Beautiful and stark and dotted with antelope who didn't seem to mind the wind. Perhaps Antelope are just too fast to be bothered by it.

Before our hot wind arrived this week, I had a lovely day at Snail Lake Regional Park in Shoreview, Minnesota. The park contains several reservoirs for the City of St. Paul and families hugged the shoreline, fishing in the clear lakes.