Happy December!  It’s weird that it’s no longer November, right?  We’d barely finished shoving the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers in between the milk and that cottage cheese we think is still good, but how can you ever really tell with cottage cheese? When ka-blam-o, month’s over.  The transition was even more jarring up/over/down here in the Midwest because we went from balmy pumpkin-spiced fall to full-blown winter in a single day.  Midwesterners spent the holiday weekend wandering the streets in a single glove and a pair of shorts with snow boots looking dazedly at the weather app on their phones and muttering, “I thought we had more time?”  Well, we didn’t; December is here.

We spent Thanksgiving week in Minnesota with my parents and my sister’s family.  We went to a production of A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie, which opened Nine’s eyes to the fact that terrifying faceless ghosts come after people who act like a-holes, and also to the world of The Muppet Christmas Carol, which he has now played four hundred times on repeat after we explained that sometimes those faceless ghosts are made of felt and not so bad.  We also went skating.

On Sunday, Nine and I packed up the car and said a bummer of a goodbye to my family before heading back to North Dakota.  Kyle and Thirteen had departed on Friday morning (hockey was calling, and they must go), and so it was just my little buddy and me.  We listened to music, ate my mother’s overly-robust snack bags – I was so full from the week that in lieu of a turkey sandwich I requested a small Ziploc bag of turkey…and so if you saw a woman driving along the I-94 corridor chomping down on dry strips of leftover turkey like they were french fries, c’etait moi – and maneuvered around the packs of traffic in order to get home.

My sister and her family live in Asheville, North Carolina.  As you know, Asheville was hit hard by a hurricane earlier this fall.  On Sunday, my seven-year-old nephew told me a story about his friend’s dad that went like this:

As the storm picked up, my nephew’s friend’s dad started to fret about the family van.  “I’m worried the van is going to get hit by a falling tree,” he told his wife.  He told her over and over, finally ending with, “I’m going to move it.”  He moved it to another part of the driveway.  An hour later, a tree fell and hit the van – instead of hitting the neighbor’s house, which would have been crushed had the van not been in the way.

Why am I telling you this story?  First off, like “A Christmas Carol,” I like stories where destiny intervenes.  Second, I have a fortuitous destiny story (albeit a lot less dramatic) of my own from that very same Sunday.

Nine and I reached Fargo, North Dakota – an hour away from home – with a little less than a quarter of a tank of gas left in the car.

“Should we stop in Fargo and go to the bathroom and get gas?”  I asked him.  “Or should we stop in Hillsboro?” (Hillsboro is the midway point between Fargo and Grand Forks.)

“Stop in Hillsboro,” Nine said, engrossed in a video of the two Muppet Jacob Marleys singing a song about being greedy.

We drove along.  As we neared Hillsboro, I looked at my gas gauge, realized we could make it all the way home with room to spare, noted the falling snow and slippery roads, and thought twice about pulling off.

“Do you want to stop in Hillsboro or go straight home?”  I asked.

“Straight home,” Nine said, still watching that video.

Thirty minutes later, I pulled off at the Grand Forks exit.  We rode about a half of a mile before the car shuttered, the check engine light started to flash, and the gas pedal felt laggy.  I pulled off onto the shoulder, shut the car off, waited thirty seconds, and started it back up again.  The engine light was off and everything was back to normal.

“That was weird,” I told Nine.

“Mercury is in retrograde,” Nine said.  “It makes computers do weird things.”

“How do you know that?”  I asked.

“Everyone knows that,” he said.

We drove home.  I pulled into the garage, put the car in park, and started to lecture Nine about helping me unpack when I realized I couldn’t turn my car off.  I pressed the engine button several times.  The car tried to turn over – odd, as it was already on – and then started flashing every warning message possible on the screen.  I put on my mechanic thinking cap and did what I do every time something happens with my car: I told Kyle.

I’m not going to bore you with the details, but it turned out my battery was completely dead.  It also turned out that there was one auto parts store open at 5:00 PM on a Sunday (the ratio of auto parts stores to humans in Grand Forks is nearly 1:1, although few of them are open on Sunday nights) and so I went from a possible calamity to a brand-new battery in under an hour.

“Wow, that was lucky,” I said to Kyle.  “If I had stopped in Fargo or Hillsboro, who knows if I would have made it back.”

“It was lucky that you made it all the way into the garage, too,” Kyle said.  “Because that battery was tough to get it out, and it would have been a pain to do it in ten-degree weather.”

“And it was lucky that the store was open,” I said.  “And that the issue was only a battery and not something bigger.”

“I guess it was destiny,” Kyle said.

“God bless us, every one,” I said.

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The photo above is of my beautiful sister and me. Our children were ice skating on physical ice and we were ice skating in our minds because we both suck at skating.

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This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Terry Schwartz, my Nice Person of the Week, as well as a community (or 7!) coming together to fix up the Walcott Cemetery.  Check it out! (Valley News Live)

A group of people have formed a new “family” tradition: delivering Thanksgiving dinners to those in need. (Grand Forks Herald)

Speaking of dinner, this article is called “Lefse Diplomacy” and it talks about the power of food to bind us together. (North Dakota Monitor – found from “Oops Only Good News”)

We’re supposed to get a winter storm this week, so there’s no better time to name a snow plow. (North Dakota DOT)

Speaking of storms, Beulah/Fargo’s “Lauren Midwest” is taking Instagram by storm. (KFYR TV)

Bismarck’s Dr. Obritsch is using his patients’ art to inspire his other patients to create some of their own. (KFYR TV)

A woman named Charity is, appropriately, the Empire Arts Center‘s longest-serving volunteer. (Grand Forks Herald)

Git out yer stuffies and games; it’s time to Stuff a Squad with toys. (Minot Daily News)

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