Happy New Year!

After the late and frolicsome New Year's Eve party, everyone was in surprisingly good shape this morning when we all gathered mid-morning at Nicole and Jesse's house for brunch. After a great weekend, it was sad to bid everyone farewell. On our way out of town, we drove downtown to see the marquee for River Cinema 12, the new movie theater that's making fans for its spacious and relaxing seating, variety of refreshments and free refills, and cheap admission prices. We also drove past our previous house and the girls' previous school just for old times' sake. (P.S. I saw our former next-door neighbor Judy at the grocery store yesterday when I went with Jay to pick up some food for the party. It was so good to see and visit with her again!)

We spent part of the afternoon with our friends Jeff and Janelle and their kids in Harwood on our way home. A flu bug has been making its way through their family, so we didn't spend Saturday night with them as originally planned, making this brief visit instead to exchange Christmas gifts and give Suzanna a chance to visit with her godparents. Even ill, those kids are darned cute (and so are the parents, if you're reading this, Jeff and Janelle). Visiting them is like visiting family, and we enjoyed even our short time with them.

Austen's pretty cute and cheerful for a baby with the flu!

While Suzanna opens her birthday gift from her godfamily, onlookers include Jaden, Austen in Hillary's lap, Jordan, and Megan.

Janelle distributes the Moberg family Christmas gift.

Jaden helps Janelle and Jeff open their family's gift from us . . . will they like it?!

We stopped in Fargo for more shopping and an earlyish supper at Chili's before heading home. By the time we were fed and the vehicle was refueled, it was late-afternoon dark and feeling especially sleepy out to this driver, who could have benefited from a nap today after last night's revelry. I stopped frequently at the various rest areas on the way home and, each time, took a little walk in the brisk winter wind before getting back in the van. We're safe and sound back home now and ready to start the new year!

(One of my goals for the year is to do a little pleasure reading every day, so that's where I'm off to next! Still wrapping up The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.)

Good Neighbors

Our last trip to Young's Park for Tuesday Nite Live was so fun that we decided to do it again tonight. We had Chuck and Reba and their kids over for supper (bratwursts and hotdogs on the grill, raw veggies, pasta salad, cookie salad [courtesy of Reba], and chips), and then we all hiked over to the bandshell in the park on the hill overlooking the city. It was a cool, breezy evening, so we dressed warmly, and Susan brought fruit snacks and cookies (made by our daughters today) to enjoy while seated on our quilt and listening to Cotton Wood, a ND bluegrass band. They were good and interacted well with the audience between numbers. Still, they mostly served as background music for us while we adults visited and the children found other kids and played tag and hide-and-seek and gave piggyback rides until it was time to walk home.

Cotton Wood on stage

Our next-door neighbors John and Beth's daughter joined us for supper and the concert, too, and she hung around to play with our kids on the lawn in the dark after we got home from the concert. While we remained outside playing, Chuck and Reba took their little boy to Beth to have her look him over; he had fallen and hurt his clavicle in the afternoon and continued to complain of pain throughout the night, and they wanted a nurse's assessment of the situation. (She gave him a clean bill of health.)

Jack ready for the ride home from the concert

I continue to be impressed with how neighborly the people in this neighborhood are. Even our next-door neighbor Ivella waved broadly to us from the couch in her living room as our gang tramped past their (Ivella and Leo's) house. In our previous neighborhood--with few exceptions (like our wonderful next-door neighbors there, Bob and Judy)--people stayed in their houses and kept their curtains drawn and their eyes averted: no waving at passersby, no dining at one another's houses, no going to community events together, no sending your kids with the neighbors to a concert, no watering your neighbor's lawn or examining a neighbor kid's bruised shoulder, no offering to fix your neighbor's lawn sprinkler (thank you, Chuck), no snowblowing the neighbor's driveway * (thank you, Neal), no bringing over fresh baking the day after the neighbors move in (thank you, Ivella), no popping over to help a neighbor start a stubborn garden tiller (thank you, Leo), no supplying popsicles to the neighborhood children (thank you, Roger and Audrey), no stopping to visit anytime you're out and about and see the neighbors out, too (thank you, pretty much anybody in Dickinson), etc.

This is a good place to live.

* "No snowblowing the neighbor's driveway" is really just a way to thank Neal; it's not really true of our previous neighborhood, where Bob quite often snowblew our driveway while he was out cleaning off his own. Bob and Judy really were great neighbors.