Here in North Dakota there is snow here and there, but the ground is mainly brown and yellow. Not exactly what is needed to get a person into the Christmas spirit. I guess it didn't help that the snow in the Flathead was picture card perfect before I left.
Staying here is also a different routine. That has never bothered me in the past, but either I am getting older (and crotchety), or I really like where I now live. Probably a little of both.
Add in less physical activity (no pocket gophers here to trap!), and I feel antsy already. There is only so much TV and movie watching I can do.
I took the bicycle computer I had given my brother last Christmas (Indian giver!) and put it on his second bicycle, which I am riding. I don't care to ride without knowing my mileage. It is the computer nerd in me. It seems as if his bicycle shrank since last year as I didn't remember it being this small. This bicycle's frame is a little smaller than my own bicycle's frame, but now I feel like I am riding a kid's bicycle.
I've ridden 25 miles since coming here. I need to remember to borrow my brother's camera as I have seen great scenic views during my rides. Tonight it was a long-lasting, wide, pastel, sunset that only seems to happen in North Dakota. Even the sky itself was a soft pastel blue, orange and pink. I was two miles from home so I enjoyed the sunset as I rode instead of rushing back to the house to get his camera. The sunset lasted and lasted, slowly changing to new and equally impressive looks.
At the hill a half mile from the house the sunset still was gorgeous so I decided to try to return with my brother's camera. I got him to drive me back to the viewpoint, but as I thought, the sunset was gone by the time I returned to the crest of the hill. It appears that the sunset had lingered like a lover until I disappeared from view, then it quickly departed.
Monday I was feeling really antsy and out of sorts. Nothing was working to settle me. I was in the middle of cutting up apples (part of my luggage from Montana, remember?) for making an apple pie when my good friend, Rod, stopped by. The Landing Bar holds a trivia contest every Monday night and Rod invited me to join him and his friends.
Our group was made up of Rod, his brother-in-law, sister-in-law, Rod's friend Alan, and me. Our team's name for the night was: Tinseltown. Rod knows I accumulate plenty of useless trivia and he felt I could help his team. I did know a few answers they didn't know, but my mental knowledge is way overrated.
As it was a Monday night the bar was not crowded. There were a half dozen to eight teams playing the trivia. There was no limit to team size and they varied. The winner of the first game was a seven person group of lawyers. Rod said they won most nights. Fortunately the trivia game was played twice and the winner of the first game could not play in the second game. The lawyers easily beat the rest of the teams in the first game as they got 19 of the 20 questions while our team only got 15.
In the second game we lost by one point. I blame Rod as he was positive that Nancy Drew, the girl detective, had auburn hair. I seemed to remember blond hair but I had only read a book or two of her stories. Actually I don't blame Rod as I messed up an answer or two myself.
Throughout the two games Ed, the host, would have other trivia questions. If you guessed wrong you had to put a quarter in the bucket. If you guessed right you won your choice of a prize on the table. It appeared to all be wine or something similar. I almost won once as I felt the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life" was either 60 or 61 years old. I guessed 61 and was wrong. It was 60. I knew the answer to another question (Ronald Reagan) but another person answered it before I could. At the end of the night the winner of the last trivia question won all the quarters.
The last question, the one that won all the quarters, was "What is linophobia?" The answer... fear of string. Here is a YouTube video of a rock song built around linophobia. A lot of quarters went into the bucket before someone answered it correctly. "I don't know" was not an acceptable answer though some people claimed it was a correct answer.
If you won a trivia game you won a twenty dollar gift certificate for drinks. Rod's team won last week and we spent the twenty on drinks this night. This had an effect on our guesses to the questions we didn't know. For the "In the nursery rhyme, who did the pussycat elope with?" We were thinking of answering with "Tom Jones" after a few of us started to sing "What's New, Pussycat? Whoa... whoa. What's new pussycat?"
A table was set in the corner and a number of people had brought chips, dip, meat, cheese, crackers and cookies to share. Food! Yum! *burp*
While the bar wasn't filled with people, enough people smoked that my clothes were smoky after I returned home.
After the trivia games were over Rod, Alan and I stayed to chat, and Ed the announcer came over to join us. Ed and Rod know each other, which may account for the wine related trivia questions during the games. Rod knows what he is doing by giving Ed bottles of his homemade wine.
I hadn't met Alan before. I learned Alan had lost his eyesight in his late 20s due to diabetes, which he had developed when he was 4 years old. It turns out Alan's mother and my mother knew each other as they had been nurses 50 years ago.
The waitress was dressed in a black blouse and black jeans to go with her black hair. Her left eyebrow was pierced with two small silver barbells. I noticed when she leaned forward over the bar to pick up bottles of beer, her blouse moved up slightly partially exposing a large black tattoo across the small of her back. I smiled as I remembered one of my relatives explaining to me why she had gotten a tattoo on the small of her back.
Going to trivia night was good as it got rid of my antsy feelings for now. I hope I can last until the next trivia night, which due the holidays being on Mondays, won't be till three weeks from now.
Oh yeah, being a Monday, Rod had to work the next morning so it was a relatively early night. I finished making my apple pie after I got back home. My mother and brother said they liked it a lot. But then that is what family usually says.
Today my mother and I made a large kettle of vegetable soup. I need to do something with my garden's carrots, beets, green peppers, and onions!
I am not hauling them back to Montana.
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