The Lone Prairie Blog

Ranch-flavored cheese curds, peak Midwest. I did not know you could return food. “Was there something wrong with them?” the young store clerk asked the customer, a young woman barely older than her, across the checkout counter. On the belt were two packages of cheese curds and a package of round snack cheese. Both packages were crumpled, as if a cheese pervert had fondled them, and though unopened, could never be put back on the grocery shelf. “No, I just didn’t need them,” t

My small hometown post office. As it turns out, sending a Christmas present to Germany is more difficult than crossing the Maginot Line. I must begin by saying that I have worked for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in the past and therefore can freely gripe. 1 Because the postal service has problems. North Dakota Senator Hoeven has long been trying to draw attention to the increasingly abysmal mail service to rural North Dakota—and I suspect equally abysmal service a

I’m not new to inappropriate Thanksgiving tales , but a decade ago, after significant professional degradation during this time of giving thanks, I discovered that chocolate was king and some people just deserve the side-eye. At the time, my job was creating content for clients at a marketing and website company. This company no longer exists (nor does the client’s business I am about to discuss), but I swear I had nothing to do with that turn of events. As part of my job, I

While watching my overweight cat swat his partially empty food bowl around and while looking at me accusingly, I was reminded that there are several ways a civilization can fall, some more dramatic and worthy of historians’ attention than others. I considered how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that unfortunate trajectory we are all on, in which entropy (disorder and randomness) always increases as time goes on. I also considered people who don’t put away their shopping car

In February 2006, I ordered a copy of the book A Reader’s Manifesto : An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose . Originally an essay, the author, B. R. Myers, expanded it into a tidy little book that took a swing at the growing pretentiousness in literary fiction. Mixed metaphors, odd imagery, weird word choices. I do all of those things in my own writing, but purely accidental, without any pretension that I’m literary, mind you. Myers’ book landed

I got a new Bible last week . This is kind of traumatic. You live in your Bible and it’s full of notes, bookmarks, highlights, moments of “a-ha!” in the margin—and to start over is super tough. I can think of several good reasons to do it: Your old Bible is so well used (like my mom’s) that it’s falling apart. You want a different translation. You use a new Bible each year and let the Bible be a kind of faith journal for each year. You want a Bible with some study notes or ot