Today was my first day back at work. Since my vacation time was more stressful and strenuous than my job is, I was not any better for the time off. But that’s my own fault. Someday I should take some vacation and just rest.

No, that would be degenerate and un-Haugean (see the link in my previous post).

Nevertheless I shall blog about Høstfest and the Sissel concert. Separate posts, I think. Keep things orderly.

This was the 30th anniversary of the Høstfest (which means Harvest Festival) in Minot. Here you may see the backside of the big “30” in the entryway.

The fellow in the tall hat is Rolf Stang, professional Hans Christian Andersen impersonator. (Also professional Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen and Leif Eriksson impersonator. He only actually resembles one of these characters [Grieg], but he gets away with it, and who am I to criticize?. He’s a friend of the Viking Age Club & Society, so he can impersonate Jenny Lind if he likes, as far as I’m concerned).

Here’s one of the halls, at lunchtime. People are chowing down on rømmegrøt, lefse and Swedish pancakes, but also fried chicken, hamburgers and tacos. Man does not live on traditional Scandinavian fare alone, especially if man is as old as most of the attendees at Høstfest.

Not that there weren’t some young people there. I fell in love (temporarily) several times, with various women young enough to be my daughters. Did not speak to any of them, of course, and didn’t even get any pictures.

The ladies below, in case you’re wondering, are not young enough to be my daughters, but they did have a handsome display of Norwegian rosemaling.

And here’s a nice booth where a violin maker is displaying Hardangerfeler (Hardanger fiddles) for sale. The Hardangerfele is a distinctive Norwegian instrument. It’s double-stringed, with the lower set tuned to produce harmonics. The result is a weird, evocative bagpipe-like sound. My Haugean ancestors believed the Hardangerfele to be an instrument of the devil.

And here’s part of our Viking encampment. The red chest in the middle, as well as the workbench and red shield, is (are) mine.

And yes, I noticed that after all my jokes about people in Norwegian sweaters and cowboy hats, I didn’t come away with a single picture of one of those. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Haugeans never lie.

Bird quotes St. Augustine on watching sad plays, though you could replace the emotion with another one to the same effect. “It was a sign of my desolation that I loved theatrical emotions, and looked for occasions to empathize with fake, impersonated misery.”

I am back, safe and sound and functioning in all my working parts. Roy Jacobsen told you in Comments about my little emergency, which he helped to resolve. In essence, when I was checking my oil just prior to setting out, I found that my car hood wouldn’t latch. So I tied it down with a nylon tie-down strap, and set out.

A short time on the freeway convinced me I ought to have a second strap. So I had to get off the highway and find an auto parts store (Target didn’t stock them. They have almost nothing automotive anymore, I discovered). I found a NAPA at last, bought a strap, and I set out again, but the hood was still shivering in the wind, especially when a semi truck passed, and the air scoop was diminishing my gas mileage radically.

I met Roy for lunch in Fargo, as arranged, and he offered to call a guy he knows who can usually fix these things. The guy agreed to see the car, and we drove over. He spent a minute looking at it and thirty seconds bending the latch with a screwdriver, and then it worked as if it had been engineered by a German.

Many thanks, Roy.

The guy wouldn’t let me pay him, but I gave him a signed copy of The Year of the Warrior, which doubtless confused him greatly.

So on I went across the plains, westward toward the land of sunset. There was harvest activity in the wide fields, and great clouds of birds, including seagulls, were flocking to do the final gleaning.

I arrived in Minot at about 7:00 p.m., called Ragnar on my cell phone, and learned that the group was at the fairgrounds (where Høstfest lives), still at work on setup.

I found that we had been given a section of Touchstone Energy’s Copenhagen Hall, a sort of large alcove which used to house a small stage for minor musical acts. This was a bad venue for that sort of thing, since it was just around the corner from the top secondary stage (where the Oak Ridge Boys would be performing twice daily this year). But it worked very well for our purposes. We had four of our Viking tents set up, along with several of the informational signs from the Smithsonian Viking exhibition in St. Paul, which had been given to us when the exhibit moved on. We’ve been storing the things for a few years now, and have never had a place to use them before.

The downside is that they’re very big and very heavy. Sadly, I was too late to help set the stuff up (So sad. So sad).

Then followed four days of doing my leather tooling, selling my books (I made a little money. Did OK), and doing sets of three combat bouts, three times a day, with Ragnar, in a sort of huge sandbox that had been set up in one corner.

The combats, of course, were a big success, especially with the kids. Ragnar and I worked up an educational patter to introduce and punctuate the fights, which gave us a little chance to get our breath between bouts. Unfortunately, the one combat I missed, which Ragnar did as a training session with a couple of our guys, was the one the local TV filmed. But the trainee beat Ragnar, and I’m told his broad smile played very well for the cameras. (I think the final score between Ragnar and me was about 50/50, draws included.)

Speaking of cameras, I was interviewed (or at least questioned briefly) by a film crew from Norway doing some sort of documentary. So I may be seen on NRK or something, in mail, somewhere down the line. What I mostly recall is that the interviewer was a spectacularly gorgeous woman.

I’m probably forgetting things, but I’ll blog more about Høstfest tomorrow. I’ll probably tell you about Sissel’s concert then, too. Yes, she did arrive, and yes, I did enjoy the show very much.

Saturday night it took us four hours to tear the display down. We got done around 11:00. I went home to my host’s house, slept in a bit, then drove to Dale Nelson’s place in Mayville. He and his lovely wife Dorothea, and their lovely daughter Lynnea (they have other lovely daughters, but I didn’t see much of them) and their dog and numerous cats made me very welcome (well, the dog was a little ambivalent, but you know how perceptive dogs are). Dale treated me to a viewing of the DVD of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which I’d never seen before.

Much thanks to the Nelsons.

And now I’m home. And I’m tired.

So I’ll end this post here.

Mommy, why is that house shaped like a toilet?

The owner is an activist, dear.

Final day of Høstfest. Yesterday the place was packed, meaning that the most efficient way to get from one location to another was to put on a jacket (or a cloak) and go around the outside (the weather’s chilly in Minot. This morning I had to scrape frost off my car windows). Especially if you’re wearing edged weapons, making you likely to poke people as you thread your way through the crowded walkways.

Today looks to be even more of a madhouse. The rumor is that Sissel’s two concerts today (apparently she is coming) failed to sell out, so the festival donated free tickets to personnel at the Air Force base. That means that today, when it’s a weekend too, ought to resemble the Black Hole of Calcutta around here. Assuming the occupants of the Black Hole had been wearing Norwegian sweaters and ten gallon hats, and burping rømmegrøt.

My batting average against Ragnar has sagged. As I had suspected, my winning season had been largely due to his suffering a flare-up of his arthritis. Now, he tells me, he’s feeling better, and I’m spending more time on my back in the sand.

During our final bout of the day, we are always serenaded by the Oak Ridge Boys, who are doing two shows a day just around the corner. For the rest of my life I expect I’ll associate “Elvira” with the weight of a mail shirt on my back and lecturing a crowd on the fine points of the holmgang duel.

I went to check out my seat for the concert, and it’s a much better one than the one I had the last time. High in the upper deck and to the side, but quite close to the stage. Very good. 1:00 this afternoon is the big hour.

Now if I just don’t die or sustain an injury requiring emergency medical attention in my morning duel.