Culture

Health insurance coverage in North Dakota and Minnesota

November 8th, 2017

Nobody is going to look you in the eye and tell you that choosing an insurance plan is easy, but when you’re transgender the choice can be twice as hard. I spend every year talking to our local insurance agencies to find out what is and isn’t covered for the trans healthcare.

While the second half here will be focusing on trans healthcare, I’ll start by going over some basics that can help anyone!

The first thing to talk about is the Healthcare Marketplace. If you’re in North…

Underwear & Underwrite Luncheon: protection, education, and empowerment

November 1st, 2017

African Soul, American Heart (ASAH) is a nonprofit organization in Fargo to protect, educate, and empower orphans in from the Republic of South Sudan through primary school, secondary school, and beyond.

After the civil war in South Sudan, ASAH relocated to northern Uganda to protect their students from the civil war, forced and early marriage, malnutrition, and diseases. ASAH has also been educating their students to prepare to support themselves and their families in the future, and…

Monsters on the plains

October 25th, 2017

Cryptozoology is considered a pseudoscience. Its purpose is to discern whether the legacy of the sasquatch and yeti are fact or fiction. It questions whether or not monsters walk among us or whether they’re figments of our imagination. Many of these beasts have roots in Native lore as well as European folklore. Needless to say, the Northern plains has its fair share of monsters leaving plenty of fodder for campfire tales and long winters.

Miniwashitu

We found out about the Miniwashitu…

Ink, iron, and the queen of rust

October 19th, 2017

When asked what sparked her interest in tattoo culture, Danielle Colby, star of the hit reality TV show ‘American Pickers,’ replied, “I think that came from my grandfather. He was in the Navy, so he was heavily tattooed. I remember he had this one tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on his forearm and it was so blown out from all of the years of being out in the sun.” She continued, “I look back on all of these tattoos my grandpa had and I guarantee you he had some tattoos from…

Smart and rural in North Dakota

October 18th, 2017

Like the many tiny towns that dot the vast expanse of North Dakota, Abercrombie, which rests some 40 minutes south of Fargo, appears quite ordinary.

In the north-eastern edge of Richland County, its flat streets rove among homes and local businesses that huddle in the center of large parcels, comfortably distant from each other. Under the broad sky, this community of several hundred presents the perfect snippet of small-town, rural America. Yet, Abercrombie holds a story that some may…

Hard drive organization is not my strong suit

October 18th, 2017

In an earlier column I mentioned how many thousands of files I have. Keeping everything organized can be quite a headache if I don’t keep up with the job. One of my favorite pastimes is procrastination, so it is doubly difficult for me. I do, however, use the resources provided to me by Windows (7 or 10) to attempt to keep everything locatable on my hard drive.

Much like a physical workspace, organizing your hard drive is important in ensuring you can easily find the files you need.…

White Lady Lane

October 18th, 2017

Just down a dusty old road trailing west in North Dakota, on County Road 9, you’ll come upon the Tetrault Woods which you’ll have to travel through. It’s said that the road eventually becomes so narrow that you can hardly drive any further because your vehicle might be too big to fit.

It is when this road is the narrowest you’ll come across a tiny decrepit bridge, lost to the laws of time. It’s usually then that a feeling will start to creep over you, a feeling that visitors…

North Dakota united against hate

October 18th, 2017

In the area this last week there were two major events dedicated to addressing and eliminating hate within the Fargo/Moorhead community. Both cities also passed an inclusive resolution to send a strong message that hate is not welcomed in our community.

Independent of their results, just knowing that events like these occur makes me, as a trans woman, feel safer to live here.

I had the privilege of talking to Barry Nelson of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition (NDHRC) who helped…

Hello

October 17th, 2017

The word hello has become a ubiquitous and sometimes even innocuous part of our English-speaking world. It can say so much and so little. Hello's meaning varies with circumstance and tone. It begins more conversations than any other word and is one of few words that stand alone as a complete sentence. Despite how common and useful it is, it's relatively new.

Geeky stuff—thousands of file types

October 11th, 2017

This is some of the basic computer technical information you have to know to be comfortable around Windows computers.

Long ago and far away, someone thought up some very basic definitions of computer files -- you know, the things you create on a computer to hold your writings or pictures or whatever.

Then someone decided that he or she needed a different type of file with a different name for his or her brand new software.

That is where naming of computer files really went off the rails.…