Blowing & Drifting

I recently started reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. So far, I’m not finding it to be profound, but it is full of interesting stories and quite a bit of insight into why Jobs became the man he was when he died. I was particularly struck by this anecdote, from the early 1980s as [...]

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Today I read an incredible essay by Meghan Daum in The Believer – “Haterade.” Equal parts autobiography and social commentary, the article analyzes hater culture on the internet – horrible comment boards on news websites or blogs, vitriolic email criticisms to authors, and so forth. Maybe I’m naive, but I was shocked by some of [...]

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Over our lives together, Shannon and I have enjoyed some everyday accomplishments – buying houses, having kids – and some less-ordinary ones – earning doctorates. Yesterday was a day for a very un-ordinary accomplishment: the publication of Shannon’s first book. This is the culmination of a lifelong dream and a lot of hard work. It’s [...]

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True to tradition, Julia is making Christmas presents for the rest of us. She started making me a book – How to Be a Good Daddy! – but then abandoned it. This is a shame, given that the first page is GENIUS and because I would love to read the other chapters, especially number 6, [...]

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Friday afternoon, as we headed downtown to do some window shopping, we admired the beautifully-decorated evergreen outside our neighbor Mary’s place. We mused about how it would be nice to have a nicely decorated tree outside our house too. Before I could even get to thinking much about how to make that happen, we’d run [...]

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Yesterday, Shannon passed a pretty cool milestone for her book, and wrote it up in her usual, wonderful way. As her biggest fan, I say, “Congratulations!” and ask, “Is it time to crack that bottle of Champagne yet?” Wondrous Life Yesterday I saw my book, The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual: How to Have a Wondrous [...]

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With the opening of Carleton’s new Weitz Center for Creativity, the College gained several great new spaces for the display of art and other visual materials. The crown jewel is the Perlman Teaching Museum, which is right inside the front door of the Weitz Center and which has two excellent inaugural shows running right now. [...]

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She’s a lovable, loving, smart, and funny kid, but Vivi can also be pretty rough on the old psyche. Last night’s hour-long meltdown was just the latest evidence of this fact. I managed to survive and even get her into bed without reinforcements (Shannon, beer, the National Guard). After falling asleep – still crying softly, [...]

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Right now, a Northfield cyclist named Ben Oney is 1900 miles into Tour Divide, an insane bike race that starts in Banff, Alberta, and follows the Continental Divide all the way down Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican border. (You can track Ben online; he’s currently about 1,900 miles – yes, miles – into [...]

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The other day, I showed off the cover of the book that Julia made for me for Father’s Day. It is awesome. Here are the four pages inside. Click through to Flickr to read each one, if the images aren’t big enough here. It’s worth it.

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Before school ended, Julia made a wonderful book to give to me on Father’s Day. Though I haven’t scanned the interior pages yet, I can share the cover. This is me right down to the reverse-J nose:

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This week, Shannon kicked off “ABC Summer,” in which she and the girls will each week do certain activities around a particular letter or two. This week, for instance, they did “H” and “D,” so we had a hot dog dinner (yum), they checked out library books on dogs, dinosaurs, and horses, and they’re making haystack [...]

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Three more drawings:

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Julia’s first-grade class has been working on poetry this spring. Here are two she brought home today (all spelled and capitalized here as she did in the originals): Amur leopords thirty left dissaperring save them stop taking them spots brownish orange My penny I found it in my yard brown scuffed Aberham Liclon My sister [...]

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I’ve been delinquent in posting updates about my 30 Days of Creativity activities, but I have not been (too) delinquent in actually doing them. My short story is about 1000 words long now, which is slightly behind my goal of 200 words per day, but I’ve done six self-portrait drawings, which has been surprisingly easy and [...]

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