Blowing & Drifting

A great summer song with a hilarious, to-the-moment pair of opening lines: In the back of the taxi you turned off the TV And read me a book on your phone

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Finally – video of the girls’ dance at the elementary school talent show! This was shot by my friend Todd, the father of the other two girls here. They’re all good dancers! You can tell they practiced a lot – and that Shannon and Todd’s wife put a *lot* of thought into the choreography. Well [...]

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For my birthday, Julia also drew this amazing picture: She drew it from a photo of taken on the first day of school last fall. Pretty good resemblance, huh?

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Julia made this great card for my birthday. She hit on all the great themes of my life.

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Musing about possible April Fool’s pranks, Julia asked me how hard it would be to rig a bucket of water to fall on someone’s head. Thankfully, she and Vivi went in another, tamer, drier direction. (The dress color and the last line in the description are the jokes.)

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Vivi wrote this newspaper while I was traveling earlier this week. Click on it to see a more legible version. It’s worth the time:

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When I was racing the other weekend, Shannon set the girls up with a dish-soap painting project. Here are two of the paintings they made, each with a mysterious title. When I asked them about the titles, they said almost in unison that I’d told them that artists sometimes gave their works strange names, so [...]

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Though I’m not quite sure what I’m getting myself into, I am doing this race on Saturday morning. I am severely undertrained, but adrenaline should compensate for at least 10% of my fitness shortfall. I hope my beard can make up the rest. If nothing else, I’ll have some painful fun on the Beast!

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I saw this graphic a bunch of times last week, when the snowpocalypse was about to crush the East Coast. I appreciate the information, and I know that falling on the ice is no effing joke, but at the same time I despair for a society that’s so divorced from nature that we need infographics to [...]

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From a great collection of posters illustrating stupid reactions to designers’ work, my new personal motto:

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The cover of Vivi’s nonfiction book on penguins. The interior pages display an excellent sense of the most useful balance between facts and images. In this work, she only used secondary sources, so I suppose they’ll do some primary research – field work on the Ross Ice Shelf? – next year.  

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I’m not sure what exactly is going on here, but…

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Julia brought these two items home from school this week – a lovely little poem about snow and a nice piece of descriptive writing – complete with illustration – on her favorite cocoa mug: The drawing is pretty accurate! Here’s the real thing:

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I’m all for my girls learning to form their own opinions. I try to be fair in explaining to them the differences between Romney and Obama, or between the two sides of the debate over the traditional-marriage amendment here in Minnesota. I was gratified, then, when they distilled Obama’s position to “people should help each [...]

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Julia and Genevieve drew these great haunted houses this morning before school. Pretty scary stuff!

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