Blowing & Drifting

Sunday night, I returned home from my quick, fun, tiring trip to Madison to discover that the girls had left an “April Fool’s” on my nightstand – an envelope which contained this: This is funny because they know I’m creeped out by “Budgett’s frog ,” a.k.a. the “hippo frog,” a.k.a. “the frog from my own [...]

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I was excited all day about the trip to my bike shop to get my machine back after its spring tune up. I (semi-ironically) call my bike a “machine.” I tested several saddles last year and chose one based on comfort and weight. I call a seat a “saddle.” I talk about “time in the [...]

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Our garage gets ridiculously filthy over the winter – even a mild, no-salt-and-sand-on-the-streets winter like the one that just ended. With practically balmy weather this weekend, I had no excuse not to tidy up and clean out the garage, so I did. The process didn’t take long (it’s not a big garage, nor an impossibly [...]

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Julia and I are getting the mail. Julia takes an emvelope out of the mailbox. “Is this a check or a bill?” I glance down and see she’s holding a credit card statement. “It’s a bill.” she sighs. “Darn it. We need checks, not bills.”

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I hit the roads with my cycling friend Joe today for a hoped-for 60 miles of gravel. We came in near that mileage, with four hours in the saddle. The conditions were magnificent: windless, relatively cool, mostly sunny. We hit some interesting roads, too: an outbound route of endless rollers and the occasional wall, nice [...]

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Shannon took the girls to a low-key magic show at the library this afternoon, an event put on by Tim Freeland, the town’s only radio impresario/magician. As so often happens, this inspired Genevieve to try her own “magic tricks” when I came home. Specifically, she tried to replicate the magician’s success at guessing the number [...]

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I brought this book home from the library for Julia before Christmas, when she was obsessively rereading Charlotte’s Web. She wouldn’t even open the darn thing. Then earlier this week, the book showed up on our coffee tabl bearing the barcode of her school library and bookmarked at a spot that suggested she’d read most [...]

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Thanks to an jesting link from a Facebook friend, my girls heard Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” the other day, via a YouTube clip of the opening to the TV show Weeds. Unbelievably, they love the song – Reynolds’ unique voice and delivery, the funny lyrics, even the message. We listened to it about ten times [...]

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Note: This is the second essay in my (prospective) series of monthly essays. In January, I posted the first essay here. In some sort of poetically proportional process, I think more and more about my childhood the further I get from it. I’m not awash in waves of capital-m Memory, but constantly splashing through puddles [...]

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Wednesday night, Shannon read from her new book to a bookstore full of friends. As Shannon wrote on her own blog, the reading went very, very well: she read several funny and poignant excerpts, the audience liked those excerpts, the Q&A period included lots of interesting exchanges, and – yes – the bookstore shifted some [...]

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I’d be remiss in being the husband of a famous author if I didn’t point out that Shannon is going to be reading from her new book (The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual: How to Have a Wondrous Life Amidst Kids and Chaos) at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 15, at Monkey See Monkey Read in [...]

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Some five year olds are composing operas or dribbling basketballs ambidextrously or mastering a third language or playing Django Reinhardt on the guitar. My five year old, on the other hand, is playing with authorial convention and narrative structure (and giving the old heave ho to the bourgeois constraints of punctuation).

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Vivi bounced out of bed this morning (6:01!) and recounted this dream: I saw two little girls carve a circle in the snow. Then the circle howled like a whale and said, “Errrrrrrrrica!” Then a little thing popped out from behind a snowbank and yelled, “Now the monuments!” She added, “I have no idea what [...]

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I’m not much for great clothes (except maybe shoes) or fine food and drink (except maybe pizza and beer), but I do like bags – backpacks, shoulder bags, fanny waist packs, and so forth. Over the last few years, my collection had grown steadily, so in January I resolved to cut back. I gave away [...]

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I decided on a whim to try and take a picture each day of 2012. Here’s the slideshow on Flickr that includes all the shots so far.

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