Blowing & Drifting

Last week I fully joined the standing-desk trend. I had bought a tall “cafe table” for my office a couple years ago, and intermittently used it as a desk, but last Tuesday I finally moved my computer to that table. A week into the experiment, I’m ready to say that it’s been a great arrangement. [...]

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Friday morning, I was finishing up some work before heading to Julia’s field trip in the next town when Shannon texted me: Washer just stopped itself with a load of clothes and water in it and there is a burning smell! I had a few minutes of before I needed to be at the field [...]

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Saturday morning, I drove up to Elm Creek park in Champlin, Minnesota, for the second running of the Fatbike Frozen Forty race. I didn’t know what to expect, since I hadn’t trained much for the race and have done all my racing on gravel roads, but I was eager for the chance to ride my [...]

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Feeling a little unprepared for a fatbike race I’m planning to do on Saturday, I spent quite a bit of time on the Beast this last weekend – trying my winter gear, testing my legs, figuring out riding positions, feeling the wintry mix on my face, learning the best way to fly off my bike [...]

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Today is Shannon’s forty-xth birthday. As chief birthday officer, I’m glad to report that everything went well. The gifts were well chosen and well received, and the girls and I acquitted ourselves well in the kitchen, making a workmanlike dinner of bacon grilled cheeses and apple-celery salad and – get *this*! – a chocolate cake. [...]

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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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The seven and a half hours of 2013 have been pretty good. I stayed up till just after midnight, drinking a good beer and chatting with good friends who unfortunately live far away. I slept till seven, when Vivi climbed into my bed to snuggle and then told me several funny jokes. Now I’m having [...]

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God, I love a big snowbank. I think back to when I was a little kid in the U.P., where snowbanks reached up to the eaves of some buildings and we could sled down off the roof. The banks around here aren’t quite so big, but they’re decent, and today Julia and Genevieve enjoyed playing [...]

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Few kids have longed to lose a tooth more than Genevieve Rose. For pretty much the whole time that Julia has actually been losing teeth, Vivi has been imagining that she’s about to lose one – or several. Today, after a couple weeks of wiggling and waggling, Vivi finally lost a tooth – at school, [...]

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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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An inch of snow, more or less, fell on Northfield yesterday and overnight. The girls couldn’t wait to get outside into it, so we were outside with our sleds by eight. We had a blast. I hope that we have a good winter so this is the first of many great outings in the snow!

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At bedtime the other day, Vivi read me a harrowing story about two crazed badger parents’ diabolical scheme to afflict their daughter with an eating disorder. (*[Bread and Jam for Frances](http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Jam-Frances-Read-Book/dp/0060838000)*)

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Lately, I’ve been taking the scenic route to work, which entails going past the frosted golf course, cutting through a corner of Carleton Arb, and then crossing the soccer fields before hitting the campus sidewalks. Yesterday and today, the impressive residence hall that overlooks the soccer fields – Margaret Evans Hall – has looked amazing [...]

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Right here, the best part of Sunday: a bike ride with the girls up to campus and back.

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