Blowing & Drifting

Today, I was supposed to compete in the first of two ski races this winter, the 26k classic race at the City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis. I was scheduled to ski the 42k classic race at the Mora Vasaloppet next weekend. When I registered for these races last summer, I was very, very excited [...]

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If Mother Nature respected my wishes, She would have blanketed southern Minnesota in snow six weeks ago. In fact, I would have been happy with snow six days ago. But we’re still snowless here, so I figured that a solid gravel-road ride could stand in for my three-year streak of skiing on Christmas Day. It [...]

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After finishing the Almanzo 100 in May, my thoughts turned – as they do – to writing something about it. My two-part race report was a start (May 16 and May 20), but I was lucky enough to be able to turn those blog posts into something more like a real essay, one that’s just [...]

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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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Whenever we get a deluge – as we have twice this week – our backyard turns into a lake, or, today, a river. It’s amazing to see how quickly this happens. Luckily, the water flows away or soaks down soon after the rain stops.

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Today is a pretty big day in the Tassava family: Shannon signed a contract for the book she’s written about modern stay-at-home motherhood. Some of the details are still being ironed out, but the arrangements are firm enough that we can look forward to seeing the book in print sometime in the next year or [...]

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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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This is what I saw as I biked up the hill that ends near my office building: At the end of the day, though, I saw nothing but a wall of early-summer rain. There was nothing to be done about it, so I saddled up and rode home. My pants were damp before I reached [...]

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Three more drawings:

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Julia’s first-grade class had a little picnic today to celebrate the end of the school year. At the end, her teacher lined up all the kids for a class photo, and then invited all the first-graders’ siblings to join in, too. Julia decided Vivi needed a little touching up before the big group shot.

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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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The first phase of Julia’s seventh birthday was a big hit: fun at school, Nonna and Boppa arriving for a visit, pizza for dinner, cupcakes and ice cream for dessert, and presents – lots and lots of great presents. Can you tell she’s enjoying the day? And not only Julia liked the festivities: even Vivi exclaimed, [...]

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A colleague recently mentioned the “30 Days of Creativity,” which is described on its website as “a social initiative encouraging people to create stuff (anything) every day for 30 days in June.” I love these kinds of ideas; they dovetail perfectly with my own motivation (or lack of motivation). I’ve done the “30 Days of [...]

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