Blowing & Drifting

By 1995, I had followed the Tour de France semi-seriously – or about as seriously as you could from rural Michigan before the Internet – for about a decade, going back to 1986, when Greg LeMond won the first of his three Tour titles and established the United States as a force in international cycling. [...]

[Read more →]

I hardly ever use my work phone, an ugly 90s era chunk of gray plastic and buttons. After getting a weird cold-call from an IT vendor the other day, I decided to put the phone out of sight and mind. Into the drawer it went! I. Thankfully I could still hear it ring today. Wrong [...]

[Read more →]

After dinner, Julia came up and asked me this: Daddy, what if a lady who owned a hair salon was forced to play a game of basketball, and she came to the game with two combs, and she dribbled the ball with one comb and she used both combs to pick up the ball and [...]

[Read more →]

Sometime in the last couple weeks, we finally stopped using the “baby” monitors to listen to the girls in their room as they sleep – or don’t sleep. We didn’t decide that one night was the last night of using them. Rather, we just stopped trying to tune them into the base station in the [...]

[Read more →]

Like many localities, Northfield is currently a site of hard-fought political campaigning. Some local candidates have good ideas, while others have bad ones, but none have the sort of bold ideas that will lead the city through the challenge of a prime-numbered calendar year. Into this breach, I now step with a bold idea to [...]

[Read more →]

This kid is six years old today – plus about six hours, I think, right now. She is a smart, funny, busy, athletic, beautiful, wonderful girl. She makes our lives infinitely richer. And she poses for a pretty good picture.

[Read more →]

Parenting (and childhood) is full of milestones – crawling, walking, toilet training, kindergarten, riding a bike, reading, et cetera – but we’ve just passed one that’s overlooked: Julia and Genevieve can both now buckle their own seatbelts. I am still a little bit surprised by how great this is: they climb in the back seat, [...]

[Read more →]

My ride on Sunday was notable in that I finally got my first dog bite. Riding down a stretch of road I’ve covered many times, a fairly large Lab-ish dog came barreling out of a farmyard, barking like a maniac. White Fang headed me off, then circled back as I slowed down, studied my legs, [...]

[Read more →]

So today I got up at 4:15 a.m. so that I could get ready for a long bike ride that was scheduled for 5. This was obviously a stupid thing to do, but the early rising paid big dividends. Along with two friends, I enjoyed a wonderful outing, maybe my easiest and most enjoyable long [...]

[Read more →]

It’s the time of the year when vacation photos are as common on your favorite social media network as photos of babies. For me, none strike a chord more than pictures of Lake Superior. We didn’t take a vacation on the big lake this year, but I hope we can next summer. It’s been too [...]

[Read more →]

Customer: “I’d like a large ice coffee.” Barista: “Would you like milk in that? Whole, skim, or cream?” C: “Two percent?” B: “Sorry, we don’t have two percent. I could make it by mixing skim and whole milk.” C: “Cold milk?” B: “Whole milk. I could make two percent by mixing skim and whole.” C: [...]

[Read more →]

Spend considerable time at the pool. Possess unusually large hands and feet. Relish traveling quickly under my own power. Make funny faces while exercising. Enjoy wearing shiny eyewear. Have a totally hairless torso.

[Read more →]

The Tassava family have visited the Northfield city pool almost every day this summer. I’ve been there with the girls at least three times a week since June, and Shannon goes just as often – or more, since we’re often there together. All these visits mean that the girls have spent a ton of time [...]

[Read more →]

Ten days, my front bike wheel locked up during my morning commute. The wheel had been acting funny on a ride the night before, but it froze completely when I was about half way to work. I had to ride the rest of the way with the wheel barely held into the fork – a [...]

[Read more →]

After finishing my workout at the gym on Wednesday afternoon – one of the greaterrible cross-training sessions masterminded by Thad Caron, a pretty good personal trainer – I wondered why I was feeling so goddamn wasted. Every muscle group ached, and my arms and legs had that heavy overused feeling. So I tallied up the [...]

[Read more →]