Blowing & Drifting

This hill is short and not very steep, but I love the way it seems to just end, rather than start to descend - in my imagination, like some of the great summits in the Tour de France. This one’s about 99% shorter than those climbs, though…

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She’s a lovable, loving, smart, and funny kid, but Vivi can also be pretty rough on the old psyche. Last night’s hour-long meltdown was just the latest evidence of this fact. I managed to survive and even get her into bed without reinforcements (Shannon, beer, the National Guard). After falling asleep – still crying softly, [...]

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The U.P. in general and the Keweenaw in particular are full of amazing vistas. Here are a few of them plus a stray notable photo or two.

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While in the U.P., Shannon and I found it pretty easy to take scads of pictures of the girls, each other, my mom, and the girls’ cousins (and maybe a stray shot of my sister). Here are are the best ones.

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location – Houghton: mainland; Hancock: peninsula personal history – Houghton: would live there (t.b.d.) ; Hancock: lived there (1987-1991) high school mascot – Houghton: Gremlins; Hancock: Bulldogs higher education – Houghton: Michigan Technological University; Hancock: Finlandia University class – Houghton: white collar; Hancock: blue collar topography – Houghton: north-facing hills; Hancock: south-facing hills main street [...]

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In our three days in the Copper Country, I want more than anything else to soak up the atmosphere – warm days, cool nights, forests, the lake, lots of stars, surprisingly cool towns – and to hang out with my mom, my sister, and her two kids. But I also want to make sure that [...]

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Today was a Very Big Day for bike-riding at our house. After a week’s hard work, Julia mastered the ability of starting all by herself, meaning that she no longer needs a parent to help her start, go, or stop. She wins the day’s Overall Achievement Award. If anything, Vivi did even better. She’s been [...]

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Right now, a Northfield cyclist named Ben Oney is 1900 miles into Tour Divide, an insane bike race that starts in Banff, Alberta, and follows the Continental Divide all the way down Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican border. (You can track Ben online; he’s currently about 1,900 miles – yes, miles – into [...]

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All in all, today was a pretty good Father’s Day, weirdly crummy weather notwithstanding. Shannon gave me a great book of photos from the last year, Julia made a wonderful book about me (scans to come!), and all three gave me some new swim trunks to replace my faded, out-of-style old pair and show off [...]

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An amazing and beautiful year in the back yard of a house in Oslo.

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I’m having a surprisingly hard time writing up a post about my late grandfather. He was a complicated guy, and I have complicated feelings about him. So while I overthink and under-write that post, here’s another picture of him, this time with my grandma, Lenore, on what must have been one of her birthdays: she [...]

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My all-time favorite bike-ride view, atop a ridge south of town and looking north up Ibson Avenue toward a little old farmstead (with a bright red-barn visible at center) and, in the background, the low sheds of a big industrial turkey farm. When I see this sight, I’m about four miles from home.

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Today the family twice ventured downtown to attend a fraction of the million or so events that constitute Northfield’s biggest festival, the Defeat of Jesse James Days. As I wrote last year, DJJD is a huge celebration centering on the town’s counterattack and defeat of Jesse James and his gang when they tried to rob the [...]

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With summer 2010 now apparently over in a few gusts of wind, I might as well list a few items which should be invented before summer 2011 comes. 1. A good way to store plastic wading pools in the garage. We currently try to hang the pool on a regular old storage hook, which works, [...]

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Our first-ever family trip to the Minnesota Zoo was quite an outing. Many many animals seen, three and a half hours on our feet, five or six miles walked, four snacks and four lunches consumed, scores of other families dodged, dozens of prairie dogs oohed and ahhed over, several big felines gaped at, one terrifying shark [...]

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