Blowing & Drifting

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 [...]

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To give Shannon a little space to work on her book, I took Thursday off and headed up to Minneapolis with the girls, planning to ride the light rail train from the Mall of America to downtown and back, then hit the American Girl store at the mall and have lunch with a too-infrequently-seen friend. [...]

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Belatedly, here a few photos from last week’s grand visit to Walla Walla, where I enjoyed a fantastic conference at Whitman College, great networking socializing, excellent food and drink, and some wonderful scenery. A view from our turboprop flight from Seattle to Walla Walla: circular fields irrigated by water drawn from some of the Columbia [...]

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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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Trying to accommodate my athletic-endeavor verbosity, I’ve divided my race report into two pieces: this summary of the race and a separate, more detailed description of the experience, to follow soon. These 800-odd words are the one to read if you’re just passingly curious. And if you’re not even that, I don’t blame you! The [...]

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The trip home from Moorhead today was about as smooth as it could be, given everyone’s boredom, the need for frequent bathroom breaks, and generalized eagerness to be home. The girls were pretty good about occupying themselves in the backseat – Julia with a trove of new Junie B. Jones books and Vivi with, at [...]

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Prior to this trip to Moorhead, the girls had only stayed in a hotel once, when we were stranded by a colossal snowstorm in Rogers, Minnesota, as we tried to get home after spending Christmas in Moorhead. They were really little then, so it didn’t go well. This stay went much better. They enjoyed the [...]

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I love cloudscapes, but I am usually admiring them from below. During the flight home from Burlington today, I was able to see some amazing cloudscapes from above, somewhere over between BTV and ORD. If I were a pilot, I wouldn’t fly for the huge salaries, the easy hours, the low-stress work environment, or the [...]

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A picture Vivi made for me while I was out of town. I love the way the three people (left to right: me, Vivi, and Julia – I think) are all saying something: “Yep” and “Nope” and “It’s Okay. Julia must be reaching out to hold Vivi’s hand (the red arrow), while I’m suffering some [...]

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I took Columbus Day off to (try to) do a 100-mile “century” bike ride. A big loop east, north, and west of Northfield got me to that distance goal, and the combination of long stretches of flats and some judicious hammering helped me hit my average-pace goal, too. The keys, I found, were choosing a big-but-not-too-big [...]

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Throughout my ride on Friday – the longest ride I’ve ever undertaken, in terms of both distance and time – I thought of the slogan on a sticker sold by XXC Mag, a great publication on long-distance off-road cycling: “Sometimes ‘fun’ hurts pretty f*cking bad.” I wasn’t going fast enough to be in agony, at least [...]

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If mining made the Upper Peninsula great in the period up to about World War II, it’s logging that – along with, arguably, tourism – that is keeping the place viable. My late grandfather spent his whole life handling logs, either skidding them out of the woods with horses or driving log trucks from the [...]

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