There’s nothing remarkable or special about this photo, taken during our Christmas visit to my parents’ in 2008, except for that it was the last photo I took of my dad before he died.

2009 was a crazy year of ups and downs. Mathias’ health, my dad’s suicide, a new job, multiple trips to India for work and school, and all kinds of interesting things with friends and family… I feel like I should feel something about the year, but I don’t. 2009 happened, but it doesn’t feel like it was ever here, and January, February? Those months feel like they were decades ago, almost a different life.

So, goodbye? Good riddance? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I care. There’s a decade some would say we’re bringing to a close as well, but you know what? Whatever.

What’s next?

So, uh, hi. Turns out I didn’t have much time to write over the past few months. Work has been its typical crazy self, and on the MBA side of things, it turns out that I can probably handle seven credits—which means no more than two classes at a time—but eight credits is one credit too many, especially when one of the courses is a finance class capable of threatening both life and limb. I survived the semester, though, and am back with the living for the next few weeks, before all the craziness begins again.

As hectic and sometimes stressful as life has been, it beats being bored. I don’t know what a typical life would be, but I’m glad that I can’t say I have one. (Key goal for 2010: Get my wife, who has been watching me run all over the place for work and school, to get to say the same thing.)

Thanksgiving was fine aside from Mathias making another asthma-related trip to the emergency room. My mom seemed to handle the first Thanksgiving without her husband of many years, as did everyone else, all things considered. The absence of my dad is still somewhat weird for me—we had broken things off months before his death, but I had expected him to still live many years, and had just a little hope, however slight, that he would’ve pulled out of his decades-long decline. There is still an abruptness to it all.

Work is challenging and fantastic at the same time. As I write this I’m on a British Airways 747 somewhere over Germany, heading back home after a week in India. (There were a few times this past week where I had to stop and think, holy shit, I actually do this for a living. The flip side, of course, is that I had a total of roughly four hours of downtime my entire week in India, so I’m looking forward to having Sunday off.) I have a great team in Bangalore, great people to work with in Minnesota, and all kinds of interesting (and sometimes stressful) problems to deal with. There are times I feel completely out of my depth… But it’s exciting, challenging, and, well, I do believe I’m getting better at what I do, so there’s that, too.

And with that, I’m heading back to my email. I’d been hoping to use my flight time to get close to inbox zero, but there’s a frustrating number of items—almost 100—that require me to have web access to close them out. I guess I know what I’ll be doing during my layover in London.

More later. Really!

So, I thought I’d interrupt this three-class semester to let you know that Mathias played a joke on me at bedtime tonight.  I handed him his sippy cup full of milk, and he turned it over and started sucking on the bottom of the cup.  He waited until he knew I was looking at him, pulled the cup away, said “ha ha,” turned it over and started drinking properly.

Maybe Lisa has had something like this happen before, but it was a first for me.

I’m on a huge spring cleaning binge, five months late. So, uh, anyone want some old magazines?

So, it was my dad’s birthday today. Not much else to say about that, except that it looks like everyone in the family did OK.

So, it was an interesting weekend. Lisa was down in Madison catching up with her folks, leaving me with our rambunctious little toddler. This was a fact that was both fun and challenging, but on the whole the weekend went well. We spent a lot of time outside biking around the lakes, cooking, shopping at Target, and, uh, painting the kitchen (without Lisa knowing we were doing so).

Generally speaking, I’ve found Mathias is happy whenever he can be doing whatever his mom or dad is doing. In most cases it’s enough just to let him mimic what we’re doing—he had a dry paint brush for much of the painting, for example—but every now and then it’s not enough for him to mimic: he needs to have his hands in whatever Lisa or I happen to be doing. This is most problematic when cooking, but I’ve managed to stop that issue—for now—by giving him a perch or location where he can safely see what’s going on.

In the meantime, we’ve installed a child door on the entrance to the kitchen so we don’t get a repeat of what I found him doing when I got out of the shower on Sunday: He’d pulled one of his little toy chairs up to the stove, climbed up, and disassembled one of the burners to see the “clock” inside. (The metal base of the burners kind of looks like a dial, and Mathias is obsessed with anything that looks the least-bit clock-like.) Later in the day I found him on top of one of the kitchen counters, placing plastic bowls in our toaster oven. I have to give him a little credit. If he’s going for disaster, at least he’s aiming high.

~ ~ ~

If there was an actual train wreck over the weekend, it was dinner on Saturday. I decided for us to try the Tin Fish—an occasionally decent restaurant in a fantastic location that keeps us suckers coming back—and came prepared for the long wait I expected with Cheerios, milk, and other items to keep Mathias distracted. It took about an hour and a half to get dinner, but, regrettably, the distractions stopped working on Mathias at the 1:15 mark. The last 15 minutes before we were served were among the longest the entire weekend. Mathias became chipper again once offered french fries, but he wouldn’t touch his fish chips.

The trip to the Mermaid Car Wash on Monday deserves an honorable mention, I suppose: It turned out the car wash was a bit, uh, advanced for Mathias, and while he definitely enjoyed watching the inner workings of the car wash, he was basically horrified to see our car get pulled through it without us in it. So, not quite the father/son bonding exercise I thought it would be. Maybe a year from now he’ll find it more interesting, and acceptable.

So, I’m pretty much sick and tired of hearing about Michael Jackson, and dread the “human interest stories” about the fate of his kids and his estate that I’m sure we’ll be assaulted with over the coming weeks and months. While I fully recognize that he played a huge part in pop culture history, and essentially acted as an informal ambassador of the United States (right alongside Coca Cola and McDonald’s), I think we’re at the point there are more important things to talk about.

So, CNN, and whoever else is still hammering on the story, for the sake of humanity, please stop.  (Anything new in Iran these days?)

~ ~ ~

One of the reasons I may be a bit more insulated from—and annoyed by—the grief around Jackson’s death is that I never really liked his music that much, and hence never understood what all the fuss was about. I was in grade school when Thriller came out, and despite not liking his music at all, finally relented to some friends’ requests and watched the video on MTV. (We didn’t have cable back then, so I had to watch it at a neighbor’s.) I was pretty unengaged from the start, and then the zombies happened. You know what? I never liked zombies. I wasn’t scared by them or anything, I just thought they were… lame.

And that’s pretty much what I thought about the video. And the album. And those stupid fucking white gloves some of the kids were wearing. I’ve stayed pretty much of that opinion ever since, although I did think it was kind of funny when his hair started on fire, but only because he wasn’t hurt.

So, do I think it’s sad that he died?  Of course.  He had a strange life, and had to put up with a lot of things that no human being should have to deal with, but in those regards was nowhere near being unique.  If anyone’s death should’ve gotten attention over the past week, it should’ve been for the man who’s actions contributed to thousands of lives lost in the Vietnam war, and then potentially saved as many through his work at the World Bank.  But did you hear much about Robert McNamara? Of course not. There was a pop star to talk about.

The original plan for the Fourth of July weekend had been to take Mathias on his first camping expedition, but those plans had to be scuttled due to a combination of everyone in the house getting sick—first Mathias, and then his mom and I in rapid succession—as well as the threat of severe weather. (Trying to camp with a toddler is one thing. Trying to camp with him in a thunderstorm is quite another.) We still had a reasonably fun and productive weekend, though, starting with setting up our tent in the sunroom and camping there.

Mathias loved the tent, so we have that going for us. We hope to get him out in the great outdoors before the end of the month.

On Thursday evening, despite coughs coming from each and every family member, we took Mathias out for his first bike ride. We decided not to do the yuppie-bike-trailer thing, instead opting for the more traditional (and harder to find) rear-mounted child seat. Mathias enjoyed it—he gave us a number of “wows” over the course of the ride—although he proved to be extremely fussy about who was riding which bike. The seat was mounted on Lisa’s bike, but Mathias would flip out whenever he saw me riding on my bike. We solved this by me switching to Lisa’s bike—which does not fit me well at all—and that more or less satisfied him, although he flipped out on a couple of occasions when Lisa rode in front or behind of me. (I’ve noticed this is somewhat typical of him these days. When I’m around he likes to be by me, but he always wants his mom in close proximity.) This may turn into one of those things where it’s easier for Lisa or me to do something with Mathias, rather than both of us trying to do something with him. We’ll see.

Our destination that beautiful Thursday evening was the Tin Fish at Lake Calhoun. Once getting there we stood in line for 25 minutes to place our order, only to be told there would then be an additional 30 minute wait for our food. Mathias was way past his regular dinnertime, so we opted for hot dogs, which were ready. They were horrible.

On Saturday we decided to ignore the clouds and sprinkles and head down to the Minnesota Zoo. The poor weather was actually beneficial for us, as it probably would’ve been more difficult to wrangle Mathias if the zoo had been busy. As it was, we spent plenty of time trying to keep him from crawling into the exhibits. Next time we go, he’s going to be on a bungee cord tied to my belt. And we’ll probably avoid the butterfly exhibit.

Saturday evening brought fireworks at Powderhorn Park, and Mathias up way past his bedtime.

Beyond that, most of the weekend was spent cleaning, and by cleaning, I mean by renting commercial-grade cleaning equipment to try to rid the house of pet dander. It’s not clear how much of an impact all this effort will have, but if all goes well, we hope to have Mathias off of the daily nebulizer treatments by the end of the summer. The nebulizer treatments over the past week have been especially difficult, as Mathias has to go on an additional treatment whenever he’s sick. The additional treatment pushes each neb session to a full half hour—we have to go through two of them every day—and the drug has the side effect of making him extremely hyper. As an added bonus, we’re supposed to give him the second treatment just before bedtime, so getting him down has been a lot of work.

In short, we’re sick of the nebs. I miss my cat, and Lisa misses her pigs, but if we can get Mathias better by not having them in the house, it’ll be worth it.

Wow, this turned into a long entry. I guess I should quit and go do something productive. More later.

With all of the time I’ve been spending on planes lately, I’ve had the chance to see a large number of movies I wouldn’t have the time for otherwise. So, in lightning-round format, here are five reviews of movies I’ve seen on small, glowing screens about two feet from my face.

• The Water Horse — I didn’t have sound for this one (I didn’t need it), and didn’t really have a choice as to whether I could watch it or not. 2/10.
• The International — “Hey, our plot doesn’t make any sense, let’s shoot it in a bunch of glamorous locations and hope people don’t notice.” 4/10.
• Watchmen — Meh. Not sure what the big deal was. 6/10.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — Not Fincher’s best, not Fincher’s worst.  A strange, lovely and–of course–curious film, one I suspect could grow on me. 7/10.
• Milk — Great acting by Sean Penn, although the film seems to skip over a lot. 8/10.

I wonder what I’ll see on the way back.

Despite the scheduling complexity in my life these days–one day this past week had meetings at both 7:30 AM and 10:30 PM–I’m trying to set aside 10-15 minutes every day to write.  So much going on, so little time to write or even think about it.

~ ~ ~

Today is my second Father’s Day as a father, and my first Father’s Day without one.  Not much else to say about that.

Yesterday was Mathias’ second birthday.  We had a small party, and my mom was up in the Cities to celebrate it, along with Ben and his kids.  It was a lot of fun, but to be honest Mathias and Ben’s kids seemed to have just as much fun, if not more, running around the mega mall later in the evening.  (They closed the Lego store.)   Hopefully there’ll be some time to meet up with Ben and his family tomorrow morning before they head back to Two Rivers…

…And before I head back to Bangalore later in the afternoon.  I’ll be gone for a week.  This will be my first trip during monsoon season, so it should be interesting.  I’ll have a really packed schedule while there, but hopefully I’ll be able to get out a little bit, something I really wasn’t able to do last time I was in town.

Last weekend we were in Two Rivers and Green Bay, in what was essentially an in-and-out stop to hit the Day Out With Thomas being held at the National Railroad Museum.  Mathias had fun, but we’ll have to go again when he’s old enough to remember it.

~ ~ ~

I can’t believe it’s almost July already.  It feels like the summer has just begun.  If I have time one of the evenings I’m in India, I may try figuring out when and where Lisa, Mathias and I can go camping.  I better do that soon, as before we know it I’ll be back in school and our brief Minnesotan summer will have faded to Fall.