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A Bit Brisk

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Zero degrees fahrenheit in Minneapolis.

“I can’t believe you like walking in this weather,” she said.

“I’ve always liked walking when it’s cold.”

“Be careful.”

“I will. Besides, it’s cold enough that if something happens, I’ll freeze, and then they’ll just be able to thaw me out when it’s convenient.”

“Oh, great, now I have to stay up until you get back.”

Posted in Journal at 8:30 am

So This is the New Year

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What a year. The start of 2011 feels like it was ages ago. I spent time in five countries, finished my MBA, completed some huge projects at work, and watched Mathias bloom into a different level of preschooler. 2012 stands before me as a relatively blank slate, which is both exciting and a bit depressing. Momentum isn’t quite as great when one doesn’t know where to go with it, and that’s kind of where I am now.

Since I didn’t blog much this year—not as much because I was always busy as because when I wasn’t busy I was too worn out for writing—here’s a Mark Danielson 2011 Year in Review.


China

Last year at this time I was in Hong Kong. China brought my second of three MBA international programs. It was an interesting trip, although not necessarily in the ways I had expected. Unfortunately, there’s essentially no way I can write about the class and be fair to the students, staff and institutions involved, so I’m just going to leave it with my thought that Carlson needs to continue to develop and flesh out what it wants to accomplish with its China programs.

China

(That’s me running to address a camera issue.)

That said, I met some great people over there, and hope I’m able to keep in touch with them in the future. I’d even say I’d want to visit the mainland again sometime. (I should talk about my interest in North Korea sometime. We’d have to pass through China to get there. But first let’s see how Kim Jong-un works out.) And Hong Kong? It took me a bit to warm up to it, but Hong Kong is amazing.

New Years in Hong Kong


Wisconsin

And, well, this happened:

Scott Walker and 50,000 of his best friends

One of the interesting things about publishing my photos under a Creative Commons license is that they have a weird way of showing up everywhere.


Scandinavia

In the early part of the year I did a funny thing. I applied for another international program and didn’t tell my wife that I had done so. Partially this was out of my own interest to see if I’d be accepted or not—I’d been rejected for the program a couple of years earlier and was curious if I could get in—but the downside of this was I had absolutely no plan once Carlson informed me I could go. After a few awkward conversations with Lisa, who graciously agreed not to kill me, I found myself in Norway.

Norway

And then Sweden.

Sweden

And then Denmark.

Denmark

Yeah, it looks like a vacation, but it was educational, too. Without dissecting this, I feel obligated to pass along that I had a couple of weird “these feel like my people” moments in Copenhagen. I’m German and Norwegian. Go figure.


DC, Baltimore and Philly

If there was a disaster-prone trip this year, it was our train trip to the east coast. And when I say “train trip” what I mean is Mark, Lisa and Mathias drove from Chicago to DC because the Empire Builder was three hours late into Chicago and by the time we got there our family bedroom on the Capitol Limited was heading eastbound without us. I dearly love Chicago and the fine folks who reside there, broad shoulders and all, but I was ready to strangle some Amtrak employees by the time we punted and started searching for a car. (Amtrak’s alternative plan for us would’ve gotten us into DC about 10 hours before we were planning on leaving DC.)

Amtrak into Chicago

The problem once we got out east was that the area was in the grips of a horrible heat wave that, in addition to killing shut-ins everywhere, made being outside pretty much unbearable. It more or less kept us inside in DC, away from the ballpark in Baltimore, and saturated in our own sweat in Philly. Mathias suffering in the heat at Mount Vernon:

Mathias in a sweltering DC

On the bright side, we had an generally excellent day visiting an old college friend in DC, and at least got enough of a taste of Baltimore to know that we needed to visit it again. I hauled us quite a ways from our hotel in Baltimore so we could see this thing:

Baltimore

Despite the heat, I can say that DC and Baltimore were fun cities. Philly, on the other hand, I can probably do without visiting for a while. If I once were the nations’ capitol, and then the nations business capitol, and now were neither, I’d probably have a chip on my shoulder as well. In that respect, it shouldn’t be surprising that the city of brotherly love appears to have so little of it. The cheese steak was good, though.

Wit Wiz


Other Travels

For the first time since we’ve lived here, we joined the Minnesota masses heading up to the lake:

At the lake

As usual, visited Two Rivers and other points around Northeastern Wisconsin.

Neshotah Beach in Two Rivers

And, also as usual, hit Northern Indiana.

Lisa and her cousin Ed

And, not at all usual, visited Gary. Because, you know, Lisa loved Michael Jackson. This is where Jacko spent his formative years:

Gary

And, fucked if I know why, Fargo.

Fargo

Other than that, the gaps between school, work and travel were pretty normal. I had a root canal, started reading fiction again—I blew through the Millennium Series in about a month—and have been on-and-off-again running for much of the year. On that last point my schedule, and a financial unwillingness to join a gym, have conspired against me, but I’m still 10 pounds lighter than I was at the start of the year. (I’d still like to drop another 20.) Other than that, we intentionally had Christmas in Minneapolis this year. My mom was able to come up for a few days, and, despite the complete lack of snow, had a pretty good time.

Mathias and my mom at Nickelodeon Universe

My year-in-review wouldn’t be complete without some comments about my political arc over 2011, which in retrospect is the most tangible thing that’s changed about me over the past year. Which means… This year in review will remain incomplete. (Note to self: I need a private place to write this stuff.) I started the year as a bit of a lefty, and ended as something else.

And with that, hello 2012. You followed an amazing year. No pressure.

Posted in Journal at 7:30 am

TraveLog: The Vacation That Wasn’t

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It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

Tuesday evening in southwestern New Jersey. In some ways this ends the vacation that wasn’t. From a technical standpoint, yes, we did visit Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, but to say we actually got to experience and enjoy the cities involves a bit of overreach. The region has been gripped by a heat wave since we got here–some of the news reports we’ve seen on TV have called this the worst heat wave in over 20 years–and the oppressive heat has made it difficult to do anything.

It’s not just the outdoors that have been a problem. The weather has kept people indoors, crowding the venues where we went to escape the weather. Museums in both Washington and Philadelphia have been packed. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art, where we were this morning, was OK, but that visit was marked by Mathias coming close to putting a stick through Monet’s The Japanese Footbridge, on loan from the MoMA.)

The highlights of the trip, as it happens, have come from visiting people we know out here. We got to visit an old college friend, Brian, and his wife Kara in DC, and a friend of Lisa’s family up near Philly. Aside from that, we’ve plodding from place to place, taking break after break to escape from the heat, seeing a lot, but experiencing very little. Mathias has been a trooper, but an overheated preschooler does not contribute to a great trip.

We’re already talking about coming out here again a few years from now. Mathias may be a more appropriate age to enjoy some of what we’re seeing, and I can better plan for weather, Amtrak delays and other variables. This trip would’ve been aggressive for me traveling solo. I’m not sure what I was thinking thinking we could do all of this with a four-year-old in tow.

~ ~ ~

And now it’s sad that I have to do this, but I have a paper to write for my last MBA class. More later.

Posted in Journal,Travelog at 3:10 am

TraveLog: The Road to D.C.

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Well, we’re in DC. The original plan was for us to arrive here on Amtrak yesterday afternoon, but the fatal flaw with that plan was having “plan” and “Amtrak” in the same sentence. The Empire Builder rolled into Chicago over three hours late, meaning our connecting train, the Capitol Limited, was already rolling east without us. Amtrak basically gave us three options: Take the train to New York and then connect to DC, a route that would get us into DC well past 11:00 Thursday night; stay at an Amtrak-booked hotel in the Chicago ‘burbs, and then run coach on the Capitol Limited (i.e. the “overnight coach with a four-year-old” option); or get a refund and make our own way to DC. While the overnight train trip was supposed to be one of the highlights for the trip for Mathias, with our planned option off the table, I wanted us to have control over our own destiny, so I got a one-way rental car from O’Hare and got us the heck out of there.

Additional train wrecks followed the missed Amtrak connection. After a tedious cab ride out to O’Hare that included the cab driver having to stop for gas, we got the car and made it to South Bend, Indiana, which seemed as good of a place to overnight as any. 1:30 in the morning is not a great time to find out that all the hotels are booked solid, but they were, and it took six hotel stops for us to finally grab a $140 room at the Comfort Suites—the last open room in the hotel. The next morning we learned there was a twirling competition in town, which made the breakfast area of our hotel look a bit like a scene out of Little Miss Sunshine, but at least the kids were quiet.

The drive across Pennsylvania was interrupted by a huge accident backup near Pittsburgh that cost us well over an hour and a half, and a construction backup in Maryland cost us another hour. In the end, it took some automotive contortion for me to get the rental back to Budget by a time reasonably approximate to its due date, only to find their “24-hour” operation at Reagan National unstaffed.

And so we spent today in DC. We drove around, visited the Air & Space Museum (which was packed), and did our best to avoid the heat. We’re camping in a friend’s house out here, and by all indications, Mathias seems to prefer lounging on couch in air conditioning than heading outside. And that’s something I completely understand.

Sometime within the next hour the folks who own this place should show up, and we’ll see what plans we can put together for tomorrow. Then Saturday night we’ll be heading up to Baltimore for a day there, and after that it’s a couple days in Philadelphia. If the heat will hold back for a bit it should be fun, but if not, I expect we’ll be staying indoors a lot.

Posted in Journal,Travelog at 9:49 pm

Summer

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I’d been hoping to get a few more posts in since returning from Europe, but life has been pretty stacked up.  There are a few papers that are suddenly going to be due in the next week or so, too, so posting here is a break more than anything.

Mathias had his fourth birthday party last weekend, a bit later than his actual birthday due to me being in Europe.  We’ve had birthday parties for him before, of course, but this one seemed to be a bit more legitimate due to the depth with which Mathias seemed to understand that this party was happening because he was getting older and/or bigger.  Anyway, it was a tremendously unorganized affair–we had snacks, but the kids basically could just go run anywhere whenever they wanted–which seemed to suit both the kids and parents just fine.

Birthday

So, while last weekend was great, this one kind of sucked.  My Saturn blew its engine in central Wisconsin, and we’re now looking for a new car.

I have an irrational emotional attachment to my car.  Here’s what I posted about it on Facebook:

The car has scaled the Rockies; touched both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico; survived traffic in Los Angeles, Chicago and Manhattan; driven up Highway 1 and down Interstate 95; taken my wife on her first trip to the Badlands; taken my son on his first camping trip; and, of course, reliably carried me to work and school for over seven years. It now sits in Owen, Wisconsin.

I briefly looked at Saabs available in the Twin Cities, but there’s not much worth buying that doesn’t exceed my broke-grad-student debt tolerance.  The rental has to be returned to Wausau on Saturday, so it’s time to get looking.

Posted in Journal,mathias at 12:03 am

Departure

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Well, I guess one more entry from Copenhagen.  I’m in my usual breakfast spot, only this time, for the first time in over a week, I’m not surrounded by classmates.  About half the class is in transit at this moment.  Me, I have a later departure today, so I’m leaving with a large pack of folks around 11:00.

Programs like this can be a weird beast.  It’s rare that one gets a chance to intensely study a specific subject in a foreign place with a group of folks who are, at the beginning of the trip, largely strangers.  This class represents the sixth such experience I’ve had–three in high school and three as a grad student–and it seems the ending of these brief periods always define themselves much more distinctly than other life experiences.  The difference, maybe, is that they create a completely transitory community, one that can only exist for a brief period before scattering.  (I’m somewhat reminded of that town in Canada that was intentionally shut down after the local mine closed.)

There’s also a weird quality to time on trips like these, especially when away from one’s loved ones.  I’m not just talking about the general acceleration that happens as a trip nears its end, but how the timeline of the trip itself begins to contort.  I’m looking forward to seeing my wife and son later today, but in some ways it feels like I was with them just a few days ago.  Oslo, on the other hand, seems years distant.  History as I feel it is different from what clearly must be true.

I have a ridiculous amount to write about from the class and the trip.  (I’ve apparently been using “ridiculous” quite a bit over the past two weeks.  Also, “rabid.”)  The subject matter may have to wait a bit, as I’m really split on a number of items covered in the class.  There’s something going on here, but the idea of corporate social responsibility, and the way many organizations are approaching the topic, may be distracting people from deeper, more important issues. As for the cities and the experiences, I’m already arriving at the point where I’ll need my photos to remind me.

Eight hours to Amsterdam, 18 to Minneapolis. More later.

Posted in Education,Journal,Travelog at 8:58 am

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Saturday morning, the start of my last full day in Copenhagen.  I’m in the breakfast area of the Savoy Hotel–or, as I’ve been describing it, Lake and Cedar with fewer dead people–and am only a few hours away from my last MBA class.

My initial reaction to Copenhagen was anything but positive–it seemed just like Oslo and Copenhagen, except dirtier, with uglier architecture, and with graffiti everywhere–but I’ve softened on it since, and now it may actually be my favorite city of the three we’ve visited.  The city has a bit of a New-York-in-the-1970s-vibe that is kind of endearing.  One key problem with that analogy, though, is that I’ve never felt unsafe here.  I commented to a fellow traveler last night that I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a cop, and he mentioned that he couldn’t, either.

The food here, especially that of the baked variety, is great. The coffee is a crime against humanity.

Well, it’s approaching 9:00, and I have to return my bike to the central train station before I head to class today.  (The hours for pretty much everything other than alcohol are inconvenient.  Most stores are open from 10:00-6:00, a fact that has foiled us almost every day.)  I have to be going.  This will probably be my last post from Copenhagen.

More later.

Posted in Journal,Travelog at 8:53 am

Stockholm, Part II

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Monday morning in Stockholm. Once again I’m blogging at breakfast.  The second week of the program is officially underway — in just under a half hour we’re off to more site visits, and then this evening we’ll be on the overnight train to Copenhagen.

Stockholm has been amazing, and I’ll definitely have to get Lisa and M over here sometime.  The weekend was a mix of relaxing on the islands, museum hopping, bars, and amazing food.  (I had three fantastic meals on Saturday, and that’s not counting breakfast.)  The weekend will likely be better described through commentary through photos, though, so I’ll wait until I have time to do that to share more.

In one way this trip has been like both of the other Carlson trips I’ve been on:  It’s long and fast at the same time.  It feels like we’ve been here forever, but at the same time it’s difficult to believe it’s more than half over.

Well, I need to finish packing. More later.

Posted in Journal,Travelog at 8:43 am

Stockholm

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Friday morning in Stockholm. Once again I find myself blogging in the breakfast area, but I guess that’s OK as I’m apparently one of the early risers on this trip.  When I did the Carlson seminar to India there was a huge group that gathered each morning to discuss the previous day’s events, but this is tuning out to be more of a dissection-over-beer kind of trip.

Stockholm was kind of a shock, especially after the relative Portland-like style of Oslo.  The first day in Oslo I commented–jokingly–that the city appeared to be populated by slackers.  That cannot be said here.   This city seems to have more in common with London and New York than it does with the capitol to the east.

Today we have a couple of site visits, a class, and discussion on what the hell to do over the weekend.  There’s no shortage of options for the weekend, so we’ll have to plan carefully… And aggressively.

Well, the breakfast crowd is showing up. More later.

Posted in Journal,Travelog at 9:10 am

TraveLog: Oslo

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Wednesday morning in Oslo. I just got back from a 45 minute jog around parts of the city center, which was both awesome–hey, I’m jogging in Oslo–and horrible–bricks and pavers everywhere. I’m currently in the midst of breakfast, which, aside from the time opened up by rising early and depriving myself of sleep, is pretty much the only open time I have here.

After a gentle opening on Monday, the class started in earnest yesterday. I obviously can’t speak about the organizations we visited, but wanted to say days like yesterday kind of justify the decision to pursue a MBA. (Hopefully I’ll still feel that way when my crushing debt load hits around January.) The fact we are in class does make it kind of difficult to see the city–I’m not complaining, we of course knew that beforehand–but with with many of the museums and such closed on Monday, and shutting around 6:00 weekdays after that, we’ve been faced with some extremely narrow windows to take in the city and its culture. That led to things like lunch yesterday when a group of us decided to skip food and do the National Gallery in 20 minutes. If given appropriate time, we would’ve been there for at least a couple of hours.

Today we have more site visits, and tomorrow we’re off for Stockholm. I’m excited to go to Sweden, but at the same time am sad about leaving, as I was just starting to get a feel for this city, it’s people and its rhythms.

Well, I need to get ready for one of our site visits today, one for which I may have to be politely combative.  More later.

Posted in Education,Journal,Travelog at 8:30 am
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