We had a crazy weekend driving back and forth across Wisconsin, and to some extent are still recovering.  It was a lot of driving for three days:  On Friday evening we left the Twin Cities to visit Lisa’s grandmother in Wausau, and on Saturday headed to northeastern Wisconsin to visit my mom, my uncle Eric (who just happened to be in town the same time), and visit with friends.  We weren’t there long, though, and on Monday headed back across Wisconsin–mostly on two-lane roads because of the route–to take Mathias to an allergy specialist in La Crosse.  From there, it was back up the river to Minneapolis.

I’d like some time off–not a vacation but just some time to rest–but things are not letting up.  Lisa is changing jobs next week, which means Mathias will be changing his preschool as well.  Due to scheduling conflicts at work, I’m starting to go back to the office late at night for meetings with India–I’ll actually be heading there in a half an hour–and in a few weeks the fall semester will be underway again at Carlson.  On top of all that, we’ll be making our annual trip to Door County in a couple of weeks, and this weekend will have Lisa heading to Madison (sans toddler) to visit her mom, who’s recovering from surgery.  I’m thinking of taking some days off at some point just so I can have some alone time and catch up on stuff around the house…  But I need to reserve as much vacation as possible for the China seminar I’ll be attending for school in January.

Have I mentioned I’ll be going to China in January?  I’ll be in Hong Kong for about five days at the start of the year, and then in Guangzhou for about a week and a half after that.  So, there’s a lot coming up in the next few months.

If you had asked me two weeks ago what I expected to be doing this evening, I would’ve told you that Lisa, Mathias and I would be camping with my mom in the Black Hills, but that was before my mom took a tumble off of her bike, resulting in a sprain that scuttled her involvement in the trip. Since Lisa and I have already been to the Badlands and the Black Hills, and since Mathias is still too young to remember much (if any) of the trip anyway, we decided it didn’t make sense to haul ourselves all the way across the boring side of South Dakota to go camping.

But we still wanted to go on a trip this week, so we now find ourselves camping (metaphorically, not literally) at a ski resort on Minnesota’s North Shore. (Hey, it was available on short notice.) And aside from our hotel, which is a bit weird, the trip has turned out pretty well so far.

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On Sunday we departed the Twin Cities and headed up to Duluth. Between the two of us, Lisa and I know a couple hundred folks who just love Duluth, but I don’t think either one of us have really fallen for the city in the same way. If anything, we’ve been a bit perplexed about what people find to be so great about the city, but we tried to go back in with open minds. The Fourth of July was a good day to visit, as it provided us an excuse to hang out on the riverfront and watch fireworks, which Mathias loved. Other than that, we basically walked around a lot, trying to crack the nut that’s Duluth.

Before bolting for the North Shore on Monday afternoon, we stopped at the Duluth Depot to hit the children’s and train museums there. The Lake Superior Railroad Museum has an impressive collection, but the lighting in the main shed made the place a bit creepy, and that, along with the huge trains and the penetrating silence of the place, kind of freaked Mathias out, so we didn’t stay as long as expected. On the flip side, it was a bit of a challenge to extract him from the children’s museum, so the morning was by no means a wash.

After a quick lunch in the canal district, we headed up to Lutsen to check in at our hotel, and from there headed up to Grand Marais, where we had dinner at Sven & Ole’s and watched Mathias throw rocks into the lake for over an hour. Today had another rock-throwing marathon, this time at Cascade River State Park, followed by a drive up the shore to Canada, plus brief visits at a bunch of other parks along the way. (Mathias was sleeping in the car, which obviously limited what we could do.) Tonight we had a catastrophically bad dinner at our hotel, but I’ll save that rant for Trip Advisor. (I’ll probably complain about the wifi as well, which exists only in theory, not in practice. I probably won’t be posting this in real time tonight.)

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Tomorrow should bring more trips up and down MN-61, followed by the short trip home. Nothing too exciting overall, but it’s been nice to get out of Minneapolis with the family for a bit.

And now, I should get some sleep.

Well, we had quite a week in New York. Despite the challenges of traveling with a three-year-old, we had a pretty good time, and Mathias seemed to get a kick out of our hotels, of all things. While we did make one brief trip into the city, for the most part we stayed up in Westchester and Connecticut, places we could, in theory, be living in a few years. Lisa has pretty much bought in on Westchester county, although depending on what we can find about air quality—a concern since we’re pretty confident at this point that Mathias has at least a mild form of asthma—I may make a push for Brooklyn at some point. Some of the communities we saw in Westchester and Connecticut were pretty nice, but in some ways I feel like moving there would be like running a marathon only to settle down one foot short of the finish line.

One area I may want to look into—and I’m kind of surprised I’m saying this—is Queens. I drove through it after dropping off Lisa and Mathias at JFK, and, you know, it didn’t look that bad. On the flip side, we are no longer considering Staten Island—it came somewhat recommended by someone who grew up there, which, in retrospect probably biased that person’s opinion. Lisa had some pretty grim comments on New Jersey that I generally agree with, but I may still be open to looking at some of the leafy areas to the north. Again, though, the end result would be the city taunting me every day on the commute home, but that’s life.

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Our travels between Minnesota and New York provided some of the most unexpected events of the trip. Lisa and Mathias went by air, which aside from Delta trying to put Mathias in a seat a number of rows away from his mom, generally went pretty well. The return trip, however, was kind of eventful. About 25 minutes into their trip they were pulled back to JFK, where they found the plane surrounded by cop cars, and, to the best Lisa could tell, someone was removed from the plane. They were then hit by a weather delay, and when all was said and done, they spent almost nine hours on a flight that should have taken less than three.

While me driving out by car saved us a fair amount of money, and give me the opportunity to visit friends in Ohio and Wisconsin, Indiana made my car pay for it. Not only did my air conditioning go out, but a dump truck launched a large rock at my windshield, putting an inch-and-a-half spider-web crack right in the middle of it. So, uh, time for me to call Progressive on that one.

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And with that, we’re off to central and northeastern Wisconsin for a visit with Lisa’s grandmother, a visit to Mathias’ grandmother (my mom), and a birthday party. Because, hey, what everyone wants to do after driving 3400 miles is drive 700 more.

Few things have been as bad for this site as my MBA program, but at least I can say I’ve had a successful semester. I’m officially done with all my finance and stats courses—how great the lifting of that burden is I can’t really overstate—and actually managed to pull off a B+ in my managerial accounting class. I had a thoroughly enjoyable class on strategic leadership this semester as well, and in a way I consider it a kickoff to the rest of my MBA. With all but one of the required courses out of the way, from this point on it’s pretty much just the fun stuff. In a way I’m almost a little bit sad that I only have a year left before I’m done.

Almost sad. By which I mean “ecstatic.” I’m taking one summer course just to make sure I won’t find myself one class short at the end of Spring 2011. If I knew for sure that I could get into at least one of the international programs I’d like to take I wouldn’t have to take a course this summer, but I’ve known a number of really bright classmates who didn’t get into any of the international programs they applied for, so I’m hedging my bets.

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With graduation on the horizon, and with Mathias only a few years away from kindergarten, it’s time for Lisa and I to consider what we want to do with ourselves over the next few years. It’s for that reason that tomorrow evening will find me in my car headed to New York, with Lisa and Mathias following by plane two days later. No, this does not mean we’re moving—it’s just another step in us understanding what our options are. Maybe New York is in our future, or maybe somewhere else on the east coast could soon be our home. (My company is like a rash across the Eastern Seaboard. A friendly rash with good benefits and lots of advancement opportunities.) Or maybe Chicago, San Francisco, or even—am I actually going to say this?—LA. I really want to stay with my company, which limits us somewhat, but considering the number of people I know who work for companies that only exist in the Twin Cities, I’m feeling pretty fortunate.

Staying in the Twin Cities is also a possibility, of course. While neither Lisa nor I have any strong ties to the area, both of our professional careers here are going pretty well. If they weren’t, we probably would’ve checked out some time ago. While the Twin Cities have a lot going for them, both of us feel we’ve been here too long. (I’ve now lived in the Twin Cities for longer than I have anywhere else in my entire life. When I came up here for school, I only expected to be here for a few years before getting out.)

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You can’t really settle down somewhere without settling. (I knew that when I named this site, but my problem then wasn’t that I wasn’t moving, it was that I wasn’t actually going anywhere.)  I spent most of my life growing up settling for one thing after another, often at the direction or suggestion of others, a trend that continued for a few years after I completed my undergrad. And you know what? Settling isn’t really my thing anymore.

So, with that, New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania Metropolitan Statistical Area, here we come.

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, 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

I’m starting to wonder if I should be worried with my son’s ongoing obsession with clocks. “Clock” was one of his first words, and while there was a bit of a dry period where he only gave passing interest to them, his sudden realization last week that the speedometer in my car looks like “A CLOCK!!!!” has resulted in three to four hours of Lisa or me sitting out in my car his week so Mathias could jump up and down on the driver’s seat, play with dials and switches, and comment on the “clock” on the dashboard. (The fact my car has plenty of lights, another Mathias obsession, albeit not quite as severe, has exacerbated this issue.)

A recent purchase of a toy car big enough for him to ride in has not distracted him from his idea that my car is a plaything, but in all likeliness has actually made things worse.  We’ve had a number of cases this week where he’s run to the back of the house (towards the garage), sometimes pulling Lisa or me along, pointing and proclaiming “clock!” and “car!”  Refusal to take him out has a seemingly inevitable result: Mathias flips. The fuck. Out.

Last night while walking back from Sebastian Joe’s, we made the mistake of taking a route that allowed Mathias to make a beeline for our garage.  In hopes of directing Mathias elsewhere, I pretended that the garage door wouldn’t open, but Mathias responded with a trick of his own, his first four-word sentence, delivered with a high level of concern: “The car is stuck!”  Lisa and I looked at each other, dumbfounded.  After a few attempts to divert his attention, we let him in the garage, briefly.  The expected happened when we removed him, though.

As with many things relating to the junior member of the household, we’re assuming this is a stage.  I’m sure we’ll be nostalgic about it when he’s older, but for now, we kind of hope it passes quickly.