Farewell Milwaukee has arrived

Last night I had the pleasure of taking in the Farewell Milwaukee show down at the Fineline in Minneapolis. This five member band brings raw emotion and passion to the stage as they seek to do more than simply entertain those in attendance. Their smooth and relaxed folky sound draws you in and their rockish tunes keep you wanting more. Although the band harkens the name of a Wisconsin city, this group of bearded men's heart is here in Minneapolis. Having started playing together as a worship band, the bond these guys share is clear through their music and interaction with one another. Even with some sound difficulties the band brought it last night to the excited Fineline crowd last night. With the recent release of their debut album, the radio waves will certainly be full of the addictive sounds of Farewell Milwaukee in no time. If you have been looking for some new music that you can connect with and will entertain while moving you, Farewell Milwaukee is the up and coming band that you have been looking for. You can listen to these guys while drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, a glass of wine in the evening, or while at your next house party. Trust me, once you listen to one of their tracks on their website you will be hooked.

Running Refuge

I just finished reading an article in my most recent Runners World on a woman who found solace in running after losing a dear family member. She described the pain she felt while running through her grief, and the joy that she found in embracing that physical pain. When we feel anything, we know we are still alive. This article brought back a lot of emotions for me and even caused a few tears to roll down my cheeks. You see the night of my wife's grandfather's death I ran. I did not have a grandfather growing up and Grandpa Bob had become the grandpa I always wanted. I had always found refuge in my running and cannot count the number of times that I have been overcome by one emotion or another while logging some miles. Tears, laughter, anger, and confusion all have joined me along my running journey.

That dark, cool, wet night in August I was exhausted both mentally and physically. I thought I didn't have another tear in my body to shed. Vacation was awaiting me with the rising of the sun, but that night I had to run. I had to get out and move. I had to enter into the solace of a run where the movement of my body can bring some resemblance of focus. Silence surrounded me as I moved quietly along the lake. Crunch, skid...crunch, skid...crunch, skid went each of my footfalls on the gravel that lined the old highway. As I turned the corner and headed for the library I felt like I could have just kept running. I could have ran through the night and into my vacation. Grandpa Bob and I were together along that dimly lit street talking about the garden, fishing, hunting, the times we have spent together, the battle that just took his physical life. My breathing was relaxed and an afterthought as I was focused on something more important. The heartrate monitor was left at home with a sleeping wife and two sleeping children. This was not about training for Chicago, meeting my weekly mileage or staying in a target heart rate zone. This was about him. This was about us. This was about how much I was going to miss him. Although I wanted to extend my run as far as my legs would take me; I knew that I had to end it. I could not live in this run, but could hold firmly to future meetings along the road. People, memories, emotions await you along your runs. Although you can never predict where they may join you along the way, I can guarantee that they are out there. Running is about more than simply burning calories or achieving goals. It is about life, love, passion, and solace. We live to run because we run to live.

I would love to hear a story that you might have about a walk, run, bike ride, or just a stroll in which you were able to tap into some deep seeded emotions. The burning in our lungs and the ache of our legs assure us that we are alive and must recognize the blessing that is on this day. Run on!

Daylight Savings Dilusion

This past weekend was daylight savings time. I am aware that some states in the country do not participate in this brilliant tradition, but I happen to live in one of the forty-eight that does. It is really quite an amazing phenomenon where you go to bed one night and while you are sleeping you "gain" an hour of sleep. Do you really "gain" an hour of sleep? Can you really "gain" an hour of anything by simply turning your clock back by an hour? Next time you are talking about "gaining" or "losing" an hour in the Fall and Spring you should talk to the parent of a young child. Kids do not understand the whole daylight savings thing. They simply wake up when their bodies tell them to wake up and go to sleep when their parents tell them it is night time. Our two precious little ones awoke on Sunday morning at 6:00 am. Their bodies communicated to them that it was in fact 7:00 am, their typical wake up time. My wife and I had to gently educate them on the fact that it was still "nighttime" even though it looked exactly like it did the day before when it was "morning time!" Kids just cannot wrap their minds around such an obtruse concept. I am not attempting to dig up the history of this madness, just make a few passing comments about how this affects the majority of us who have children.

Sunday night I had the pleasure of working the 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm shift at work. Now I am not complaining about the fact that I missed out on the previous nights overnight shift where Stephen had to work an extra hour. I am however commenting on the fact that the day after daylight savings is always a difficult night to stay up, especially when you have kids. One of my duties at work is to lock up the tennis/soccer complex on campus at dusk. Well since we had rolled our clocks back it was prior to dinner that I had to make this happen. As I locked the gate I thought to myself, "my it sure feels like it is about 9:00 pm." I am really a fan of the extra hour of light in the morning, but the nights can become very long and depressing for those of us who live north of I-90. Since I am a morning person I welcome the extra visibility on my morning runs, but is there something we could do about turning up the thermostat along with the turning on of the lights? Just a thought!

Soon the whole time change will be a thing of the past and we will not even think about it, but in the week that follows it sure can throw your entire biological clock off. Well, just like any other changes that happen in our lives we must adapt, adjust, and just keep moving forward with our lives!

Relax, Halloween can be wholesome and fun!

Today is one of those days that can bring people together and also rip them apart. I personally find Halloween to be a great tradition in our country that provides kids an opportunity to have fun and live a little beyond their norm. I have very fond memories of Halloween and the various characters I was through the years. I do think that my favorite of all time was when my brothers and I were the California Raisins complete with insturments. Our mom went to great lengths to provide us with creative and cheap costumes that were outside of the traditional vein. The most memorable Halloween of all time though took place in the early nineties and will live in infamy among all those who were living in the Upper Midwest at the time. We received the snow storm of the century that night and the entire tri-state area (SD, ND, and MN) was blanket with feet of snow. Schools were canceled for the next day and kids could not have been happier. What is better than spending a night collecting free candy and causing mischief than having the next day off of school! I will never forget hiking through knee deep snow at the high school to get to another group of houses. I was about halfway through one of the practice fields when I decided to hunker down for a break and eat some of the booty I had already obtained from gracious residents of Yankton, SD. Everyone's costumes that year were transformed into Arctic Explorers or Eskimos.

One of the best things about Halloween for me was having two older brothers. We would always get home from trick-or-treating and dump all of our candy out on the floor. I liked to separate all of my candy into groups (candy bars, sugar candy, suckers, garbage). After dividing my wares into piles the trading would begin. The bartering and swapping would last for what seemed like an hour before we finally were told that we needed to go to bed. In addition to dividing and swapping, there was the inevitable toll that we had to pay to our parents. They would always request a few pieces here and there and it was never those nasty black and orange wrapped candy that everyone hated. It had to be the Crunch bars or the Milky Ways. Well I am in that position now where I need to, "make sure the candy is safe" before my kids can eat too much of it. I would hate for them to get sick!

Whatever you believe about the origins and background of Halloween needs to be placed into a little wholesome perspective. It does not matter what the tradition, event, or holiday is there will be people who will openly criticize and critique the quality of it for all people. We have gone from having Halloween and Christmas parties to "Fall Fests" and "Winter Celebrations." Halloween, in large part, is not about the demonic and ghostly traditions that radicals would like to make it out to be. It is about friends and family spending some quality time together. It is about letting loose with your kids and getting dressed up for one day of the year where you can be goofy. The vast majority of our population is afraid to get on a stage and act out a role in a play, but will dress up for one night to "play" someone they are not the other 364 days of the year. Where is the harm in that? Where is the harm in my buddy getting dressed up as an old lady and going to a party where no one knows who he is for the entire night? People need to simply calm down, relax, and enjoy the wholesome fun that can be had on this last day of October. If it makes you feel better to call it something other than Halloween you go right ahead, but that does not change the fun that you can have on a crazy night like tonight.

Midnight Madness

Last night was one of those nights where you wonder how you were able to function when your children were infants. Our kids have been fairly decent sleepers for most of their lives, but in the past month our son and daughter seem to take turns waking up in the middle of the night for one reason or another. Last night it was the fact that our daughter needed her sheets pulled up. After pulling up her sheets and flopping back into bed, she called out requesting that I turn on the bathroom light for her. (The bathroom light shines into their room.) When this request was denied, the waterworks erupted. You would have thought that we had thrown her favorite stuffed animal (Snuffy) out the window. Even though they have a great nightlight in their room, it was not good enough for her. There is a part of the request that is pointed towards wanting some more light, but the majority of it was focused on controlling the situation. She calmed down and fell back asleep, but it through me for a loop. When your sleep is interrupted in the middle of the night, you can never seem to get a quality night of sleep. It is one thing to stumble into the bathroom at 1:47 am to use the facilities, and it is a completely different thing to have to get up and do something that requires brain power. Sure I have had to wake up and change sheets, wipe up vomit, rub a back, and re-tuck in covers, but it never ends good the next morning.

This whole episode last night made me think of a couple of fantastic people that I know and knew who were late night eaters. Uncle Steve wakes up every night around midnight, eats a large snack and then goes right back to bed. Some nights it is a banana smothered in peanut butter, other nights it is all of the pecans off of the top of his mother-in-laws pecan pie. He doesn't discriminate against food. Our old neighbor was known to wake up in the middle of the night and wolf down a large bowl of ice cream. How does one wake up in the middle of the night, eat something, and then just fall back asleep? I would be dead if I woke up in the middle of the night every night to eat something. I have a hard time eating something after about 9:00 pm. Plus, are your tastebuds really functioning at their maximum capacity in the middle of the night?

The Bar

Yesterday was my daughter's fifth birthday. I love to decorate cakes and always ask the kids what they want for their birthday. This year Mattie asked for a Deedee Doodle birthday cake. The majority of this requests was generated from her thumbing through the cake books at Target and the local grocery store. Every time that we are purchasing lunch meat from the deli, the kids love to run over and look at all the airbrushed cakes that are compiled in a binder at the bakery. I am not an airbrusher, but knew that I could grant her request for the Doodlebops cake. As I began to plan for this cake I made some initial sketches and evaluated whether or not I was going to be able to pull off this new feat.

Whenever I make another cake, I attempt to make it bigger and better than the one before it. In August I tried my hand at constructing a cake that had a skeleton. The high heeled shoe that I made turned out very well, but not exactly the way that I wanted it to, due to the materials I used for the skeleton of the shoe. I was not going to make that same mistake with this cake. Everything came together quite well, until about 11:30 pm on Saturday night when I was tired and getting frustrated with the mediums that I was using. The cake was not looking like the prototype did in my head. After sleeping on it, I awoke Sunday morning feeling much better about the cake and what I was attempting. Mattie was thrilled with her cake and I was mostly pleased with the end product.


A friend posed an interesting question for me though: If you have set the bar here for her fifth birthday, what will you need to be making when she turns sixteen? I have never stopped to think about that, nor have I ever lived my life wondering about how high I am setting the bar. I want to put forth my best effort in the present and will worry about how high the bar is when I get to that time. I think that when we choose to do less than we can, in order to preserve our best for later, we are doing ourselves and others a disservice. I have never put forth a mediocre effort on Monday, so that my boss is impressed when I am working at full capacity on Friday. In my opinion, when we do our best today, our best tomorrow will be even better. I do not know what my daughter will ask for her sixteenth birthday cake, but I know that I will be up for the challenge when I get there. The hard and fast reality is that day will be here before I know it, and that is scary!

Welcome to the future

There is a newer Country song by Brad Paisley entitled, "Welcome to the Future." It is a great song that talks about how far we have come with technology in the last sixty plus years. Today at work I am having some serious "welcome to the future" moments. My grandfather and then my father owned a car dealership back in the 1970's and early 80's so I have been familiar with that new car smell. The new Hybrid Prius that I am driving, while at work, makes those "new" cars look archaic. First off this vehicle is a hybrid. If you would have told me fifteen years ago that I would be driving a car that was propelled by mostly battery power I would have said you were crazy. Beyond the battery, you do not need a key to lock or unlock the doors, or start it for that matter. Every thing is done through a simple touch. Oh, did I mention that I am typing this post from the passenger seat of this vehicle. Laptops used to be a thing of the future and now people are carrying them around in their pockets. When I graduated from college ten years ago very few people had email accounts that they used at libraries, let alone blogs they would update through a wireless card. Speaking of wireless, this vehicle is equipped with voice activated bluetooth. I know you have seen the commercials with all the voice activation stuff, but using it is another thing. F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S! Sure this care if great. It is brand new and has all the bells and whistles, but in another year it will be just another car. Although it will end up being just another car, the technological advances are still mind blowing. Where are we going to be in another 5, 10, 25 years? What will my kids be driving when they are thirty-five. I am not about to jump on the hover board craze with Marty McFly, but I am know that wherever technology is then is going to be amazing. What blows your mind about technology in your life?