I’m not dead, just really busy. I’m wrapping up another long week at work–all weeks can be long but the past two have been unusually challenging–and slowly preparing myself for more of the same the next few weeks.

Upcoming: On Saturday we head down to Indiana for a few days. Lisa’s grandmother’s health has declined as of late, and as much as I hate to say this, the trip is basically being done to make sure Baba (a regrettably imperfect variation of the Polish word for grandmother) gets the opportunity to meet her great grandson. The following week we head to Door County for our annual vacation over there. The trip is being done on the cheap, with us staying with our parental units in both the Door and Two Rivers, which is good because I doubt we’d be able to afford it otherwise. These days even Chipotle would be a luxury.

I start school next week Thursday. I have a lot of prework for my course, but haven’t been able to start yet do to a lack of materials. As it happens, the U of M Bookstore’s “special hours for back to school” don’t start until September 1st. In the meantime, the 6:00p.m. close time isn’t exactly convenient for those of us who, you know, work for a living. Thanks guys!

Well, I actually have more work to do tonight, so more later. The next post may be from Indiana… Or maybe delayed until, uh, next year or something.

Well, pretty quiet around here as of late. I’ve been busy, and this coming week looks like it’ll continue the trend.

Aside from me accidentally sabotaging a 150-person game of diversity bingo, orientation at Carlson went well. Due to baby, family and job, I’m starting with only one course my first semester, but hope to ramp things up as my education progresses.

Mathias has embarked upon quite a growth spurt over the past week. It’s amazing the amount of milk and formula he’s consuming. He’s grown quite a bit, too. Sometime over the past 10 days I’ve lost the ability to reach around his body with the ends of my fingers touching. He’s still a little baby, but not nearly as small as he used to be.

As of today, he’s also started grabbing things. That’s progress, of course, but may soon present us with additional challenges as well.

Well, I’m busy this evening, so back to work. I’m expecting to be tied up with work functions until at least 10:00 in the evening Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I probably won’t be here again until the end of the week.

More later.

Looks like we’re about to get hit by another big storm in 30 minutes or so. Running errands this weekend, I was surprised at the amount of damage I saw from this past weekend’s storm, especially along Snelling Avenue. Our entire neighborhood woke up early Sunday morning when that storm rolled through–I remember looking out the windows and seeing lights on all the way up and down the block despite it being 3:30 in the morning–but while impressive it didn’t seem like something that would do $3 million in damage to the State Fair Grounds.

It sounds like this night’s storm will come in two waves. Uptown will probably miss the first wave, but it looks like we’ll get clocked by the second one. Maybe the Danielson household will end up like we did Saturday morning: Mom sitting in a chair feeding baby, Dad sitting on the floor with kitty, pigs over in their cage doing whatever it is pigs do.

Weather blogging: What wired Minnesotans do when looking for distraction.

OK, back to my pre-reading for orientation at the U of M tomorrow. More later.

Now that everyone who helped me in one form or another has been thanked, I can finally pass along the following:

I’ve been accepted into the MBA program at Carlson. I start in September. Orientation is this Tuesday.

I’m utterly shocked that a school the quality of Carlson would let me in, but now that they have I intend to make the most of it. I’m a student again! Time to shake off the rust.

OK, so I said no more entries about this, but that was before my sense of humor got me in a bit of trouble tonight. This evening a happy-hour conversation about cell phones somehow evolved into a group ridicule of text-messaging while driving, with different people pretending to text while they talked.

“I’m on my way home right now…”

“I just had an accident…”

“I hit another car, but my thumb still works!”

And then me: “I just drove off a bridge!”

Uh, yeah. Too soon. The weird thing is I don’t find the bridge collapse to be the least bit funny, and, as for many in the Twin Cities, it’s actually been a fairly emotional thing for me. I know my brain will continue to come up with crap like that, and that there’s not much I can do to control it, but sometimes I wish I just had a bit more of a filter mechanism.

So, I meant to write about last week earlier, but that was before just about every electronic device in my life decided to malfunction. (That’ll have to be its own entry.) It was kind of a weird week, even before the bridge tragedy. Lisa was on a basically unplanned three-day trip to Madison with Mathias, mainly so some family friends could meet the little one and so I could take care of some errands around the house (like stripping paint) that I didn’t want to do with the baby around. Lisa’s dad picked the two of them up last weekend–neither Lisa nor I wanted her traveling solo trip with a six-week-old–with the plan of them returning on Tuesday. Car problems and other issues intervened, though, which slowly pushed the return date all way to Friday.

Generally speaking, I handled Mathias’ absence pretty well, although my heart would melt whenever I heard him over the phone. A couple of days are OK. A week, not so much.

At least I got a lot done, although not as much as I had hoped. I spent two nights getting the dining room out of moving mode, and while the apartment is still a mess, it finally has all of its rooms in functional order. Warm weather and closed windows prevented me from finishing the paint stripping, but in retrospect that’s probably OK, as with all the distractions over the second half off the week I probably wouldn’t have finished it anyway.

The weekend was kind of mellow. We made an attempt at the Uptown Art Fair on Saturday, but gave up midway through due to bad weather. On Sunday I took Lisa down to see the bridge, which was a generally sober experience punctuated by one asinine run-in with some power-tripping cops. The MPD has some great individuals in it–we met one about an hour after the run in with the dicks–but events like that sometimes make me wonder, you know, why can’t we just have St. Paul’s police force? Minneapolis is a great city, and it deserves better.

I’m going to make an effort not to talk to much about the bridge here–I have other places for that–but it’s been on my mind a lot. Not much else to say about that, I guess.

I had couple of weird coincidences on Wednesday that I didn’t realize until yesterday morning. Driving home, I was listening to the audiobook version of The World Without Us, an interesting little book about what would happen to the planet if everyone just happened to disappear one day. I exited the freeway a couple of minutes after six (it’s a long and unintersting story as to how I know that) and as I merged onto Hennepin Avenue I found myself listening to how quickly New York’s bridges would fall apart and collapse without people around to care for them.

After parking my car, I stopped at our mailbox and found our two most recent rentals had arrived from Netflix. The DVDs? One was a movie called Big Night, and the other was a documentary called The Bridge.

Somewhere between the time I got off the Interstate and entered my apartment–a span of maybe three or four minutes–35W fell into the Mississippi.

Okay, I wasn’t going to do this, but a few more comments about the bridge collapse today:

1. To those of you talking or blogging about terrorism or “Al Qaeda wanting to attack the heartland,” seriously, shut up. I’m amazed at the number of people spouting such crap.
2. CNN: Seriously, dudes, where do you find your engineering experts? The amount of irrelevant crap being discussed that could be cleared up by a simple Wikipedia search on the bridge is amazing. And, for the love of god, the bridge did not collapse after getting hit by a train. Seriously, what the fuck?

It’ll be interesting to see the papers tomorrow.

I ran down with my camera as soon as I heard the news. Photos are now up on Flickr.

Of course, my super-expensive, top-of-the-line zoom lens decided to stop working today. I couldn’t focus on anything past 30mm, even on manual. What the hell?

Holy fuck.