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!