Dad's Day 2010

Been a while.

Yesterday was Father's Day. Father's Day and I have a spotty history for the last ten years. I haven't been too into celebrating it, in fact, until last year, when I was for the first time a dad on that Sunday. It was a pretty intense shift in my perspective about the holiday.

One of my gifts from Beth, Sam, and Harry this year was a picture book called The Heart and the Bottle, by Oliver Jeffers. It's a beautiful book, about loss and coping and learning how to put one's self at risk again, and it sums up my feelings on Father's Day very nicely. It's also very sad in a way, though it ends on a positive note. If you haven't looked at it yet, I hope you will, especially if you are someone who has lost a parent, perhaps a little sooner than you thought you might.

On the brighter side, I was also gifted with a hand-crank pasta maker and a gift card to a coffee shop at which I like to write. The real highpoint, though, was our bike ride up to Como Park for a late morning picnic. That was perfect. Here's a photo of our bikes: (ETA, Blogger image uploading is wonky. This will have to wait, of you can check this Twitpic.)

Also there was a lovely Indian dinner and a Buffy marathon. We're on a big Buffy kick, Beth and I, the last few days. We started right in season four, the one we probably know the least, but knowing us we'll go right through the rest of the series before we stop. Perhaps we'll even be inclined to watch one, two, and three afterward.

It's just over two months till the official release of The Absolute Value of -1. Watch this space for a bunch of contests and giveaways during the summer.