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.

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I'm unbelievably tired.

This was, hands down, my best Father's Day ever. It was of course my first, too, but still.

The gifts! My new favorite shirt, narrowly nudging my previous favorite out of first place, is this here:

To find out what it says, go here and use the translator.

Beth gave me that shirt yesterday, on behalf of Sammy, who of course saved up his allowance to buy it for me. Harry didn't get me anything but a crappy card, if you're wondering.

This morning, Beth gave me her present, which is one of the coolest presents ever. It's a calendar of the next 12 months, and once a month, Beth has declared an WYAOD. To go along with these WYAODs, she has given gift cards to my favorite "satellite offices," totaling more than enough money with which to buy coffees and cakes and bagels and such to have a very successful 12 WYAODs. I'm very excited about this. My two WIPs, and maybe even that peskey MG I haven't touched in ages, will get very whipped into shape, no doubt about it.

Following a short bike ride for breakfast on my own, we three headed to the Children's Museum in downtown Saint Paul. It was all of our first time going, and we all loved it. Awesomely, it was "Free Day," which we didn't even know when we headed down there and were thrilled to hear it. Sam got to enjoy the Habitot room, specifically for kids 6 to 48 months old. (Sam's 10 months, by the way.) It was one of the few times so far in his life he's had the opportunity to play with other babies his age, so that was a pleasure to watch.

Lunch at Midtown Global Market, ice cream at Izzy's, a nice long family walk . . . All in all, a great Father's Day, a holiday that's actually been pretty crappy for me for the last nine years. So it was a nice, very welcome, change.

Oh, there was that pesky Chapter-a-Day Challenge that a few Tenners, including myself, were doing this weekend. I didn't win. I failed in epic proportions. Other than revisions, it was a work-free weekend. Also a nice and welcome change, I suppose.