J. Michael Andresen

Two weekends ago, Katie and I went up to spend some time with my sisters at their cabin in Kettle River. Here's Missy and Tina and me on a rock in the river, with some early fall color in the background: Here's Katie and me: And here's a giant Tina trying to grope miniature versions of Katie and me:

Marathon man update Last month, I wrote that a friend of mine is running a marathon to cure cancer. I had that slightly wrong, in that he was raising money for cancer in order to run a marathon! It turns out that he needed to make his goal of $4000 in order to run the marathon with his father. It turns out that he made his goal! The email he sent out to announce that he made his goal is more colorful than his initial fundraising email (and more typical for Gorka, with lots of capitalization and repeated letters): WE DID IT: $4084 for the Aubrey Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research (IN 4 WEEKS!!) $2063 has been raised under my father's name, and HE IS HAPPIER THAN A KID WITH A NEW TOY. Not only that, but $2021 has been raised under my name. Yes, your already know that ... (1) we have raised $4084 for the Aubrey Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (GOOD JOB!) ANDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD (2) Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

A friend of mine (Sam) posted this article on Facebook. It describes the guilty conscience of a former prosecutor who is partially responsible for 1000 drug-related jail sentences. Some of Sam's friends and I got into a discussion about the article. Nota bene: what follows is not for the faint of heart. Sam's friend #1: "'the drug war'?!? Wasn't that lost a long time ago and no one seemed to notice or even care? 'Just say NO' indeed..." My response: "Best just to legalize everything. People will abuse substances no matter what the government does, so we might as well acknowledge it. Money raised by taxing the drugs (and money saved by eliminating enforcement) can go to help those who are addicted and want to stop." Friend #2: "Ugh. Our current system is certainly broken. We don't have to go as far as legalizing drugs to make a difference... it would save a ton of money if we just provided our homeless substance dependent populat

Katie and I read different magazines. For news, Katie reads Time while I read The Economist . It is common in our household to swap articles that we think the other will find particularly interesting. Amusingly, the last articles we swapped were each editorials on Sarah Palin, this one from Time and this one from The Economist . The first article (in Time ) suggests that the reason the Republicans have pulled even in the polls is Palin's abililty to propagate the myth of idyllic small-town America. It is a well understood psychological phenomenon that good memories from the past are much better remembered than bad memories. Perhaps this explains voters' irrational obsession with mental images of the good times of yore that never really existed. According to this mythology, McCain and Palin are trying to restore all the good things from the past that people remember inaccurately. Obama isn't able to do so much along those lines. Will the incumbent party be able to overcome

When we got home on Sunday night, we were beat from the weekend, so we decided to relax in front of a movie. Katie had recently decided she wanted to see the third X-Men movie . I had already seen it, but I dutifully ordered it fron Netflix, figuring I wouldn't mind seeing it again for Katie's enjoyment. My doubts as to whether Katie has really not seen it before started about 30 seconds into the opening battle scene, when Katie correctly predicted, "Is this in a simulator?" Later, when Kelsey Grammer appeared on screen as the cerulean-skinned Beast, she asked, "Was he in the previous X-Men movie?" He wasn't, of course, which confirmed that Katie had already seen this movie, too. The next thing to figure out was whether I had, in fact, watched the movie with Katie. It was released in 2006, so we might have seen it while we were dating. The X-Men movies (like the comics before them) are set in a world of normal humans living alongside mutants with a vari

Katie turned 37 on Friday, and we celebrated with a weekend of festivities. On Friday evening, we went out for dinner with her family over in Hudson. We ate at an eclectic fish fry buffet that included barbeque ribs and egg rolls. Saturday we threw a wine-and-cheese party for as many of Katie's friends as we could get to come over. It turned out not to be the best weekend for a lot of people (many of whom were traveling), but we still had a nice turnout (Rene, Liz/Jeff/Maria/Felix, Eric, Beth, Ryan, Christy/Gabe, Mark/Laura, Sarah/Andy). I forgot to take pictures at the party, but I took a few of Katie and me for our Sunday night outing. We were sitting around on Sunday afternoon thinking of what might be fun to do for the afternoon. I suggested we take a nice drive to a restaurant destination somewhere. After a bit of flipping through some Minnesota magazines, we chose Tangled Up In Blue in Taylors Falls. That's about an hour away by the shortest route, but we chose a meander

My favorite thing about Facebook is "status changes", where my "friends" and I can write one-line sentences describing what we're doing, what mood we're in, etc. It's fun tracking people's one-sentence updates on life. Here are current statuses of some of my friends: Leah is doing okay. Liz finds Palin's personal attacks off-putting. Grant cares a lot. Hannah is beating up the East Coast! No, wait, that's Hanna. Pamela wishes that we could have fall, skip over winter, and go directly to spring. Christopher is at a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat. Heather is waiting for banana muffins to come out of the oven. I'm particularly fond of Leanne's version of the Liar Paradox : Leanne is status-free . Here are some of my recent statuses: J. Michael is undergoing mitochondrial respiration. J. Michael is chewing gum. J. Michael hopes the Red Sox will win. J. Michael has a sore foot. J. Michael is extracting mouse brains. Here's

My father has just sold his lake house, which he bought in 1997. It's on the beautiful (but prosaically named) Blue Lake, surrounded by gorgeous birch and Norway pine trees. This weekend, then, was the last hurrah of many years of visits. It was a poignant weekend, made more unsettling by the removal of most of the furniture on Sunday. (Jeremiah took possession of that to furnish his new house, which he just closed on last month. A sign of the crazy housing market: he bought it for just 47% of the purchase price the previous owners paid in 2006! They had an ARM and the bank foreclosed when the higher rate kicked in. What a great investment now for Jeremiah!) My father does a great job managing the forest on his tens of acres on the lake, thinning out the problematic trees and turning them into firewood. I conned my sisters into packing their covered trailer full of firewood to haul back to our house to supply our fireplace for the winter. The trailer was overloaded, so we caravaned