J. Michael Andresen

I am achingly close to accomplishing one of my life goals! I am marrying the love of my life in just under a month now. I may have had some false starts, but Katie was certainly worth the wait! I love being with her and being a part of her. I'm so happy to be spending the rest of my life with her, and I'm very excited to be celebrating our marriage in front of 200 of our friends and family in just four weeks! More on that later. This post is about my life goals. I started my list fifteen years ago after reading a magazine article on an airplane. The article suggested that keeping an up-to-date list of goals was a good way to keep some perspective on life. It seemed like a neat idea to me, so I started right away. Although I could have populated my list with things like "finish college" or "land safely," I wanted my goals to be longer term and involve significant effort toward something that I might not normally take. I started with three goals and added more...

In advance of my nuptials, I need to divest myself of some real estate. It's a bit sad that I moved to Minnesota and needed to buy my house at the same time the Federal Reserve dropped the prime lending rate to 1% to battle inflation and unemployment. The very low interest rates tempted the banking industry to experiment with an idea they thought might make them money in the circumstances: extend mortgage credit to sub-prime borrowers. Banks thought they could charge interest rates high enough to cover the probable default rate for borrowers with poor credit ratings. These poor credit risks were out there buying houses when I was buying mine, pushing up demand and pushing up prices with it. The great banking experiment failed miserably. The banks had greatly miscalculated. The banking industry is awash with defaulted loans, and the housing industry is awash with foreclosures. This is a doubly bad situation for me now, since (a) the demand for houses had dropped drastically since th...

Yesterday during the Super Bowl, I asked Katie to marry me and (after a long but unintended delay) she said "yes"! Her mom (June) and dad (Tom) and sister (Laura) came over to watch the Super Bowl with my mom (Cherie) and siblings (Missy, Tina, Jeremiah). It was the first time that our families had met, so it seemed like a good time to make a spectacle. Here's the video (it's 7 minutes long, so beware) followed by a brief play-by-play explaining some of the jokes and filling in bits that might have been hard to hear: Jeremiah was nice enough to agree to take the video. Before the video started, I told Katie (and everyone else in attendance) that she had to sit in front of everyone because I wanted to play a prank on her. That explains (I hope) her expressions of horror at the start. Jeremiah starts out at what turned out to be a non-optimal angle but catches me taking a knee before he gets up and runs to the other side of the room. You can hear Katie's mother say ...

Over Labor Day weekend, Dad and I played bridge at the Fargo Regional. We teamed up with a father-son combination from the Fargo area. We entered two knockout events with them, coming in first and third. Not too shabby! We might even team up again next year. I rounded out the bridge year with two sectional tournaments played with my sister Tina. Also in September, we went to visit my sisters' cabin in Kettle River. We had a good time enjoying the fall foliage and talking around the campfire: Later in September Katie and I went to Paris! Details from that trip are in a separate entry. Through the rest of the autumn, we've partaken of Minneapolis/St. Paul culture as much as we could. We saw three musicals ( Ain't Misbehavin' , Cats , and Chess ) saw three art exhibits (Old Masters of the Wadsworth Museum, Alexander Calder, and some photographer that Katie wanted to see), and signed up for a series of lectures on modern scholarship in American history that has been very en...

In September, girlfriend Katie and I took a romantic trip to Paris and London. We were gone for ten days: four in Paris, three in London, and three more in Paris. We saw lots of museums and ate lots of food. We took an overnight flight to arrive in the morning in Paris. After quickly checking into our hotel room (which was amazingly small) we went to lunch at a cafe very nearby that overlooked a little square with an amusing fountain: Then we went to see the Eiffel Tower, which was in easy walking distance. This is Katie under the Eiffel Tower and doing her best imitation thereof: Here's a picture of me a little further away (on a bridge crossing the Seine): Here's the view of Paris from above: Paris is very white. All of the buildings are supposed to be white, I guess. It's like that in Kendall Square in Cambridge (where I worked for a lot of years), only with red brick. The similarity is a nice effect, but a bit shocking to see a rule applied to so many buildings in a cit...