So it goes...

We are heading north soon to visit our daughter and her boyfriend in Minneapolis. They are moving into a new apartment near the Vikings stadium and we will be helping them move some of the larger items with our van. I miss her dearly, so it should be a chance to reconnect and see her new digs. She sent a few pictures of her place and it looks spectacular. It made me think of my first apartment and that incredible feeling of pride and excitement with having my own place - even if I was sharing it with a roommate. That first apartment is a feeling of "having arrived." School is finished, you have a decent job - or at least decent enough to afford a place to live - and your obligations are few. I can remember that first Christmas in my first dumpy apartment. My roommate was gone and I had the place to myself. I shut off the lights and just sat there in the dark with the single string of twinkling lights thinking, "It ain't much, but man, it's all mine." Aft...

There are ebbs and flows to parenting. Times of high concentration and focus on one or the other of our kids happens cyclically it seems and with the prospect of an empty nest in our immediate future coming this fall, I am especially in tune with these moments with my son, Ben. During my wife and my Saturday morning coffee yesterday, we agreed on how nice it was to have a couple of one-on-one years with Ben, while Sarah is off to college. Despite the door always swinging with his comings and goings, the time we do have with him has been rich and gratifying. And while I love both of my kids. this week was one of high contact with Ben and I have to admit it was what I needed. We tend to cruise through our day-to-days sometime and forget to stop and talk - catch up on where each of us is really at. So this was good. It started on Wednesday evening when we went to the Journal Sentinel Sports Show. This has become an annual event for the two of us over the past five years. We usually go...