At the risk of forfeiting any future travel with my amazing in-laws, I really need to get this story down in a blog.

Last year, Kari, her family, and I started planning a vacation to the caribbean. We'd narrowed it down to a few non-U.S. islands. So needless to say, we all had to make sure our passports were in check. Kari's dad, being the world traveler that he is put a lot of stress on making sure we got this done ASAP... possibly bundled with a few snarky remarks.

Fast-forward to March.

Our flights were booked out of O'hare on the 10th, so we all drove to Chicago on the 9th to kick it with family and friends for a night. It was great.

On the 10th we woke up and took the shuttle to O'Hare, super stoked to finally escape our cruel …

2013 was a roller coaster of a year for me. A roller coaster with some serious business highs, lows, and hardly anything in between.

A few of the key happenings were...

• went to a presidential inauguration and some inaugural balls! ... (heh, inaugural balls)
• figured out wtf I ... well, we (me, Harper, Dylan, and Clint) were going to do for a job
• started building a company (and a product!)
• paid off my education
• bought a new car
• dealt with some surprise homeownership woes
• got away from everything via the BWCA
• helped my wife battle her new M.S. diagnosis
• got stressed out
• became comfortable

There was also a lot of awesome travel, weddings, concerts, festivals, friends, a huge tattoo, these stats, and other things I could talk about... But really, all …

One day last year, amidst the shitstorm of a job and life I was living in the city of Chicago, I IM'd my buddy, Josh and told him that I needed another trip to the Boundary Waters. I wanted to check out from technology, humans, the city, insanity, everything.

A trip to the Boundary Waters, a complete wilderness area absent of all civilization, modern conveniences, and man made structure seemed like exactly what I needed. This is a place where canoes and feet are the only modes of transportation, paper topographic maps are the only way to navigate, and you only take what you can carry. There are no cell phone towers, electricity, roads, running water, man made structure, and minimal human contact. In short, you treat a trip to the boundary …

Didn't have the best lineup ever, but it was definitely better than 2012… Add in not having a crazy job to pull me back to the office, a free place to stay, the beautiful weather, and the amount of butts hanging out of daisy duke mom jorts, this turned out to be one of the best lollapalooza experiences so far.

Here's how it went...

Friday

• Crystal Castles - This was my 3rd time seeing them. Their producer, Ethan is amazing and Alice is batshit crazy on stage… smoking, drinking jameson out of the bottle, and just putting on a great show. They sounded awesome.
• Theophilus London - was a nice surprise. He sounded great and sort of quick mixed his set which made things fun and let us hear a ton of songs. He actually moved a bit too fast and …

I've been trying to take a lot of random bike adventures around central Iowa this summer… and the more I bike, the more I'm coming to realize that biking in Iowa is both amazing and confusing as shit.

Where should I be?
One of my biggest concerns about biking here is that there isn't a clear definition of where bikers are supposed to be. If you ride your bike in any urban setting, you know (or learn fast) that bicycles belong on the street. Bicyclists "Share the road" or "GTFO the sidewalk" (depending on whether you're learning from a sign or a pissed off pedestrian).

In Iowa though, things are a bit different because barely anyone commutes by bicycle. Riding bikes is primarily a leisure activity that's done on our amazing trail …

It's no secret that I fell in love with public transit while I spent those 15 months in Chicago. So last night, when Iowa Senator Janet Petersen scheduled a meeting with me in downtown Des Moines, I decided to leave my truck in the garage and finally try out our public transit system.

Here's how it went.

Step 1, get directions

I looked up transit directions to my meeting via google maps (like ya do) and was instantly shut down. "Public transit coverage may not be available in this area."

Step 1, get directions (take 2)

I visited ridedart.com hoping for a place to put in some addresses or plan a route map, but I couldn't find one. This is either because it doesn't exist or due to my inability or impatience while using their …

The year that I…

• brought in at Chicago house parties with Kari, Drea, and friends.
• mostly spent living in Chicago, apart from visiting my wife and working my ass off.
• learned to scratch records (sort of).
• watched my uncle get inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• met the President of the United States.
• watched Kari learn that the biopsied lymphnodes in her neck were not cancerous.
• spent Saint Patrick's Day with friends on the green Chicago River.
• learned to make umeboshi onigiri.
• attended a good friend's lesbian wedding at a dude ranch.
• visited Minnesota, Washington DC, Arizona, Indiana, Marion, Des Moines, and Lake Okoboji.
• watched a Chicago Cubs game from a rooftop.
• went to the Chicago Blues Fest, 80/35, and Lollapalooza.
• saw the Lichte…

I moved to Chicago for 466 days, where I lived in 3 different neighborhoods and visited 375 different places — 239 of which were restaurants or bars. I walked around 10,087 steps (or 7.67 miles) per day, slept roughly 7.19 hours per night, and gained 1 pound before returning to Iowa.

I was actually in the city on 400 of those days and ventured out of Chicago on 117 of them. 68 of those (spread across 17 different trips) were spent in my actual home, with my wife in Iowa. I was also fortunate enough to get out to Washington DC, San Francisco, Arizona, and Napa Valley.

I spent 302 days at Obama's campaign headquarters, where as an engineer I committed over 140,000 lines of code written in 6 languages to 19 applications across 1,675 commits. …

A few weeks ago … err actually I guess it was more like 2 months ago (the concept of time has completely broken since I've taken on this crazy job of mine), I decided to try a little experiment in gluten free eating.

First let me start off with the gross backstory… For years, I've been prescribed with various medications to make this random rash on my ankles go away. Doctors have told me it's eczema, a fungus, and several other random types of dermatitis. Some of the treatments have helped, but nothing has really made it go away. So I've pretty much just lived with it - as annoying as it may be.

After some conversations over the fourth of July weekend, I began wondering if these spots were my body reacting to a gluten allergy. …

I'll start off by saying that the weirdest part about lollapalooza this year was the line-up. I wasn't really stoked about ANY of the headliners and kinda "meh" about most of the other shows. This has never really happened to me on any other year. However, I'm living in Chicago right now and couldn't pass up the ease of going to the festival.

Here's how things went...

Friday

I obviously had to work on getting that President re-elected, but was able to sneak out and catch some music in my downtime. Actually, The Head and The Heart came to perform IN our office, but I missed most of their performance for a meeting, which was a bummer.

The other shows I saw were...

• Anamanguchi - I took a lunch break to check out this 8-bit rock …

I'm 30 years old, love music, and am about to become the sickest DJ my bedroom has ever seen.

But first, let me give you a a bit of a backstory...

In the late 90s (high school, for me) I found house music. I had mostly been listening to terrible metal and rap at the time… but once I heard those crazy electro sounds, I started to become super interested. I even started going to some under-18 dance clubs in the Quad Cities.

As soon as I heard a DJ mixing these crazy electro tracks on ridiculous house systems I fell in love. I still remember that first club pretty vividly… Not only was I blown away by what I was hearing, I was also blown away by what I was seeing. There was an entire room of people just raging out, crazy raver kids, …

Once I got to work, things were fairly normal - well aside from most everyone else being dressed to the nines… especially the ladies.

But then around lunch time, about 30 giant secret service dudes started showing up along with cops, dogs, etc. We had a mandatory office leave while they swept the entire place. (Remember, this is Obama's campaign headquarters. These are the people who love the president and are hired to re-elect him. Security was still this tight)

After the sweep was done, we all came back to the office and went through security similar to an airport (or a hip hop show), but with qualified professionals. Not the TSA.

Once through security, we hung out for a bit, working as usual while tip-toeing around the secret service …

After my shower this morning I thought to myself, "What should I wear to make myself presentable to the President of the United States?"

I don't really like dressing up and I wasn't about to start… but I felt like I should at least make an attempt. My normal attire consists of a hat, a pair of skate shoes, an unwashed pair of jeans, and an inappropriate/inappropriately priced screenprinted tee.

To me, the only real variables of this outfit were my hat and shirt.

So I glanced at my 2 stacks of t-shirts and thought, "I probably shouldn't wear a screen printed shirt... Maybe I should throw on one of my 'fancy' flannel button ups."

After looking through those for a bit I remembered that I worked in a 76 degree office and that everyone in the …

Ah, 2011. A year that was brought in while wearing tie dye tighty whities at a house party in Des Moines, and finished at a freshly painted warehouse party in Chicago.

It was quite a roller coaster year with my new job, huge culture shifts, and a long distance relationship with that amazing wife of mine.

There's sooo much to talk about, but I'm gonna try to keep this short and list style.

So, other than my new job and the move to Chicago...

• I finished sleeving my left arm
• Bought a bike
• Learned how to "cook" raw food
• Had to cut down part of a tree I planted
• brewed a lot of beer
• Turned 30
• Made a whole lot of new friends

I also traveled a bit. Here are some of the places I visited...

• Minnesota for Bock Fest and a death defying canoe …

The 20 year anniversary of Lollapalooza, my 5th year at the festival, the 30th anniversary of my life, and the turning point of a pretty major change in my (and Kari's) life. We had some huge milestones going on this year... all of which sort of overshadowed each other, and moved too fast for me to fully appreciate them like I should have.

Either way, Lollapalooza was a giant, super expensive blast again this year. There's the standard eating of great foods, dealing with crowds, late night dinners and even later night partying, so I won't get into all that… but here's a breakdown of the shows we saw this year.

Friday

• Tinie Tempah sounded great. We only stayed for a few songs of his set, but I wish we would've stayed longer.
• Skrillex was …

So my buddy, Harper is currently serving as the CTO for the 2012 Obama Campaign. This spring, he told me I should interview to join his team. However, after taking the 5 hour commute and a couple other minor details into consideration, I declined.

… and regretted it immediately. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, working on technology for our president with a team of baller engineers. There would've been a lot of sacrifice, but the experience and knowledge I could've gained would have been completely insane.

So fast forward a few weeks... I began talking with Harper and his team again.

Today, I accepted an offer with Obama for America - so did my friend, Nick.

Most of you probably know that I'm not a very political dude. …

Let me start off by saying, I don't care about diets and dieting (I think most diets sound completely awful and unhealthy). However, I do care about being healthy, so I thought I'd share a bit about how I lost 20 pounds over the span of a few months.

The extremely short version is that I stopped eating like a dickhead.

And all that really means is that I began snacking less and started paying attention to my food portions. That's it. No gym, no additional excercise - I changed 2 simple things and now I get to sag my pants until my ass shows!

Feel free to leave now, haha. That's it!

But if you want to know a bit more about it, here's the rest of the story.

I got back from a trip to Ireland last fall and weighed 199 pounds. …

This is one of the best, most condescending emails that's ever been written about me. Back in my corporate days (circa 2007), a director sent this to all of information management.

Subject: Sorry to have to write this...
Importance: High

Folks,

I'm confident that it's no one in our group - given your maturity and professionalism, but you can help me by spreading the word that the reoccurring stupid and immature prank of taking, or tearing, a "bite" from Friday donuts (and other food) and putting the remainder back into the box is a thing of the past, starting now.

If you see anyone doing this in the future, please politely ask them to take the whole thing and not replace the remnant.  Please also politely inform …

So a couple weeks ago I put together a timeline of my 2010 with plans of writing a year end blog... so now that you've forgotten about everyone else's 2010 retrospectives, here's 1 more.

Every time I write these I start out thinking, "man, I didn't really do a whole lot last year," but after looking back through photos, blogs, and tweets... I'm quite happy with last year. I traveled a lot, saw a lot, became a bit healthier, and progressed professionally. All awesome things.

So 2010 in a nutshell...

Work...
At the start of the year, I began doing some contract work at Dipity, a San Francisco based timeline tool startup. After about 5 months of contracting, I decided I really liked working with the folks at Dipity so I left Red 5 …

And now for a story about Josh and I geolocating a random YouTube video - and how I'm amazed by how easy it was.

So, this all starts with a conversation with my dad over the recent snowfall we've been having... He tells me about this Toro Power Shovel thing, which sorta looks like a vacuum sized, cheap snowblower. My dad said that he was super skeptical of this power shovel, but he tried it out and wound up being thoroughly impressed.

Soon after, I passed this info onto my buddy, Josh. He's gotten around 3 feet of snowfall this winter, so he was immediately interested. We discussed how dumb the power shovel looks but started reading reviews and looking for videos of it in action (such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJ8L…