the-lundgaards.com

Neal Aage Lundgaard Jr
Kris Aage Lundgaard
Nicholas Aage Lundgaard
Henrik Aage Lundgaard

Paula cut an album when she was a little girl in the fourth grade or so. When you listen, her voice is the younger one. Which Road Leads to Heaven?

I just purchased and quickly devoured Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box, by The Arbinger Institute. My bottom-line review is that this book could spur profound changes in your life – particularly in the way you relate to people. At least, that’s what I hope for myself, and I can’t really think of any reason for you to read it unless you would like to discover why people can be so difficult to live and work with.

The authors have clear insight into human nature and behavior and the complex ways we create destructive patterns in our relationships – and how our strategies for getting out of those destructive patterns can only make things worse!

There is more to say on the topic than they get into – they assume, for example, that we mere mortals have the power within us to clean up our messes; still, their analysis is eye-opening and I’m grateful for it.

No, not the movie – I haven’t seen it yet. Here’s a series of shots of Nicholas teaching his sister Karen to make a cappuccino. (Sorry the final shot is so blurry – missed the beauty of the results.)

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He sure woke up in a good mood this morning. He looks quite handsome (and his mother is a cutie too).

In a few hours Paula and I will hop on a plane to (at long last) visit our first grandson. Henrik lives in the Lone Star state now, so we will also get to see the rest of our family on this short trip back (and our first in a year). You can imagine how much we look forward to this….

Plus, there’s a chance to see a few friends, eat some sushi and some Tex-mex (not at the same time), grab some coffee beans from Anderson’s, and who knows what else….

Kristian turns 15 years old today, and he has recently made a remarkable jump in maturity that fits such a milestone. One recent change in him is a new desire to study music – he picked up the guitar on his own, buying himself an instrument and spending many hours taking lessons from “youtube.” Then, when offered piano lessons from Anya, he added a second instrument immediately. He now spends 4-5 hours many days practicing the guitar or the piano – or both.

He also made an interesting comment last week, and I’d like to know whether you can explain why this might be: he said that a few years ago, when he would go out to the soccer field and practice his skills by himself for many hours, he felt lonely. But now, he says, even when he spends five hours playing the piano or guitar alone, he doesn’t feel lonely. I believe him. But why do you think that is?

Tonight we watched a German film called The Lives of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen). I wrote a few months ago about the Swedish film Kitchen Stories, which involved a kind of people watching – done for research. This film involves people watching of the secret police kind – surveillance by the government of an artist in East Germany in 1984. Both movies seem to ask whether it is possible to observe other human beings and come to understand them while remaining detached from them, and both answer clearly that it is not. In this case it’s interesting to watch the watcher change as he watches others, as he learns more about what it means to be human.

Anya couldn’t just paint a portrait of Kristian – it wouldn’t be fair to Ethan! So she went to work this weekend and finished another gift to us this afternoon.

Here she is at work, with the model himself overseeing: