Jeff Erickson's Family

• My beautiful wife Kim Whittlesey is a geometric group theorist. Kim finished her Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley in 1998 under John Stallings. Kim is a lecturer in the UIUC math department.

  

• Our five-year-old daughter Katherine Kate is the Magic Ambassador Fairy Queen of Butterfly Planet. In the spring she collects flowers and butterflies; in the summer she collects wild berries and lightning bugs; in the fall she collects leaves and ladybugs and Leaf Fairies; in the winter she collects snow and Ice Fairies. She likes climbing and swimming and sledding and skating because they're really hard. She loves to draw and paint pictures and write stories for her friends and family. She requires her bedtime stories to be sad at the beginning (someone must die), scary in the middle (there must be a monster), and happy at the end (the monster is nice after all; there must be a party). Kate's been whispering the following every night for many months, but only just recently loud enough for anyone else to hear. Yes, it works.

  I wish to have good dreams, I'm not joking, I really mean it.
  I wish to have good dreams, I'm not joking, I really mean it, okay.
  I wish to have good dreams, I'm not joking, I really mean it.
  I wish to have good dreams, I'm not joking, I really mean it, okay.

  Kate's best friend is her younger sister Hannah.

  

• One-year-old Hannah is a wicked little flirt, who learned to walk just in time to travel overseas. Her favorite activities are escaping, opening and closing doors, climbing, trying to do whatever Kate is doing, and pushing buttons (mostly physical, but sometimes metaphorical). Her best friend is her older sister Kate.

  

• My mom Connie Erickson paints and draws portraits for a living. Check out her online portfolio! Her husband Robert Ames Cook is an architectural photographer and silversmith. They recently moved from Caddo Lake to the suburbs of Dallas, Texas.

  

• My dad Jon Erickson is a medical physicist, who runs his own consulting company in St. Joseph, Missouri. Dad used to be a professor of radiology, which meant that I grew up with a healthy disrespect for both academic and hospital politics. His master's advisor was a student of Robert Oppenheimer.

  Dad used to keep an electric hammer in his office. It looked just like a regular claw hammer, but it had a brass plate with a toggle switch and a red LED on the end of the handle. When anyone asked how it worked, Dad would flip the toggle switch, the LED would light up, and he'd say "There, now it's on." People say this story explains a lot about me.

  

• My sister Tina Erickson is a photographer, biker, retronaut, and even more of a coffee snob than me. Her husband Don Bernier makes documentaries; you might have seen his recent Emmy-nominated editing work on PBS. Tina frequently accuses me of breaking things, which would bother me a lot more if it weren't true.

• Our dog Nori is a Lab/Shepherd/Husky/Akita/something-or-other mix who likes to chase squirrels and rabbits/bunnies, or as he prefers to call them, "Minions of Satan" and "Senior Minions of Satan". We couldn't take him with us to Austria; we miss him!

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- "Zits" (3/30/98) by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman