Will Edit for Free

My youngest son is finishing his first year of college this week which means I’m going to be very busy editing a final paper on a book that neither of us read. I’m really looking forward to it. After all, it’s nice having an excuse to spend quality time debating grammar rules and discussing current…

4Ever a Bobcat

[I attended the funeral of one of my high school classmates this week. Afterwards, I wrote and shared the following post on my class's FB page. Saving it here for posterity.] David’s service on Wednesday was really nice. It was great seeing so many people honoring his memory and hearing tales about his life since…

The Hardest Part

I once snuck a large Burmese python onto a flight from Arizona to Idaho. Then back again. If you think this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done with Hank, the snake I bought as a pet back in college, you’d be wrong. Before 9/11, airport security was primarily based on the honor system, so…

Gingersnaps and Dog Hair

Our mixer is on the kitchen counter and ready for duty today. My wife is a blur behind it, pulling out measuring cups, baking pans, and containers of sugar, flour, and eggs. In front, our old cookbook is opened and turned to the desserts section. The page she’s referencing is semitranslucent from absorbing splattered drops…

This Is Not an Ad

I found a fancy bar of soap in our spare bathroom last week. It's supposedly made from “Alaskan Glacier Mineral Clay” which is a very expensive way to spell “mud.” Like $8-per-bar expensive. I'm not rich enough to afford anything that luxurious, of course. My son left it behind when he moved away to college…

Generation.next()

My youngest son graduated from high school last month. This means my wife and I get to retire with a perfect 4-0 record against our children, each of whom would’ve preferred to drop out and become a rich teenage TikToker. I don’t blame them. School is harder than ever nowadays. Nobody understands how New Math…

This is 53

I turned 53 last month. So far things have gone pretty well except for the time my eyeballs dried out and stopped working normally. I spent that entire day dousing myself with saline solution and wondering how blindness would affect my mountain biking skills only to later discover I’d been wearing an extra pair of…

Incident Detected

I was mountain biking last Friday and feeling pretty good about my efforts when my smartwatch started freaking out and barraging me with alerts because it’d detected some sort of regional incident. Since I was currently descending a section of trail ill-suited for stopping, I had to finish getting to the bottom before I could…

Truth in Advertising

We celebrated the first anniversary of Rupert’s Adoption Day last week. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t send a card. I can see how you might forget about the existence of a 71-pound dog if you weren’t living with him every day. Besides, I’m not sure if Hallmark even covers this specific occasion, so you…

Give Me a Brake

Do you ever find yourself with an abundance of extra money and/or free time? Then I highly recommend learning to maintain and repair your own bicycle. To get started, you’ll just need a few simple tools, a can-do attitude, and access to a good internet debugging proxy. Here’s the step-by-step guide I recently used to…