When my wife told me she was pregnant with our first child, my heart filled with joy. Two seconds later, panic arrived at the party. All I could think about was how profoundly our lives were about to change and I didn't have the slightest idea of how to prepare. I immediately began searching Amazon for the latest owner's manual for babies. Kim, on the other hand, seemed to calmly slide into the nesting phase that's common to many moms in the animal kingdom. In preparation for a new life, they instinctually work to create conditions for that new life to thrive. In the years since …
Archives for January 2025
My Dumb Resumé
The whole reason Kim and I started our own business was so that we would never have to write resumés. Ok, maybe not the whole reason. But it's at least 79 percent. Kim recently took one for the team when she was required to write our resumés for an organization that wanted to hire us to speak. The funds were coming from grant money and apparently, a resumé would make it more likely we'd get the job. She was, let's say, less than thrilled about having to do it. I'm just glad she did it because I would have refused and we wouldn't have gotten the gig. To be honest, I'm not sure if we …
One Piece at a Time
The time between Christmas and the New Year is Puzzle Season in our household. (Except for my wife, who is not the least bit interested in them, but is eager to take advantage of the fact that we are all distracted.) Me and the kids usually enjoy the 1000-piece varieties but hate the unnecessarily hard ones. (All double-sided puzzles, or those made entirely of pieces that are mostly one color, should be rounded up and incinerated.) Our biggest accomplishment thus far was a 3,000-piece behemoth that featured Peanuts characters. At first I thought, "This is totally …
Today or Never
"Today or never, that’s my motto." Now that's a good motto. Thanks for that, Mary Poppins. Looking back at the last year, I lived a lot of it scared. The after-effects of the storm that ripped through our property two years earlier lingered longer than I expected. The debt was a leviathan, and we slayed it sooner than seemed possible. Maybe too soon. The finances didn't snap back the way I thought they would after we moved heaven and earth to exorcise that beast. Maybe it was the lousy economy. Maybe it was the uncertainty of an election year. Maybe we were just …