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… Continue reading Incident Detected
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… Continue reading Give Me a Brake
June 10, 2022 There’s a two-mile trail near my home that punches its way upward through 2000 vertical feet of unkempt Pacific Northwest forest. It’s little more than a crack through thicketed undergrowth—a tangled and erratic mixture of stone, roots, and sludge. My dog and I first discovered it in 2011. I was looking for… Continue reading Upward
I helped put a new roof on our house this month. Specifically, I got to choose which shade of gray tiles to use and then pay for them to be professionally installed. This wasn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. Honestly, I didn’t know roofs wore out. I guess I’m still spoiled from the glory… Continue reading Our Bear Roof
I have some bad news. I crashed while mountain biking with a friend near Mount Rainier on Friday and ended up breaking 6 ribs and my right clavicle. Stay with me because that isn’t the bad part. After conducting a thorough trail-side wellness check (“Dude, has my collar bone always jutted out from my shoulder… Continue reading Costly Mistake
I got some bad news this week. My mom called from Idaho late Wednesday night to tell me that my 77-year-old father, who has been living with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) for the past several years, was tired of all the unnecessary suffering and had given up the fight. She was elated. "I can’t… Continue reading There Goes My Early Retirement
I got grounded from writing this week. I can’t go into details because my wife who shall remain anonymous said if I posted anything about it on social media we would have to move out of state and I wasn’t sure if her “we” included me or if she just meant her and the kids… Continue reading Gagged
Two things: The standard sentence for first degree murder in the state of Washington is 20-26 years.My wife and I have been married for 27 years today. This means if she would’ve intentionally killed someone instead of marrying me back in ’92, she’d most likely be a free woman right now. Or at least awaiting… Continue reading Good with Words
My wife and I just dropped our 17-year-old daughter off at the airport so she can spend the next 2½ weeks volunteering with a humanitarian organization that’s building schools and teaching English in Cambodia. Interesting Fact #1: Cambodia is not a suburb of Seattle. It’s not even in Washington or the Pacific Northwest or the… Continue reading She’s Off for Good
According to the internet, a “baker’s dozen” is 12 + 1. The phrase dates back to the middle ages when bakers would include an extra loaf of bread for every dozen ordered so they wouldn't get fined and/or flogged if one was accidently misplaced during transit. Of course, it could have also been defined as… Continue reading Perfectly Planned
