Husband. Father. Writer. Entrepreneur. Maybe a bit crazy.
I’ve experienced three significant personal traumas in my life. I’ve written about all three before, so I’ll summarize: In 1988, when I was 9, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A few days before I turned 15, she lost…
On a Saturday afternoon, I sat next to my maternal grandmother near the oval-shaped table in the kitchen of their small home. My mother grew up there with her parents and her three siblings. Some years early, Grandma Dee (Delores)…
It’s 4:00 am again. I rarely need an alarm to wake me at that hour anymore. 4 or 5 hours of sleep is never enough, but I’m awake. With my headlamp fully charged and snug around my skull, I enjoy…
Henry sat next to Spencer for a long time, neither one of them saying much to each other. The two had been friends for decades. After a while, Henry stood, took his friend’s hand lightly in his own, and walked…
MapQuest was a technological marvel. In the early days of the internet you would. . . Visit mapquest.com, Enter your departure address, Enter your destination address, Print the turn-by-turn instructions produced by the system, Take your printed directions and find…
‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was one of three key messages created by Britain’s wartime propaganda department, the Ministry of Information, during the second World War. The now-ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ phrase was chosen for its clear message…
We live in a weird time. On one hand, the wellness folks are all telling us to take a beat and slow down. A lot. Articles with titles like these dot the internet landscape: “Why You Need to Slow Down”…
It’s rare that I get more than 6 hours of sleep in a night. 5 is a solid average. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to stop setting an alarm. I figured I would wake up when my body…
Imagine you’ve just been to the doctor for a routine checkup. But your doctor found something. A few weeks later, tests confirm that you have a stage II non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Treatments begin in earnest: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation. You lose…
It was 5:00 am when we hit the trailhead of one of the most challenging day-hikes the Wasatch mountains have to offer. For August, it was a cool morning, but I knew that would change as soon as the sun…
When I was six years old, I knew I would be a veterinarian when I grew up. By the time I was nine, I had expanded my love of animals and knew I’d be a zoologist. By fourteen, I was…
When I was nine or ten, this old lawnmower we had stopped working. The engine seized one day while my dad was out mowing the lawn. My younger brother — who was only eighteen months my junior — and I…
The door to our storage room sticks just a little; one of the many consequences of finishing the basement myself. I pushed the door open with its characteristic *click* and flicked on the lights. I was on a mission to…
I turned 44 recently. To celebrate, I got up at 4:45 am, had a bite to eat, and ran 10 miles in the cold. There was snow on the ground and with the wind chill it was about 25 °F…
Ah! The Holidays! I have a tainted, tarnished, and cankered view of most major US holidays because of how over-commercialized they’ve become. It’s a personal problem, I know. Online shopping has made it incredibly easy to shop for trinkets, baubles…
