I know, for a fact, that you’ve experienced this.

It might have been in the car with your family.

Maybe you were in a movie theater, or you might have been at church.

The smell comes out of nowhere, and as the gas from a silent but deadly attack begins to invade nostrils, everyone starts looking around.

First, just out of the corner of their eye, but then as the smell gets worse, people start craning their necks and looking around, trying to figure out who violated the airways…

[Fair Warning: foul language alert]

Yesterday I had to run over to the new grocery store to pick up a couple of things. It was just after 5:00 when I got there, so the place was packed with other people picking up stuff on the way home from work.

Full parking lot.

Cars everywhere.

Most times at this store, you can just park, but this time I had to look around for an empty space. I spotted one and started to turn in, and then. . .

BRAKES!…

Last summer, after I'd gotten so out-of-shape that jumping on the trampoline for two minutes with my kids resulted in me being totally out of breath and my [too small] jeans splitting at the seams, I started looking for some way to regain my fitness.

This was a path I’d been down before.

I’ve done the “regular gym” routine at a dozen or more health clubs.

I’ve done the Body for Life program.

I’ve done P90X2.

Etc, etc, etc.

They all work, there’s no doubt about that. They just take so much time…

On the way to school this morning, Sam wanted to know why it's easier for kids to learn things than it is for adults. In trying to explain, I used the example of learning a language and how much easier it is for kids who grow up in bilingual families.

“That would be so cool!” Lily said.

“What? A bilingual family?”

“No daddy, it would be so cool to speak another language!”

It took me a minute to get over the shock of what I’d just heard…

Every morning when I look at new listings on our MLS, I’m amazed at what real estate agents get away with.

Amateur photography.

Allowances for repairs instead of just making the repairs.

Lack of staging.

Neglected curb appeal.

A new fridge, but a 20-year-old range and dishwasher.

Dingy paint & dirty walls.

The list goes on. . .

You might recall that Julia and I are going to Mexico as soon as we both hit a 365-day streak of Spanish lessons on Duolingo.

It was an idea we had back near the end of July after she followed my lead and downloaded the Duolingo app. We figured learning a language is hard and, if we stuck with it, we should reward ourselves…

One of the first things I did when we bought our house was to split a large bedroom right down the middle, turning it into two smaller bedrooms so that each kid had their own room.

It was not a complicated project by any stretch, but I was short on time, so I paid someone to come in and frame the wall for me. Afterward, I did the simple wiring, which consisted of only two lights and a handful of receptacles.

Conveniently, there was an outlet right beside the new wall, so I popped the cover off and looked inside to what gauge wire was on the circuit before heading over to Lowes to pick up my supplies.

The entire job took about 45 minutes, counting sweeping up the mess from drilling through the studs. Mind you this was just the rough wiring so the sheetrock guys could get in - I’d not yet installed any receptacles or switches, nor had I tied into the existing circuit.

When I went back to make the tie-in, there was a problem. I’d wired the new wall with 14 gauge wire, but the wire in the existing receptacle was a larger 12 gauge wire…

Looking back, I can see two things.

One, the writing was on the wall and, two, I was utterly unprepared.

Hindsight offers that sort of clarity.

In the spring of 2009, I was flat broke. The housing market had collapsed, and over the previous nine months, I’d sold only one property, earning just a couple thousand dollars. The bills were piling up, and with the credit cards maxed, and I had no idea what I was going to do…

Riding home from school the other day, I was telling stories about funny things Sam did when he was a baby and, of course, Lily wanted to know something funny about her.

Back when she was born, you couldn’t teach me anything about how to tend to a baby - I already knew it all. So, despite having never changed a diaper in my life, I wasn’t about to take any advice on how to do it.

Being an expert diaper changer, I reckoned, required nothing more than fathering a child.

It’s a baby, a butt wipe, and a diaper.

How freakin’ hard can it be?…

After my post last week about my buddies doing the burpee challenge, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mental aspect of doing hard shit.

Quitting cigarettes, getting up early, eating healthy, reading more, exercising every day - whatever your “hard shit” is.

When it comes to hard shit, it’s easy to get started. The first second or two is no problem, but then you hear the voice…

Pulling up at the baseball field this morning for Sam’s 3rd game of his first season, I noticed that a lot of kids carry fancy equipment bags.

Special-purpose backpacks, built for baseball, with room for a helmet, gloves, cleats, water bottle, and more. They even have straps on the side to hold their bat, so they don’t have to carry it.

In contrast, Sam is carrying an old backpack leftover from kindergarten…

You know what drives me nuts?

A buddy of mine and I were talking about it this morning, and I bet every married man will relate.

Hell, you don’t even need to be married, you just need to have a girlfriend.

Or even just a friend who’s a girl that you want to grab a bite to eat with.

It goes like this: you’re out driving around, maybe running errands, and she gets hungry…

From a challenge thrown down a few weeks ago, a crazy bunch of my friends are doing 100 burpees every day this month.

I’m not one to shy away from a challenge, but with old bike injuries to both shoulders and an upcoming Spartan race, I didn’t want to risk it. (That might be an excuse, I’m honestly not sure, but that’s another story)

Either way, I’m not doing the challenge, but 100 burpees make a regular appearance in the Crossfit WOD bible that guides my workouts.

The first time I did it last summer, it took me somewhere around 30 minutes.

By January of this year, I had it down to 19:42…

You know how some people just like to worry?

Maybe “like” isn’t exactly the right term - but you know what I mean. Some people seem to worry about shit all the time…

Over the last couple of months, on the exercise program and diet that I’ve been following, I’ve lost some weight and a few inches. In the first few weeks, of course, there wasn’t much difference but now that I’ve been at it for 8 weeks some folks have taken notice.

“You look great.”

“Wow, you’ve lost weight.”

Compliments like that are great and they certainly suit my ego (thank you very much), but what’s been more interesting is the follow-up question.

“What’s your secret?”…