One of the big challenges of outdoor youth sports is dodging the inevitable spring rainfalls. We’ll have a practice or two and I’ll see some real improvement with the children I’m coaching. Then, we’ll have some rain and be forced to miss a practice and a game and then the next time I see them,
Several people have written me asking whether I actually go to a lot of live baseball games. I do not. For starters, I live pretty far from a major league team. The closest park is about three hours away. There are some minor league teams in the area and we’ve attended a few of their
Every once in a while, you have a day that’s so filled with strange and unusual events that you find yourself just shaking your head as you go to bed, wondering how a day that started so normally could have gone down such a bizarre path. That was my Monday. It was just one of
On Saturday evening, my wife fell really ill. She was feverish and barely wanted to crawl out of bed. By Sunday afternoon, she felt fine. On Sunday afternoon, my youngest son fell really ill. He was feverish and barely wanted to move. By Monday afternoon, he felt fine. On Monday afternoon, I felt really ill.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, spring’s arrival means that my volunteerism goals are starting to kick into shape. My goal for the year is 200 hours of community service, which breaks down to about four hours a week. This week, my volunteer hours are going to top off at somewhere around ten, making
I’m one of those people that you’ll typically find wearing full-length pants on the hottest day of the year. I’m not much of a fan of shorts for some reason. Everyone else in my house, however, seems to have already made the leap into shorts. We spent much of the last weekend digging clothes out
I’m not talking about basketball. I’m talking about the weather. We’ve had six days in a row where the temperature peaked above 80 F in central Iowa in March. The grass is rapidly turning green and everything is blooming. All of this is happening a month or so earlier than normal. I am so tempted
I consider the switches to and from Daylight Savings Time to be largely useless in the modern era. It disrupts sleep patterns, causes people who forget to adjust clocks to miss appointments, and adds something else to worry about to our hectic lives. I understood the need for it in the past, but as the
On Sunday, we had a snowstorm that deposited several inches on the ground and left me shoveling the driveway. On Tuesday, the temperature reached 70 F and I went on a long walk in short sleeves. Spring springs suddenly. Marginal Tax Rate VS Effective Tax Rate – What are They and How do They Affect
A few nights ago, I stayed up until 1 AM working on a project. The following night, I stayed up until 12:30 AM talking to friends. Both of those days, I had to get up at 6 AM. The second night, my oldest son woke up twice in the night from bad dreams. That next
For some reason, three people have contacted me within the last day or two asking me for suggestions on how to deal with drinks and snacks when playing board or card games with friends. They do make a mess. If we’re just playing a game with an ordinary deck of playing cards, I don’t sweat
You would think, with the Iowa caucus ending a month and a half ago, that the automated political calls would stop for our family. You’d be wrong. I’m still getting calls from candidates I don’t support asking me to donate to them. I’m getting weird calls from all sorts of action groups wanting me to
If I had to give someone advice on how to keep a marriage in good shape, here’s what it would be. Every day, do two things. One, tell your spouse that you love them and tell them something specific about them that you love. Two, spend half an hour doing something that helps them in
Recently, I found out that one of my favorite writers has cancer. That person will announce it in due time if it turns out to be untreatable, but that’s her (or is it his?) decision. When you’re a fan of someone’s work and read it faithfully, it’s easy to get caught up in that person’s
Sometimes, I wonder what the line is between an appropriate amount of youth activities and too many activities is. My older children have tumbling/gymnastics one night a week, ice skating one night a week, soccer two nights a week when the weather is appropriate, and they both want to join tae kwon do which is
During the day, when my kids are at school and my wife is out of the house at work, I turn the furnace off and the house gets rather cool. When that happens, I often just wrap myself up in a warm blanket as I work. It’s a big, comfortable thing that’s just cozy to
Whenever there’s a significant vote or election, I find myself tuning into the results the evening after the vote. I’ll visit tons of websites, looking for the latest results and different perspectives on what they mean. The funny thing is that it’s usually impossible to really say what the impact of a vote really is
A few days ago, a technical problem with The Simple Dollar cropped up involving the front page not refreshing for some users of the site. A reader emailed me about it. A few months ago, I would have then spent several hours reading documentation and trying to figure out what was wrong. There would have
Over the last few weeks, I spent a lot of time thinking about resolutions. During that process, I did a lot of digging for articles on resolutions and goals from people whose thoughts I greatly value. Here are some of the useful articles I found in that search. Solving problems Leaning away from problems rarely