This afternoon, we made it back from Ojai in time for Nate’s All Stars soccer practice. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and I offered to help put the goal together with one of the dads. We found ourselves staring at approximately 15 metal tubes with various colors of tape…
December. Elves working nights and weekends. Planning for 2020. And of course, workplace performance reviews. Earlier this week, I warned the boys on our drive up the mountain, “Now listen. I have to get my year-end review done tonight, so I have to work on it after dinner.” Nate, “What? Your…
All my life, Granddad has talked fondly of his mom picking him up from school. His favorite days were when she’d show-up with the bird dogs and the shotguns in her car, ready to take him hunting. Just the right mom for Granddad. Meanwhile, Nate and I have a similar…
We’re still deep into Legos and Nerf Guns. Thankfully, Pokémon is finally losing its grip on our wallets. Now beyond these mainstays, every few years the No It All Gift Guide for Boys likes to mix it up. You know, we gotta keep it woke. We started with the OG…
When my childhood friend, Nealy, got married, her older sister Erin gave the best speech– almost perfectly summarizing the experience of growing-up in the Santa Cruz mountains. It talked about her parents raising tough mountain women that knew how to stack wood, dig ditches, and weather the inevitable disasters brought-on…
As I’ve mentioned, Jacob is very interested in entrepreneurship and business and how you make money. Lately he has a lot of questions about taxes and interest. The former involving how he avoids them, and the latter involving how he can apply it to his little brother. So today Jake decides…
Last weekend we had our second annual Halloween party. No joke, ever since his inaugural party, Jacob’s been planning the next one. We’ve created a monster! He tells me he loves planning parties. He loves setting-up the upstairs as a Nerf gun zombie apocalypse course. He loves filling the giant horse trough for…
On October 14th, the real license plates got put on my car. It’s kind of sad really. How quickly the paper plate era flies by. Now in my recounting of that great date in July when I set forth on my first unassisted automobile acquisition expedition, I didn’t quite capture the full…
Two weekends ago we had back-to-back soccer games at Damon Garcia. On these days I position myself in between both fields and kind of ping-pong pivot back and forth. I generally find myself in “enemy territory” for the Bullsharks, which is Nate’s team. It’s apparently gauche to be cheering for…
This email from our Team Mom made me snort out loud yesterday: I am so bad at this! I need to remind you sooner! Tomorrow’s game is at 3:45 so please arrive by 3:15 for warmup. Jacob is on healthy snack duty. Go team! Sent from my iPhone I sure…