I like to productively procrastinate. Instead of eating the frog^[1], I go down the to do list and start checking off easy items or power putz ^[2] my way around the house. So instead of working out or checks todo list completing my January course pre-requisites, I’ve been setting up focus modes to help prevent future procrastination endeavors.

That’s right, I’m procrastinating by preventing future procrastination. I’M BEING PRODUCTIVE.

1. Ryan Holiday’s ‘do the most important thing first’↩︎
2. Merlin Mann concept↩︎

Lieutenant General Hal Moore most famously commanded a battalion as a Lieutenant Colonel in the battle of la Durang in Vietnam.¹ I don’t normally get to compare myself to true American heroes² but here we are.

As portrayed by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers, LTC Hal Moore led his unit on to the battlefield and was the last to step foot off of the battle field as the helicopters transported his troops away. I too am the first in and the last out.

More specifically, I am the first one out of bed each morning and the last one in bed every night.³

I wonder who is going play me in the movie.

1. Normally I’d be thanking Wikipedia, but We Were Soldiers FTW  ↩
2. Cue Hulk Hogan entrance song  ↩
3. I chose ‘first out of bed and last one in bed’ instead of first awake, because sometimes the World’s Worst Alarm Clock  ↩

I sat down in my window seat¹ with the best of intentions. I had a couple of books downloaded ² and some work to do.

The crew handed out the headphones. I decided to check out the movies instead of following through with my best of intentions. Which critical masterpiece did I choose?

Clerks 3.³

While not a great movie, Clerks 3 proved to be familiar⁴, crude and exactly how a flight should be spent. I enjoyed the movie; I enjoyed the movie more because I was on a plane without access to emails, streams and threads…⁵

I don’t want to oversell Clerks 3, but it turned impactful⁶ at a certain point. Though the movie doesn’t stand on it’s own and has the nuance of a brick I believe Kevin Smith had the best of intentions and he followed through.

—

1. I hate window seats, but it’s government travel  ↩
2. DaVinci Biography, Cambridge History of Warfare and Less is Lost  ↩
3. Kevin Smith’s cleverly titled third installment  ↩
4. in a very meta way  ↩
5. Layover in Atlanta  ↩
6. Even poignant  ↩

I was listening to an episode from the Bookworm Podcast discussing Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson¹ and in a passing comment they highlighted an old adage – you learn more from losing, a slight variation on the lessons taught by failure.

However, we shouldn’t let winning get in the way of learning. After action reviews are as important following successes, to consolidate gains and highlight repeatable successes. We too quickly celebrate² and move on without a deliberate reflection and capture³ of best practices from the team.

Thank you for coming to my painfully obvious Ted talk.

Speaking of podcasts⁴, I’m painfully behind⁵ on the weekly shows I follow. I added some sports specific podcasts because October is second best sporting events time of year with football, playoff baseball, the NBA starting up and Formula 1 racing every other week.⁶ I don’t know why, but I have an incredibly hard time deleting a show, especially after I started listening to it.⁷

I suppose that’s a story for a different day.

1. Guaranteeing that I never read this book but I love the summaries  ↩
2. Pizza party  ↩
3. Pics or it didn’t happen  ↩
4. See line 1 ↩
5. hours  ↩
6. Three weeks in July rate number 1 due to the spandex clad Freds riding through the French country side.  ↩
7. Listen to completion  ↩

We’ve been on a big Disney kick at the house this week.¹ While I wish that I was watching something seasonal, instead Rapunzel played on a loop each night until tonight, when the 3YO chose Frozen before bed time.²

As I sit drinking my wife’s pumpkin beer³, I hummed along with Do You Want to Build a Snowman, For the First Time in Forever, Love is an Open Door, and Let It Go, and that’s just the first half of the movie. The soundtrack slaps, even after the 23rd viewing.

Thinking back to Rapunzel, I can’t name one song from the movie. I know there is a song I dislike by the evil witch⁴, but after 6 viewings in 5 days I can’t hum a single tune.

Do you want to know how little an impression Disney’s Rapunzel made? That’s not even the name of the movie.⁵

1. Second best streaming service behind YouTube.  ↩
2. Golden  ↩
3. Now that’s seasonal  ↩
4. Not played by Susan Sarandon, apparently  ↩
5. It’s Tangled.  ↩

Some evenings, the sound of heavy breathing and a hamster wheel rises from my basement. I’m a fair weather cyclist, and I’ve moved my bike to a trainer inside.

I’ve never been a gamer, save for some Goldeneye in middle school, and a bit of college Madden instead of class. However, my rides inside this season have been less mind-numbing thanks to the game pictured above.

I learned two things staring at a screen while pedaling a stationary bike.

• I still have a bit of the competitive spirit brought out unexpectedly by virtual racing
• I was half assing my time on the bike before, both inside and out

Meanwhile my riding outfit in today’s ride included a green sprinters jersey, some Bavarian socks and shoes earned on a recent October ‘pretzelfest ride’ and a backwards hat for completing registration on my phone.

It’s not all just fun and video games; it’s playing dress up too.

Can’t believe I let 6 months go by without posting… I’m sure many of you Russian bots in the comments missed me.

I chose to redo the sight, moving from Bluehost to just a plain-old WordPress-hosted personal site… pennies saved are pennies earned. Honestly, though Bluehost took steps in the past two years to streamline their products, WordPress provides a simple-to-understand and simple-to-utilize blogging platform.

I’ve felt internal pressure because of the domain name I picked to provide a certain type of content, and this writer refuses to let the pressure of a good website name elevate the effort he puts in

I’m in no position to provide Dad advice and am too poorly skilled a writer to consistently provided Dad Blog-level wisdom. Instead, I’ll focus on the simple, consistent update of my personal thoughts site.

Examples of successful rebrands fill the history books, right?

One of my Year of Foundations objectives is to improve my fitness and health.

I sat on my wife’s peloton while 1/2 of the house attended a birthday and 1/4 of the house napped. 2/3rds (a lot of fractions in this post) of the way through the class, I grabbed my red “Little Debbie” waterbottle, about 1/3 full (now I’m just f-cking with you) and took a sip. The water tasted both rubbery and earthy.

I looked at the bottle and attempted to recollect the last time I filled the bottle. I haven’t ridden the exercise bike in two weeks… It’s important to stay hydrated, so I pedaled on glad that the bottle wasn’t see through.

Speaking of hydration – I stumbled across an article about the magic of keeping your toddlers hydrated to help keep them emotionally stable. Since then I’ve been pushing water on the 2 year old like she’s prepping for the Badwater Ultra

We’ve always been diligent about her hydration… We field tested a dozen different bottles to get the right balance of ‘sipibility’ and ‘spill proofness’ and then ordered multiples of the best bottle. Every morning, she goes to school with fresh from the filter water, every afternoon a bottle awaits her arrival home and every night she’s got new water in her bedroom.

I still regularly drink from a hose in summer and my Army canteens are worse off than my exercise bike bottle I mentioned earlier.

But that’s being a dad… We don’t go an extra mile for our kids; we go the right distance. Fresh water, healthy food, and a robust schedule of sleep are all things we should be doing for ourselves too.

I’m going to go get myself a glass of water.