Category Archive

Today is my birthday. I was up early for a bike ride. Dramatic clouds caught the colors of the dawn, and were in turn reflected on the surface of the Pacific. Shortly after walking through the door and receiving warm wishes from my wife, she informed me that an acquaintance we saw at social events (whose kids played sports alongside …

When I was assessing how my actual life fell short of my ideal life, one of the most obvious shortcomings was that my life had far less music infusing it than I would like. Some of this was a function of how my brain works – I can’t concentrate with music playing in the background – it immediately goes to …

The past few years have witnessed a proliferation of gigantic skeletons popping up on lawns around Halloween. While there’s a certain novelty with these holiday decorations, there’s a countervailing argument that the rest of the year’s worth of storage in the garage (to say nothing of the time required to set up and take down the items) might make these …

Something changed for the better relatively recently. I’ve mourned the loss of my father for the past two years, but the tone of my grief shifted. I am the eldest of four siblings. For the final couple of years of my father’s decline, the others lived 2500 miles away. While my brother and sisters visited often and supported my parents …

I’ve been a longtime blog reader / podcast listener of the Mad Fientist, one of the more extreme pursuers of Financial Independence I follow (the other I’ve read for years is Jacob Lund Fisker at Early Retirement Extreme, even though he stopped creating new posts many years ago – his posts are that unconventional and mind-blowing). I met the Mad …

Although it’s been a minute since I left clinical practice, I still strongly identify with those who wear scrubs, work hours that are hard on the body, and engage the people and fluids that causes those in polite society to avert their gaze. The reason those people seek care in the emergency department is for variations on a theme: betrayals …

This past week marked two years since my father’s death in a hospice facility in my hometown. Mom and I marked the occasion by meeting at the cemetery to pay our respects. I’ve been replaying dad’s final hours in my mind intermittently for the past two years. He’d lost his oxygen supply when the tubing caught on a corner of …

My wife and I attended a Halloween party this past week with a group of fellow nerds. The theme was birds, and the costumes ranged from predictable (I was one of two Big Birds from Sesame Street) to pun-filled (the hostess dressed in blue, wearing a necklace of strung together blue kitchen sponges – a “scrub jay”). It was wonderful. …

I was at game night with the fellas when one of their high school age kids joined us for dinner. Knowing a couple of us are finance geeks, she shared a budgeting exercise that was an assignment for an economics course. My enthusiasm for hearing her planned budget (how, based on an average starting salary after graduating college, she proposed …

I’ve slept poorly the past week, waking to read at 4am without being able to fall back asleep. This week marked the anniversary of my father’s death two years ago. This morning, after another partly restless night, I loaded up my gear and headed to the beach. A couple of 70-something guys walking their dogs looked at me starting down …