A few months ago my wife went away for a couple nights on a work trip.  When mom goes away a couple of things always happen.  First, the ratio of screen time to total hours awake approaches one.  Second, we all eat like kings and queens.  For the kids that might mean loading up the grocery…

The day before her thirty fourth birthday, I gave my wife a puzzle.  Well, actually it was an address to a website I’d created that included an assortment of puzzles.  To access the website she needed a password, which she would have found while completing the previous day’s puzzle.  That puzzle, an Excel spreadsheet with…

When people ask where I come from I usually say D.C.  Of course I didn’t actually grow up in D.C., I just say that out of force of habit because everyone knows D.C. but few people know the town of Laurel, Maryland where I grew up.  Saying you are from D.C. is a shorthand for…

When traveling with a pregnant woman through Italy, you end up eating a good number of meals by yourself.  At least, this was the case when my wife and I spent a week in Italy together, while she was pregnant with our first child.  No one tells you this, just like no one tells you…

This year for my 36th birthday my wife picked out the perfect present for the man who has everything: a set of Hexbugs. A Hexbug, if you are not already in the know, is a robotic bug. They come in various designs. My wife had chosen…

There is a pain in my side.  It is transient and subtle.  The untrained observer might even go sometime without noticing it.  But I notice it.  Between clear muscle spasms in my lower back, and a feeling that part of my abdomen has been pulled a bit too tight, there is a general dull aching. …

I don’t remember exactly how we found ourselves having lunch together, me and my new friend Zeb.  Zeb is short for Zebulon, an interesting bit of trivia that I’d only first learned many years after we’d become friends.  You rarely meet people in life with interesting names that actually live up to them.  Zeb was…