Category: Uncategorized
-
The Only Diet That Ever Worked on Me Is a Roofing Job
What are your best healthy eating habits? View all responses My best healthy eating habit is that I climb roofs for a living. I mean that literally. Nobody who sweats through a shirt by nine in the morning in a Georgia August stays fat for long, no matter what he eats. That was my diet…
-
I don’t have life hacks. I have scar tissue.
What are some life hacks that you practice? Most of the things I’d call a life hack are just habits I picked up after getting burned by not having them. Here’s one: I take pictures of everything before I close it up. On a roof, that means photographing the decking, the flashing, and the underlayment…
-
I married an Asian woman. My dishwasher became a drying rack.
I grew up in about as milquetoast of a white household in the suburbs of Atlanta as one could describe – son of a contractor and a schoolteacher. Pot roast. Canned-soup casseroles. Khaki shorts. Dave Matthews Band. When I married my wife, the daughter of first-generation immigrants from Vietnam, I predicted a few immediate lifestyle…
-
The Estimate Was Wrong Before Anyone Talked About the Roof
A tree came down across a back porch a few weeks ago, at the house of a former customer of mine, a woman in her eighties. Her husband spent his career in construction and would have handled every bit of this himself twenty years ago, but he’s disabled now and recovering from surgeries, so she…
-
Escapism
When I think about going off to some far-away fantasy world where wonders abound and the boredom of the ordinary is a thing of the past, what I notice is that I’d be going to get away from what’s here, not because I have any real appetite for the strange newness of the other. You…
-
Animorphs?
I couldn’t tell you the first book I ever read, but I know exactly what turned me into a reader, and it was Animorphs. I read every one of those books at least half a dozen times. Thirty years later there are scenes I still turn over. I thinkg about Toomin winning a singing contest…
-
And it’s not even close
We have three kids under seven and a business I’m trying to grow. So when I say the best purchase I’ve ever made is a robot lawnmower, understand that I’ve thought about this. There is no runner-up. Here’s how I got there. A while back I found out I’d be traveling abroad for about six…
-
I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords
#1 by time – Claude I think I’ve found a way to use it for most aspects of my life. Eating something? Better log that to my calorie and exercise tracker. Working? Hey Claude, check my proposal for errors. My washing machine broke? Claude, here are the symptoms… and boom, there’s how to fix it.…
-
A Song of Ice and Fire
What an absolutely excellent five-book series. The story ends on a cliffhanger—what a tease!—and we all wish the author was still with us to write a sequel or two. Sadly, some literary mysteries will never be solved. Did Jon’s story go anywhere? What was the deal with the White Walkers? Did Daenerys ever make it…
-
Groupthink
Every night I read stories to our three children. My oldest loves the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe and has me reading the graphic novels. It’s an odd place to find lessons for life, but sometimes they come from unexpected sources. In one of the stories, a character slowly dying from blood loss loses consciousness…