Shortly after marrying my wonderful wife, I told her that I would rather starve than “have a belly”. In my relatively young adult mind, I believed that I could always keep doing the things I was doing and not gain weight. How naive I was! We weren’t married long before…

I love baked salmon. I fell in love with it eating lovingly-prepared meals at my paternal grandmother’s table. Unfortunately, she took her secret recipe to the grave with her. One thing I do know: no part of the recipe was hurried. Each filet was carefully seasoned by hand, wrapped in…

The door to our storage room sticks just a little; one of the many consequences of finishing the basement myself. I pushed the door open with its characteristic *click* and flicked on the lights. I was on a mission to find a can of Mandarin Oranges for the Hawaiian Haystacks…

What do patches of ice, darkness, dogs, snow-covered trees, cats, cars, sunrise, and freezing temperatures have in common? Not much unless you’re a runner. Then, you might encounter all of those things in a single run. I’m not a big fan of outdoor running in the cold. I used to…

I turned 44 recently. To celebrate, I got up at 4:45 am, had a bite to eat, and ran 10 miles in the cold. There was snow on the ground and with the wind chill it was about 25 °F. Running south, there was a stiff wind blowing; one of…

Ah! The Holidays! I have a tainted, tarnished, and cankered view of most major US holidays because of how over-commercialized they’ve become. It’s a personal problem, I know. Online shopping has made it incredibly easy to shop for trinkets, baubles, and knickknacks that will break or be abandoned without ever…

A warm, June sun had just appeared over the horizon when I walked toward the building where I would be married in just a few short hours. I was terrified. In a classic case of cold feet, I had spent most of the previous night wondering if I wanted to…

There are seemingly endless stories about people (most of them famous in their own right) who were confronted by significant challenges who went to extraordinary measures to overcome them. …

People are not like trees. Okay, that’s not entirely true. People, like trees, start out as a seed, of sorts. We both grow, eventually begin to decay, and finally die. In both people and trees, complex biological processes are at play, many of which still seem like magic to even…