i was walking to my office when bella, who was using marty's computer, stopped me. she said i had to see this. she said it was so awesome. i pulled up a chair and sat next to her. she had a youtube video cocked and ready. the moment i was situated and looked at the screen, she hit play. three seconds into the video she paused it, turned to me and launched into a verbal dissertation that went somet...

i forgot that i had one more facebook morsel to share, which i do realize takes me further from my seven sentences goal. a friend forwarded a message they received from another facebookian they didn't know. here's a name-protected version of the message:


i fear i'm unable to share the exact wording of my friend's message to me because i don't think i'm able to sanitize it enough for this public space without it losing all meaning or coherence. the gist of his message was simply asking how one should respond to an inquiry of this nature.

as far as conversational mis-steps go i put this right up there with asking a woman who is not pregnant what trimester she's in or when the child is due. i've been lucky enough to witness one of those first hand and for however uncomfortable the next few minutes were, i gotta say i'd rather be dealt that (says the man) than asked if my child, who is not mentally disabled, is mentally disabled.

after pondering my friend's fix for a moment i suggested he say no, his child is not special needs and that after receiving her inquiry he looked at her page and wondered if she is expecting again or is merely struggling with the baby weight from her last child.

and yes, my mother did raise me better than that (she would have asked me to share this point with you).

and yes, these sage advice services are also available to you. and get this, they're completely free of charge. i know, thoroughly unbelievable.

i need to make a clarification about yesterday's post. while i did receive an email about it, the email i received was sent from facebook because grammar-dave posted the message on something called "my wall". i'm not entirely certain what my wall is. i've been told by more than one person that if i'm going to have a wall, i should at least know what it is. i told them that having or not having a wall was never a choice i was asked to make and it was only emails like this one that even made me aware of my wall-ownership.

and speaking of facebook, i bet you cash-money i can summarize my facebook thoughts and experiences in seven sentences or less:

1. in april of 2006 i created a facebook account after i was hired by a university because i was told that everyone at the university had a one and it was the proper thing to do.
2. in 2008 i used my facebook account for the first time to look up 40 students i was teaching and then told them in class there were five of them i wouldn't hire for a job based solely upon what i found on their facebook pages.
3. i've never seen more blood leave more faces more quickly, like ever.
4. i log onto face book every three to four months and accept every friend request that has been made of me whether i know the person or not.
5. when asked by someone why i friended everyone, i said because it just didn't matter enough not to.
6. a female student at my school had a job with facebook where she received the questionable material reports and had to make decisions about if the material was questionable enough to be stricken from the record.
7. it's very possible the questionable material job is the only job i might enjoy more than the job i presently have.
8. the last time i looked in on my page a woman i know asked a question about my photo contest and when i didn't answer after a few weeks, another friend, who knew me but not the woman, answered the question for me after saying he was pretty sure i never looked at the page.
9. when i saw that that exchange had occurred, i experienced my first ever warm feeling towards facebook.

ok. so i couldn't swing it in less than seven sentences. de-friend me. and if you're wondering what this might have looked like for myspace, i'm reasonably confident i could have wrapped that up in one sentence.

most guys obsess about fried food, hollywood starlets, first-person shooter games, fast cars and/or fantasy football. i used to work with a guy who obsessed about grammar, or more accurately, broken grammar. for this guy my site and its quickly penned material was like porn of the highest caliber. most correspondence i receive from him contains a bulleted list of errors he's found in my ramblings. that said, the latest message i received from him surprisingly did not contain a litany of my blunders.


first off, he's going to have a hard time convincing me he didn't pen that retort. and secondly, i for the life of me can't imagine why that banter would lead him to me.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. incompetence

it was my first outdoor ride of the season and it was proving to be a better first ride than most because of my diligence on the trainer through the winter months. this diligence can be mostly attributed to the belt loop i gained before the end of october. this single belt-loop is what got me on the trainer religiously. but for however spiritual and life-saving the bike trainer may be during the f...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. oh yeah

ok, now that i got my bitching out of the way, let's talk about the good things of the latest vacation.

the day before the trip, a girl who works in my office sent me off by saying, "enjoy your man-cation". it is just not humanly possible for me to love this colorful phrase any more and all the good things that go with it.

i don't know that they've made the camera that can capture just how massive and stunning and wicked cool this particular span of mountains are. it's beyond bewildering and banff national park, where bookguy and i traveled this year, is really something diverse and special.

canadians build castle's in their mountains. i thought the stanley manor of estes park was impressive but this hotel, built in 1888, is as unbelievable and awe-inspiring as the mountains that completely surround it. truthfully, it makes the stanley look like a metal tool shed in a suburban back yard.

spring skiing in colorado involves sunscreen and t-shirts. spring skiing in canada means temperatures may get above zero degrees. when commenting on the low temps on a lift to a local, i was told that this same hill in january registered negative thirty and this here near-zero business was deemed a for sure heat wave for the region.

after soaking in the canadian hospitality and breathtaking vistas, i asked bookguy why he thought more americans didn't move north. he said it probably had something to do with the nine-month winters. i reckon this is a sound take and probably why you see canadians making the most of things, frigid as they may be. talent-wise the small boy in this picture would easily make most high school hockey teams in the states. and watching this man work with his son so made me extra-homesick for my youngins (not to mention watching them play on this wild lake made me miss skating on colorado mountain ponds when i was a kid).

banff national park is definitely a place that holds appeal for a summer or winter sojourn and i was taking diligent notes about the ways my family would enjoy this region. i have already discussed the matter with marty and the start of a road trip north is taking form. i imagine a mix of camping and hotels while we wend our way to the obvious attractions (e.g. rushmore, the badlands, custer's last stand) making banff the termination or turning point for our great north american adventure. too kewl.

(all photo credits go to my long-time mancation cohort, bookguy)

my sunday was to begin at 3:50am. i can count the days that i have begun at 3:50am on one finger of one hand. i was ready for this particular day though because it was to mark the beginning of a twelve hour trek that would return me to my people.

the day started with the alarm of my iphone ringing one hour early due to daylight savings time which means the day that already had a gruesome start time now had an even more gruesome start time. sadly i didn't realize this miscue until i had taken a shower and went to wake bookguy. for one hundred reasons i was afraid to go back to sleep so groggily waited the hour out in preparation of the two hour car ride to calgary that would officially set our journey in motion.

instead of boring you with the litany of missteps that occurred throughout the day, i'll just add how it all ended because if you sprinkled ten more equally fated dots on the page, you'd have a fine picture of this travel experience. the day concluded, after a three hour delay at o'hare (an airport i was not originally supposed to pass through at all and a full six hours after i was supposed to have been home based on my original itinerary), with the pilot saying over the garbled intercom that there would be a brief delay because the plane was over-fueled and we had to wait for the suck-extra-fuel-back-out-of-the-plane truck to come and suck-extra-fuel-back-out-of-the-plane (as you can imagine, airports, even ones the size of o'hare, aren't exactly teeming with such specialized equipment). the word "brief" in o'hare-speak turns out to be thirty-five minutes and these were just a few more drops in the bucket that culminated in my crossing my home's threshold at 12:40am (mon) instead of 4:30pm (sun) as i was originally scheduled to, or if you prefer twenty-two hours instead of fourteen.

i try to not gripe about such pedestrian matters in this space and i know i run the risk of sounding like one of the douche-bags so expertly dissected by louis ck but i'm taking this moment to rededicate myself to some long-held convictions:

• avoid u.s. customs (post 9-11)
• avoid connecting flights
• avoid checking bags
• avoid flying (post 9-11)

and don't get me wrong. i love flying. i love traveling. and i love the ease in which both of those things are possible via today's knowledge and technology. but the love of those things is irrefutably trumped by my complete lack of patience for thoughtless reactionary, partially-cooked processes which are mindlessly implemented and heartlessly administered. it's tragically sad and we're capable of so much more.

marty learned something new about anthony last week. before falling asleep at night, anthony had a habit of reaching up and under marty's shirt. when this happened she would push him away telling him he already nummed (e.g. nursed) and they were done for the night. he would grunt and continue with his wandering hand and the grudge match persisted until he would finally fall asleep. what she has just recently discovered, somehow, is he wasn't looking to nurse, he just wanted to fall asleep while holding her nipple in his fingers.

marty told me the story while making breakfast the morning after she figured this all out. she concluded her revelation by muttering a sarcastic "freak" at the end. after a pregnant pause, i said. "yeah freakshow. how weird" to which marty quickly replied, "nice try. don't think i don't know where he gets this little proclivity from."

hey, at least he got to experience the tap directly. i was bottle-fed.

there's something about voicemail from kids that is so way better than voicemail from grownups.

click to play

128kb / 31 seconds transcript hello. this is bella dearmitt at the troy dearmitt's house. happy birthday again. lots of people at school are saying happy birthday also. uhm. i was wondering where you wanted to go to work, or i mean, to dinner. we are all voting for sushi. i am voting for steak if you would like to. so give us a call. bye. in the end i trumped them all and returned to the natasha's kabob international for the second year in a row.

i was awoken with one kiss on the cheek and then a second. the first came from bella. the second from alex. then i heard, come on dad, wake up. it's someone's birthday. i blearily opened my eyes. through squinty slits i saw bella and alex standing before me. smiling broadly. as soon as they saw whites in my eyes they broke into a bright and spirited version of happy birthday, which seemed extra bright and spirited given the pre eight o'clock hour.

they told me to get up because i had to find 'things'. i groggily asked what things i had to find. alex asked if i remembered how mom hid numbers for the kids on their birthday? well this year they hid little numbers for me to find. i asked how many. he asked how old i was. i asked if i could go to the bathroom before i started. bella held her hands up, instructed me to wait saying that she would get the bathroom ready for me. by the time i staggered through the doorway, she had lifted the seat and had the father wipes sitting open next to the toilet (not that they were needed). as i approached she was standing before the toilet fanning her hands towards it like a price is right model introducing a shiny, deluxe motor-home. when i entered she shooed alex out saying i should get privacy.

i walked out of the bathroom towards my office for a drink of tea. after taking a long draw from last night's glass, i turned to begin my search. alex stopped me in the doorway and said i stank and should get a new pair of underwear. i told him that if he could smell me from where he was, i probably needed more than new underwear and should take a shower. he said it was definitely my underwear. there was a laundry basket nearby and i leaned down to get a fresh pair of boxers but alex said the ones there wouldn't work and i had to get them from my dresser drawer. he was practically dancing in place as he said it and then i understood, one of my numbers was there. one down. only forty to go.

in my defense the kids numbers are way bigger than my numbers. this seems backwards to me and the geriatric factor should trump the small hands and short attention factor. in evidence, there's just a few more hours left of my birthday day and i'm still missing three of my forty-one numbers. since the kids helped hide them i'm thinking i'll be lucky to find the those last three before i'm forty-two.

recently, walking home from work i passed a neighbor trying to remove a 50 year old retaining wall in his backyard with a rented jackhammer. i stopped and wordlessly watched him for several minutes. he paused from his work, wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve and jokingly asked if i wanted a turn. my face lit up and i exclaimed, "really!". yes really. i ran home, flew up the stairs calling to marty as i passed by. i quickly changed my clothes and bounded back down the stairs and shot out the front door yelling a garbled goodbye to marty on my way out.

i could not recommend the use of a jackhammer more. both so you can say it's something you have done and so you can say it's something you don't have to do for a living.

someone had asked me how the new feel-good approach was going with bella. now two weeks in and sticking firm to the teachings i gotta say the transformation has been remarkable. this isn't to say i haven't been pushed by bella in the last two weeks because i have and will continue to be. what has been different is i haven't bitten. instead i've backed off and gotten her to back off until emotions and tempers can cool down. then when everyone is in a reason-worthy state, we talk.

in example, last night bella and i were supposed to go look at bikes because she has outgrown hers. i came home early from work to do this. when i arrived she was already in a fitful state. i calmly let her do her thing. she appeared before me in a huff and said she was ready to go. i said great. she asked how we were getting there. i said we were walking. she groaned loudly and said she wouldn't walk and would only go if we drove. i explained that if that were the case we wouldn't be going. she escalated. calmly, i told her she needed to go to her room until she could re-join the family in a calm and respectful way. she boisterously made her way to her room.

marty and i made dinner and did homework with alex and played with anthony. when dinner was ready, about an hour later, we called bella down. she appeared in the kitchen as if nothing had happened just sixty minutes earlier. without prompting she presented herself to me and said she was sorry for yelling earlier but her class got in trouble at school and they had to run a bunch of laps in gym and then she walked home from school and she was tired and afraid that she couldn't also walk to the bike shop. when she was done, i took her cheeks in my hands and said, "bella, how you just expressed yourself was amazing and if you'd said that, like that, an hour ago you'd have a new bike here and ready to ride to school tomorrow. thanks." with that we hugged, said we'd try to go tomorrow and moved to the dinner table to eat.

so in answer to the question, how has my new approach been working with bella, i gotta say, i'm a full-on, card-carrying believer.

click for larger version

bella and i have been struggling. i would say we have been for several weeks. it used to go in spurts with moments of good followed by moments of bad but since school began it's mostly been on the tense side. this picture shows us in happier times at the beginning of summer break.

things came to a head on sunday when she and i had a battle over her going to a neighborhood baby shower our family had been invited to. while walking to the shower, bella went into full shrill mode, and i, predictable as crappy service at borders books, bit. the hook didn't just pierce my lip. i swallowed it whole and only the longest pair of needle nosed pliers operated by someone skilled in removing hooks this buried could have saved the confrontation. it culminated with me marching bella home (prior to us reaching the shower) and sending her to her room for the remainder of the day. this was at noon.

that night when i went to exercise, my bike computer was missing from my desk. i asked bella if she knew where it was, she said she didn't. the next day, with marty's help, we learned that she did know because she had taken it from my desk and hidden it. with this multi-tiered offense, bella graduated to a new level of childhood crime.

i couldn't even begin to fathom the appropriate punishment. i told marty to be prepared for something extreme. two days later i was still thinking what it should be. while walking to work and playing the pending conversation in my head i imagined myself saying to bella that no one in my life, professionally or personally, treated me with as much disrespect as she showed me on sunday. before my brain had time to move to my next line, my head responded for bella telling me that the same was true for her, that i treated her with more disrespect than anyone else she dealt with from day to day. this froze my thought. after our fighting and boisterous stand-offs bella could say the same thing of me that i was thinking towards her. this realization made me sick to my stomach. this was not the father i wanted to be.

i pulled a book off my bookshelf. it was a parenting book i read a few years back called parenting from the heart. obviously i needed a refresher. i started reading its pages which still held my markings and notes from the first time i took it in. the basic gist of the book is this. children are born inherently guileless and happy. parents and society pour notions of insecurity and distrust into these innocent creatures, in time making them skittish and less certain. it was most likely done to us and unless we become aware of it, we will do it to our children. another way of thinking about it is that inside all of us is a happy and centered person, we just have a bunch of crap (work, fatigue, worry, doubt, debt, apathy) piled on top of it suppressing that original person from making more appearances. it's like the notion that everyone has a six-pack (you wouldn't be able to get out of a chair if you didn't) it's just no one can see it because there's three to nine inches of fat sitting on top of the well-formed and toned muscles.

i came home from work. marty was making dinner. i asked where bella was. she said she was next door. i told marty i'd take care of her punishment and that i'd had a change of heart. marty's head turned to me looking surprised. i told her the offense was made upon me and i felt that i had done things to warrant it and would like to handle bella's punishment my own way. with a touch of uncertainty marty relented the fight.

when bella came home i asked her to follow me onto the porch. she immediately started asking what and why. i marched ahead not acknowledging her inquiries. once on the porch i sat down and told her to come to me pointing at the spot directly at my feet. she did so apprehensively. she stood there looking pensive. i told her i needed her to give me a hug. she asked why. i told her it was because i needed one. hesitantly, she complied. it lacked heart, feeling. i told her it wasn't big enough. it wasn't good enough. she hugged me tighter. and then i hugged her. i hugged her BIG. and then we hugged each other. i looked at her and apologized for not being more supportive or understanding towards her as of late. she reciprocated. more hugs. this full exchange was less than three minutes long and by the end we were smiling and giggling and tickling. for the days and weeks prior to this we had predominately been nothing but scowls and scorn. for the first time in many weeks bella and i shared a completely tension-free evening full of respect and more importantly full of adoration.

i'm learning, more slowly than i should, there is no cruise control for parenting. you always have to keep your eye on the road and your foot on the gas. otherwise, you are destined for the ditch. or worse.

please know, this record is more for me than it is for you.

i felt a step behind all day yesterday. it started when bella got up at 6:15 to go to the bathroom and the wind from the open window blew the door shut and woke me up. and then while walking to work i just missed crossing a busy street before the eternal light turned green and released an endless throng of traffic. and then there was the painfully slow-moving elevator i arrived to just in time to see the doors pinch shut. then there was the person who called me a second time moments before i returned their first call. like i said, one step slow all day.

then last night i was slated to go for a bike ride. for these rides, i try to leave by 10pm but was still sitting at my desk at 10:30. i didn't actually push off until 11pm. i ride for 30 miles and it takes me two hours. thirty minutes into the ride lightning started flashing in the distance. at the midway point i take a ten minute break. the lightning was intensifying and i smelled rain so i jumped back on the bike after just a few minutes and started back. about ten minutes later i was coming up on one of my favorite stretches of this particular route. it is a long, winding section of blacktop that is slightly downhill and is flanked on either side by stately homes with deep lawns and the occasional hanger-on farm. the road is wide and smooth and on a good day i can maintain a clip of just under 30 miles an hour for a mile or two. i had one street to cross before starting this alpha-stretch and was approaching a green light which meant i could hit it on a run. moments before i would have pulled through the intersection the light went yellow. i pulled up and stopped.

after taking a dejected pull from my water bottle, my mind immediately began replaying all the near misses the day had dealt me. the quiet around me was interrupted by a muscle car coming down the street that currently had the green. they turned onto my road heading in the direction i was waiting to go. after negotiating the turn, the car accelerated with a groan and sped forward. after straightening out the driver didn't notice, see, mind or care about a slight bend in the road and ran his/her car straight into the curb. the raised edge caused the front tire to jump in the air and sent the car crazily veering off to the left. the driver effortfully worked to regain control and once he did he continued down the road like nothing had happened. as i watched the taillights diminish in the distance it occurred to me that had i made it through that light, i would have been in just about the very spot that car hit the curb when it hit the curb. for the first time that day i didn't feel a step behind. in fact, i felt in perfect sync. my light clicked green as did every other light i approached for the next ten miles.

i also beat the rain home.

while walking home from work i ran into two women. it was a mother and daughter. they were visiting the university i work at, considering it for the daughter for next year.

i met them by asking if they were lost or needed help finding something because they seemed perplexed about things. their faces lit up with surprise. then they said they did not need help but immediately commented on how nice it was that i asked. they went on to say that people everywhere here were so nice. nothing like at harvard or yale or the eleven other schools they had visited. i quipped that we run a happy campus but there are a few old cantankerous cranks around, we just don't let them out much. after a few more pleasantries i noticed the woman, the mother, intently staring at my face. when i turned to her, she said in a methodical and careful way that i had a very cuban forehead (i now assumed that both of these bronzed women were themselves cuban). she moved her hand over my forehead like she wanted to touch it but resisted. after a pause while i processed her comment making sure i heard it right, i assured her she was the first person to ever say that particular string of words to me and that i've been told i look like eddie munster plenty but never that i had the forehead of a cuban man. she then told me it was a good forehead clapped me on the shoulder in a familial way and with that we parted ways, everyone the better for the moment we shared.

i was working on my computer one night during last month's sabbatical. the software updates notifier appeared. i'd been putting these off the last few weeks so decided to finally install the updates and restart my computer. i ran the updates and after the reboot continued to work for several more hours before going to bed. when i awoke in the morning, i went to my office, lifted the laptop screen...

i must apologize for not being more involved or entertaining since returning from my sabbatical but i've been distracted. as for what has caught my eye it would be my new knee. this would be the knee which received reconstructive surgery in april of 2008. while the full rehab took better than a year to complete, the restoration of my knee was in a word complete, completely beautiful. completely restorative. simply complete.

when i first met with my super-surgeon and he recommended the reconstructive course of action, i asked him to guess my rate of performance after going through with the procedure, and would my knee perform at, say, 50%, 80% or better. he looked at my like i had asked him if we would be sleeping together before or after the surgery. after shaking the ludicrousness of my question off he said, without pause, "your recovery will be 100%. it will be like your knee was never injured. your rehabilitated knee will out-perform your knee that was never injured." i then asked him what other parts of my body he could augment similarly.

before my surgery if i played 1 hour of tennis, while wearing a brace, it would be three days before i could climb a flight of stairs or get out of a chair without wincing. and i would have to wait at least a week before even considering going out on the tennis court again. this ongoing debilitation was largely what sent me shopping for a doctor in the first place. now with my fully rehabilitated knee my weeks look much different. tuesday night i did an intense, thirty-minute, interval routine on my bike trainer. wednesday night i played two break-free (and brace-free!) hours of tennis with e-love. and last night, thursday, i biked 25 hilly miles maintaining a 14mph average speed. and in the last few weeks, i'm down more than a full belt-loop.

so, i'm sure you can appreciate this infatuation with my new body. i mean it's not like i sit up at night rubbing on my knee and cooing at it softly. i can do that during the day at work, i'm too busy having fun with my knee out and about at night.

thanks in advance for your understanding.

two guys i used to work with ten years ago were recently exchanging emails.

after one guy typed:
... i got a tickling feeling in my colon each time i ran the command that was a bit disconcerting but now that you've explained it ...

the other guy responded to the comment by saying:
I see you stay in touch with Troy!

if you're going to be known for something, i guess there's worse things to be remembered for than colon-centric conversations.

and yes, sure, there are better things one could be known for and my mother would be the first to point this out, but there are also worse things to be remembered for. that's all i'm saying.

i went to my doctor yesterday. it was my first post 40 visit. i told marty i'd go. i told myself i'd go. i made the appointment in a moment of conviction. i steeled myself for the day. i promised myself i wouldn't balk. or argue. my doctor of sixteen years walked in and sat down. he asked lots of questions about the last three plus years since he'd seen me. he reviewed my bloodwork in detail. he had me take my shirt off and lie back on the waxy paper. he poked and prodded me above the waist for a bit. he then handed me my shirt back, said everything looked good and to keep doing what i was doing. then he shook my hand and left.

i think it's fair to say that worrying about a digital prostate exam has probably taken more days off my life than an unhealthy prostate ever would. it looks like i can breathe easy for one more year. i'm sure you're as relieved as i am.

between the ages of 25 and 35 i was a full-on hypochondriac. any persistent discomfiture would send me to my doctor complaining of shortness of breath, bloated lymph nodes or persistent fatigue. my doc was a patient and kind listener to my woes until one day, visibly frustrated at my ongoing-angst, he told me that the human body is an amazing structure, the most amazing thing any of us will ever see, and it can shoulder the most ridiculous sorts of abuse for many years before it begins to show signs of wear. he said at my rate of malfeasance i wouldn't experience overt signs of physical debilitation until i was forty and that before turning forty all my pieces and parts would continue to operate as advertised. you know what ... he was right. and seeing what has happened in just the last few months, i've constructed the below model for your own benefit and edification.

i would liken a pre-thirty year old body to silly putty. you can do the stupidest of things to that flesh colored nubbin and it bounces back each and every time proving just as resilient as the day you first took it out of its two-tone egg.

i would like a thirties body to play-doh. still lots of fun and able to do plenty of neat tricks but not quite the gamer the silly putty was. play-doh isn't going to recover from being run over by mom's car tire in the driveway nearly as well as its near cousin, putty, is.

now a forties body, and i'm quite new at this, but a forties body i would liken to day-old play-doh. you know the play-doh that got left on the kitchen table overnight, taken for granted, forgotten. we all know, too well, no matter how much you re-work it in the palms of your hands or how many drops of water you secret into its folds, the stiff cudgel of doh is never as pliable, moist or sweet smelling as it was before the trespass.

the moral of the story is, take care of your play-doh today because you do reach a point where there's no getting it back tomorrow. and if that hasn't got your attention, i'm noticing i suddenly have a lazy nipple. did you even know such a thing was possible? one droopy nipple! i gotta admit, it wasn't anywhere on my radar.

a new developer in my office is about to roll out his first project with our group. we delivered a preview to the core clients last week and it went very well. next his app goes into user testing and then into the wild world of production. yesterday i attempted to give him a pep talk to make sure he stays focused and diligent in these final hours of the project. this is what i said: my closer friends will easily recognize the move of me starting out talking about someone else but finding a way to swing the attention back on me. i'm old and savvy enough to know this about myself and if it could work for travolta in pulp no reason it can't work for me in my small world.

i've recently completed my annual hyrum review. this would be the process i spoke of on my reading page in january of last year (10 Natural Laws). a core facet of a hyrum-review (what the process has come to be called in my home) is to create a list of your core values or priorities. the importance of this, in addition to simply knowing what your core values are, is to help you structure your days. for example, lets say a college buddy calls you up and invites you to play golf on saturday. when you look at your calendar you were scheduled to take your son to the park and work on his baseball skills. after a long week of work, a smack-talking golf outing seems more appealing than a tee-ball lesson for a five year old and is what a parent, a father, a man is inclined to choose given the option. but, odds are, deep down, your relationship with your son is of more importance to you than your relationship with old college pals and your golf handicap. so knowing your core values plays a role in making decisions throughout the year when 'conflicts' in time management arise.

to set your values you are to lock yourself away for a long weekend and smoke peyote or sleep in a pilates pose and reach deep inside yourself to discover what is truly most important to you. the reason this is a bit of a thing is you are meant to remove all the noise, static and distractions of daily life so you can get serious about the matter. once your values are set it is recommended you look at them every day to keep yourself pointed in the right direction. additionally, you should revisit the list every year or so to tune it to life's changes. in the last several years the one thing i seem to routinely change deals with my expectations for myself as a father. the rest of the items remain pretty static. this year, i changed the father blurb to:

ENJOY MY CHILDREN
this experience is tragically temporary. do not take my time with my children for granted. they will be gone soon. too soon. create an environment they want to be part of so they may cherish their memories of their father, family and home.

after seven years, i think i'm finally getting to the meat of that one. the credit for this progress goes to marty. in the last few years marty has on a few occasions described people she has met as people who don't seem to enjoy their children. every time i've heard her say that it's made me disproportionately sad. i reckon there's a root for that but i'm less interested in that than i am in making sure it doesn't happen to me.

if you're interested in what a list of values might look like, mine are shared below. some folks consider these quite private but that's not exactly how i roll. so if you'd like to enjoy learning about what makes troy tick read on. if you could care less, click through my brother.

CARE FOR MYSELF
do not deprive myself of my life experience through poor, selfish and gluttonous behaviors. stay healthy. stay fit. stay away from doctors and hospitals through wise living.

CARE FOR MY MARRIAGE
always remember my luck in finding marty. she is the one. cherish her. make her feel special. work to make her dreams come true.

ENJOY MY CHILDREN
this experience is tragically temporary. they will be gone soon. too soon. do not take my time with my children for granted. create an environment they want to be part of so they may cherish their memories of their father, family and home.

EQUIP MY CHILDREN FOR LIFE
treat my children with respect. treat them as i would treat another adult i respect. be consistent. be patient. be kind. be just. don't spoil them to the point of ill-preparing them for the world they will one day enter.

VALUE MY TIME
there are limited minutes in our lives. the clock is ticking. use each day to achieve things that matter. leave a mark.

PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE
make my professional contributions be of consequence and import. never let my role be questioned or compromised. control my experience through excellence.

PERSONAL GROWTH
expand and exercise my mind. read every day. be curious.

i have those values printed out and taped onto the back of my PDA. i read them everyday on my way home from work. i find that this forty second review helps me get my head straight before i move from my serene and orderly office to my chaotic and bursting home. if hyrum has taught me anything, it is that often the little things that make the biggest difference. the key is to know what you're looking for.