marty recently posed the dinner table question of what each person's proudest life moment was.

without much thought alex casually said his was saving anthony from a concussion. his comment brought life to the table as people lit up in their retellings. the moment alex referred to took place a few years ago. marty had taken the kids to an event at her school. there was a standing wooden s ...

today is my 9 year anniversary with my present employer (remember).

and, if you believe in a little rag called forbes, my employer is the 13th best you can work for, in this country at least.

and i've long said i'm the happiest employee at my employer which means i might have a sporting chance of being one of the top 13 most satisfied employees in the country.

and i have the added benefit of being able to walk to my office. that is after i walk my boys to school in the morning (which adds up to 8,000 steps by 9:00am for all my step-counters out there).

and this proximity obviously means, when the kraft macaroni and cheese mood strikes, i can walk home for lunch too.

and i'm not even going to mention the part about my office being a sexy, cool corner office with a bay window or that it would be my first choice of offices on the entire campus. we'll just leave that bit out.

and then there's the little professional part where i love my work, like way more than i should.

sometimes it seems unfair.

but so did unloading trucks after i graduated college.

so if life is going to feel unfair either way, i'll take my current unfair over my past unfair any workday of the week.

alex has played soccer for several years. over this span, he has developed into quite the defensive specialist, namely because the first team he played on got whooped up on pretty regular so we had lots of practice defending the goal. and, alex was the team's prize student in this regard understanding how to position himself to disrupt shots on goal, harassing players as to not let them get situated and the like.

one problem alex possessed when playing defense is he always had a giant smile on his face. several times i explained he should try to smile less or at least less enthusiastically because a smiling defensemen did not seem very intimidating, but some parts of nature cannot be controlled ( exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3, exhibit 4, need i go on?)

alex's second team had an unnatural number of kids who ravenously loved soccer and played constantly. this equated to a lot of natural scorers and there's nothing a bevy of goal-minded kids loves more than a kid who likes playing defense because it means less time sharing the spotlight which means more shots on goal. this meant alex became a quick star on his team because he was one of the few kids who always asked to play dee.

but thanks to some gentle nudges from the coaches over the years (and surely helped by some blowouts where they were trying to pull the big guns off the front line), alex found himself on the offensive side of the field. as you'd expect, it is surely a different game up there and you could see alex working through the math of it all.

his intuition about the sport has been visibly improving but he'd yet to score a goal. then this last weekend, he scored not one but two goals in a game. after the first, when he turned from the goal to run back to middle field you could have seen the white of his smile from two pitches away, which sounds impressive until you consider that you could have seen my smile, FIVE pitches away.

for the last few years marty has organized a large regional girl scout retreat. she first took it on during bella's short-lived stint in a troop. but even after bella stopped going, marty had formed a fondness for the mission so stayed involved. if i'm remembering correctly, alex attended more of these weekend adventures than bella has—it surely never hurt that all the girls found him wildly...

speaking of food (yesterday), the fiancé of a good friend of mine just started documenting her nurturing her newfound love of food and food-making. and, it doesn't take long to see that her style of 'documentation' is a bit richer and deeper than most folks form of documentation. the above quote comes from her newly established blog. http://www.kindred-eats.com

and her instagram page should come with a full-on warning as i first looked in on it before bed and can tell you that that is a wicked kind of mistake. https://instagram.com/diana.zeng

and a few days after seeing this alex caught her fiance, and my friend, super-sam, slipping something into our mail slot. upon opening the door and surprising him he confessed that he was dropping off a chocolate bar he just made for us to try out. later, when opening it up for the family to try, i found a personalized note on the wrapper's backside (you're not going to get that with hershey!!!) part of which said:

shortly after bella was born, marty declared we would be a family that ate together. if you're wondering what happens when marty carves something in the tree like that, well, after fourteen years, if everyone was in the same zip code, i could count on both hands and feet the number of times this family did not eat as a full complement. dinner is typically at six and lasts, functionally, for about ...

the other day bella and i were driving and discussing a recent event. after rehashing things, she said it was ok if i posted that story on my website. how telling is it that i find posting things with the subject's permission less satisfying than when they have no idea it's coming.

marty voiced something i've been wondering a lot lately but haven't trusted myself to speak about. she commented: i've had that very thought (not the early morning hour bit, but the who is everyone talking to) as i watch cars go by as i ride my bike or sit at red lights or do anything that puts me in the path of other folks. please note that this part of the sentiment is not a judgement but just an observation as well as a genuine curiosity. the logical part of my mind anwers the question of who everyone is talking to is, obviously, each other.

this is not to say that i don't have judgmental notions about people's distracted states, especially while driving (seconded by when they are conducting transactions). after our last day of skiing, an 18-wheeler drifted fully into our lane at 70 miles an hour and i had to drive my car, also going 70 miles an hour, onto the shoulder to keep from getting side-swiped. the man never saw me before, during or after his maneuver. then the next day when we were literally one mile into our 1,300 mile drive home a girl came barreling through a red light where we were turning and came inches from caving in the passenger side of our van at better than twenty miles an hour. she definitely saw me as i could see the sheer terror in her face as she saw the near collision unfold.

i continue to be struck that more is not done regarding the legality of using a phone while driving. i'm convinced that this is largely due to the fact that one of the greatest abusers of this tenet seem to be police officers themselves. it's rare that i see a cop rolling by who is not on the phone (i wouldn't say the same of state troopers i've observed). and suit/business types seem to be another high-frequency abuser of one-handed, half-minded driving. i assume some of the these folks are the ones we would turn to for help in changing the law so when the law-makers and law-enforcers are big users themselves, it's hard to think there might be help close at hand.

the frustrating part of it all is in time i think this behavior will go the way of our pre-seatbelt and biking-helmet existence. there is just no sane, rational or intelligent argument in defense of the practice. none. i just wish we'd hurry up and come to our collective senses already.

one final aside related to marty's initial question above. back in the nascent days of cell technology (e.g. car-mounted, brick phones) a friend of mine, man-who-screams-like-woman, had a scanner that could listen in on the conversations at hand. he and another friend would stay up way into the night searching for and then listing to any nearby conversations they could detect. as it was still a newish thing, i asked what sorts of things merited the need for being able to call someone from anywhere. he said that well over half of the conversations they picked up on involved people in extra-marital affairs. and this was exactly what i told marty when she asked who all those people were talking to at seven in the morning--their lovers who they couldn't talk to at seven the previous night because their wife was around. for anyone thinking the percentage can't be the same given how many phones there are in play now i would only say the divorce rate trends will not support your argument.

i try to make my children think creatively or logically as much as possible. one of my tactics for this was to answer their questions with illogical responses. for example, whenever they asked me a yes/no question, i'd answer "sure". i liked watching their faces process the response before saying, "no dad. that's not right." to which i'd say "oh. no thank you." i know, i know, i'm a real party. or at least it's a party until your eight year old takes to responding to all questions directed to them with nonsensical answers, and even to people outside of the family, and even when responding to our host and hostess, and even when this host and hostess are the people kind enough to let our family of five descend upon their home for an entire week—for a third year in a row—wildly disrupting their home's routines and sleeping situations for several straight days. even then, whenever one of these kind people would ask anthony something, he would respond with gibberish. if you're wondering what that looks like, it looks something like this:

how was skiing today anthony?
uhh, oatmeal.

anthony would you like another piece of bread?
pink giraffe (with a nod of his head)

anthony, did you like the show?
doorknob. no, i mean, uhhh, blond hair.

if you're wondering how long this is cute for, it is, as you probably guessed, it is cute about zero times which means that thirty seven times in it is bordering on obnoxious. on the good side, he's having to think a little more than he would by answering 'epic' to everything.

marty's favorite spring break moment didn't emanate from one of our family members, in fact, it didn't come from a human at all (part 1). instead, it came from my iphone. it was our first night on the road and we were nearing our first planned stop. as we approached the city, marty punched the address of our end destination into my iPhone and hit the ROUTE button. the computed voice took over and began guiding me to our hotel. in less than ten minutes we saw our spot on the other side of the highway. the iphone instructed me to exit the highway. at the top of the offramp, it told me to turn left. after crossing the highway it, curiously, told me to get back onto the highway. i recalled there was another exit ramp about a mile down the road and assumed, without much time to think about it, that perhaps the proper way to get to the hotel was using the previous exit and the mapping software was correcting its oversight. so i pulled back onto the highway and headed back in the direction we had just come. as we began to pass by the hotel the iphone advised me that our destination was on our right and that we had reached the closest navigable location and should park and walk the rest of the way. were we not sitting on a federal interstate and were there not a fence between us and our destination i reckon that is maybe what we might have done but since we could see all sorts of roads leading up to the hotel on the other side of the fence we chose to push forth and actually drive to the hotel's parking lot.

i'm sure it would not take much to convince you that the phrase "you have reached your closest navigable point" said in an automaton-miming voice was repeated often over the next nine days. it is a surprisingly nimble phrase that can be contorted to fit a shocking number of situations. in fact, i'd be rather surprised if those simple words haven't just become part of our family lore and will make appearances in our family vacations for decades to come. further, that experience has just become my latest and greatest bit of ammunation in my debate (with the world) on the evils of gps systems.

yesterday we returned from our spring break holiday—a week in utah rife with friends and skiing. this is the third year we have made this pilgrimage which gives it some tradition-caliber stock. in perusing the rich week of leisure, laughter and recreation, the moment that most jumps out at me happened on the drive home somewhere in wyoming when alex yelled from the third row seat of our speeding minivan, "i have to go pee and REFUSE to go in a bottle!"

sadly, in my telling of this i am unable to convey the gallons of vinegar and vitriol his words included as they were hurled the full length of our honda odyssey. good to his word, alex held fast on his pee-boycott until we delivered him to a proper urinal. anthony on the other hand gladly peed in his bottle although he did confess it was hard to perform without any privacy (as the whole family was drawn to watching him see to this need). anthony also offered his neighboring passengers a taste of his lemonade at least half a dozen times. he seemed fully undaunted that no one ever took part in his generosity.

anthony is a rabid monopoly player. how much does anthony like monopoly you ask? well, every day my kids get a dad hour with me (technically, it's more like 45 minutes on the weekdays because there just isn't enough hours in the evening given the number of family members i have). in your dad hour you get to say what you and your dad (me) will do to spend the time.

here are what people us...

my baby girl turns 14 years old today. last night i told her she had to spend a dad hour with me (a nightly ritual i do with my kids) on this night becuase it would be the last night i'd spend with my 13 year old daughter. then when we were done (watching an episode of lost) we stood in my office hugging. after the hug should have ended and i didn't let go bella slowly said, "uh dad, i kinda gotta go to bed". after five more seconds i lessened my grip, gave her a long kiss on the top of the head and she left for bed and fourteen.

after my mom died i took a little, green swiss army knife from her house. it belonged to her father when he lived with her before he died. it was surely something my mom bought for him to help with his crafts. i was never one to routinely carry a pocket knife but took it because it reminded me of both of them.

alex quickly noticed my new accoutrement and commented on it. i explained to him where and why i got it. he shrugged his shoulders and said a casual 'cool'. after this discovery alex would routinely approach me and ask to borrow the small knife to clean out some dirt from under his nails, cut a string or trim something up.

a few years back as marty and i were plotting out christmas i suggested getting alex his own pocket knife. marty first balked saying he was too young. i confessed he was young in years but in many ways was more responsible and conscientious than either of his parents. she said that he'd probably loose it straight away. i didn't have a solid retort for this as alex is not super-great of keeping track of things but suggested it might be different with this because he would love it enough to keep track of it. marty gave a consenting shrug of her shoulders and alex got his knife. and now, better than two years later, alex still has his knife and has always kept a solid line on it.

over the next two years my knife took several rides through the washing machine because i kept forgetting to take it out of the little pocket on my right front where i kept it. after one such journey it started falling apart, the glue holding the plastic sides in place having finally giving way from repeated trips through the water. so this last christmas i replaced it, with a shiny new one, one modeled after alex's newer model.

three weeks after getting my new knife someone asked to borrow it. i said i didn't have it. they asked where it was. i said i didn't know and confessed to mis-placing it. alex's one-word response, "already?", stung then and now as i think back on it. maybe i'm the one who shouldn't have gotten a knife for christmas.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. awesome II

bella's mantle of hair is such a thing that she routinely gets asked if its fake. and as with all things, you know that for every one person that asks, there are seven that wonder.

her hair is most glorious when she is doing what she loves most, roller-blading. given her skill and ability to go fast, this body of hair floats behind her lifting and falling in sync with her actions, seemin ...

apologies for my recent disappearance. for the past several months i have been putting the finishing touches on my latest work project. it is the most ambitious and functionally coolest thing i've ever made. thankfully, the work has been delightful and invigorating (which equates to many hours of getting lost in the riddles at hand where what seemed like a seven minute span actually turned out to be, per the clock, a four-hour stint). over the last last three months i have worked every weekend, oftentimes both days. even over the christmas break i worked two to four hours every morning (excepting christmas of course).

while this interesting professional avalanche proved a welcome challenge, the life balance i passionately covet and proactivley protect took quite the point-blank hit. the primary victim during these episodes is my body which doesn't get the exercise or sleep it thrives on. the second casualty affects my relationships with my wife, my children and my friends which too require ongoing nurturing and care for a healthful and happy state. and lastly, my daily and weekly rituals that allow me to do things like read, and write (here) and to give back to my home and community become a collection of warm, blurred memories. thus, while it's good (and necessary in my opinion) to experience such professional sprints every now and again, it is also, by my accounting, an unsustainable lifestyle if one wishes to be healthy, married, loved and most-notably content with the full spectrum of their life.

your seeing me now is a sign that i have crested this particular hill (or jagged Himalayan-like peak rather) and am settling back into my less exotic but more steady, sustainable, and balanced (Hooah!) clip. i thank you for your patience and look forward to again visiting with you in these pages on a routine and respectful schedule.

as a curious aside, in the past fifteen years each and every one of my prior projects of similar scale took place during the arrival of one of our three children, dumb luck that, making this the first time we experienced this sort of professional onslaught while marty was of sound mind and body. this convenience helped not just a little, although i did sense her tank, like mine, was running on scant more than fumes in the last few weeks of the endeavor. thanks marta for the support and understanding, both of which share a sizable ingredient in my proudest and greatest successes in life. you rawk!

at dinner bella launched into a marty love-fest that went something like this.

BELLA
you're so awesome mom. i mean, you wake up super early in the morning. then you go work all day. then you pick the boys up from school. take them to playdates. then come home and make dinner. and then sit and grade papers every night.

MARTY
well, i don't grade papers every night. i maybe ...

excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. awesome

i bumped into one of bella's classmates dads at the pool. we got to talking after showering and i asked him what industry he worked in. this is not a question i usually ask folks but i found this guy to be very balanced and positive and always even-keeled so found myself curious about his trade. he said he taught seventh grade. in fact, he was a 23-year teaching veteran of seventh grade. to this, i expressed great surprise and complimented his easy-going nature saying i'd think he would look more worn and frazzled. to this he said: if i have repeatedly observed one law of our universe it is the importance of how we frame the world before us. it's like Gale told H.I. in Raising Arizona, "This'll go hard or easy, H l.", and that it did. one's mindset will do more to govern one's fullfillment or disastifaction in life than all the dumb luck, raw deals, or curve balls life might throw one's way.

i went to see american sniper but it was sold out. in fact, the next two shows were sold out. in scanning the wall of options i felt lucky to find blackhat still open. a michael mann movie about hacking and espionage. when the movie began, there was a light smattering of other viewers. i remember scanning the room with surprise and wondering where everyone was. then the movie began and i knew. they were intelligently and enviably somewhere else. it would be the second film i walked out of before it concluded (for the life of me i can't recall the last one, but i think it might have been heat).

since escaping that torment i've done some thinking and digging about this movie. there are a lot of folks speculating about why this movie did so poorly. they say that on paper it should have been a slam-dunk. people are pointing at directing, marketing, weekend competition. all of this is pointless and remarkably off the mark. this movie failed for one reason and one reason only: casting.

chris hemsworth is as believable in the role of a world-renowned hacker as i would be in the role of THOR. how social-media rich he is could not be less relevant to his ability to play this part. he is a handsome, muscle-bound guy. not only are neither of these assets helpful in this case, but by and large, they probably hurt any convincing arguments that of all the actors out there, known or not, he is the best suited for this particular character. if this highly obvious factor isn't in the math of the people charged with this decision, then those movie pundits could be replaced, professionally, by either of my elementary aged sons. hell, i would have found a present day sylvester stallone equally suited for the role if that helps paint a proper picture.

hence, this lack of insight makes the movie completely unwatchable. i just wish i was as quick at spotting this disconnect as others. admittedly, the fact that i don't watch trailers bit me here. but not enough for me to change my practice of avoiding plot-destroying, entertainment-stealing trailers. you just have to accept that you win most but will have to walk out of some.

i feel like marty and i missed a ripe business opportunity when we failed to hire our kids out to test parks and homes for safety. because when you combine marty's free-range parenting style and the natural athletic abilities of most children, boundaries will be tested. there were many a time i look at one of my children atop or inside something and wonder at length how they ever managed the man ...

opening passage from karl ove knausgaard's My Struggle (book 1)

an exasperated bella interrupted marty and i talking to ask if she could be excused from the dinner table early. marty, breaking off from our conversation, exaggeratedly asked whatever could be more important than her family's company. we then looked to anthony (8) who, with sitcom perfect timing, was pushing his upper lip to his nose with his hand and saying "look alex, i can almost pick my nose with my top lip" and when you then looked to alex (11) he was in the midst of his own antic "but can you make you hair shake around like this" while he gripped the arms of the chair to brace himself and quickly rotated his head left to right making his winter mane flail wildly about. marty and i, both stifling laughter, especially at anthony's effortful, and ongoing, lip-nose contortion said, "yes, bella, you may be excused from the dinner table as it seems people are done eating." she pushed back from the table and walked out of the room with the classic teen-huff of annoyance painted on her person.