I missed my annual reading update...so what the hell, let's do it now! To start, I've spent a lot of time in the last year and change, reading The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. I really have enjoyed that series, but they are some loooonnnnggg books. I am currently still on Book 4. On top of diving headlong into fiction, I've also spent some time revisiting one of my favorite books, Awareness by Anthony de Mello - in fact, I've read it twice because it is so calming (AR review...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Waking up lately is getting harder and harder. And it’s not that I am sleeping any worse than before…in fact sometimes I am sleeping better, but I am just so, so, so very tired. As any parent of two elementary-age children will tell you, parenting is NEVER-ENDING exhaustion. From the neediness to the attention-craving whining, crying, shouting, and laughing. It all compounds. Yet somehow, most of us parents managed to fool ourselves into thinking that it would be easy. But raising kids to be...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
I've been struggling to write lately. Heck, I've been struggling with the motivation to work on much of anything. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it. I mean, by all accounts, I AM living the dream: My kids are doing great. My wife is awesome. I work only a few hours a day on things that I have purposely chosen to work on. I am about as fit as I have ever been at 40. We've been taking amazing trips with our kids every year! By all extents and purposes, I am making the most out of most...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Well, another year is in the bag and another year of blogging concludes! That makes it now 4 years since I started this little venture I call Accidentally Retired. And as always I am shocked by how fast time flies. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. It was nearly 5 years ago when I put in my notice at work to leave the company I built and the job I loved –> that fact alone is blowing my mind! At that time, I was 36 and had toddlers running around. Now, I am 40 and my kids are ripe into...
3 months ago • 1 min read
After a little bit of a rough stretch last month, my family and I wanted to go on a little day trip. So we headed out of town and had a really nice day. We stopped at a Costco for gas, and just as we were about 10 minutes into our drive home, we heard a loud explosion. I was driving and I thought we had *maybe* been shot at. It was THAT loud. Looking in the rear-view mirror, I noticed glass flying off our 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe and into traffic behind us. I pulled off the road, opened the...
3 months ago • 1 min read
I love to hike, bike, ruck, and work out outdoors. But I live in the desert, so as soon as summer heat hits, it makes it near impossible to do that without getting up at the crack ass of dawn. Yet, I also dearly value my sleep, and would rather not sacrifice one part of my health for another… So what is a dude to do? In years past, I chose to do nothing…most summers, my step counts, fitness levels, and mood would simply all take a dive. And yet there was already a simple answer to help with...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Back in August, I decided I would take some time off from social media. Since I don’t use social for personal use anymore, it was mainly just taking some time off the AR X/Twitter account to take a breather. Even though built the AR account up to nearly 20K followers and helped to drive many new newsletter subscribers to this blog, it was starting to consume too much of my mental power and frankly becoming a bit of a bad habit! X was the first thing I checked every morning and the last thing...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Patience and time. That is all humans have ever needed. The problem is that both of those are the most elusive things to most of us mortals. We tinker when we shouldn’t tinker. We get bored and we sell off one investment and trade it for another. We have a few pounds that we all want to lose but lack the requisite patience it takes to do the work to drop them. The fact is that most of us simply lack the necessary tools it takes to commit to something for the long haul. While all of us dream...
5 months ago • 1 min read
We live in Arizona… So when it starts to get hot, it gets hot quickly. And sometimes by March, you're sweating it out in 84-degree heat, questioning why you live here. But then you settle into the actual summer where Phoenix just managed to set a new record for over 113 straight days over 100 degrees. It’s so hot that most of us don’t bother to go outside and those who do are only sitting by the pool. Finally last week, after a torridly hot summer, we dipped back down into the high 80s. And...
6 months ago • 1 min read