What I have learned (ver. 4.0)...

Thought I'd share just a few of my latest thoughts...

The sign of maturity is the ability to move ahead with uncertainty.
I think kittens enter their “terrible two’s” on day 1 and have the uncanny ability to stay there for as long as they want despite their owner’s pleas.
If fear is a great motivator then I’m really motivated!
I’m sorry, J Lo, but “the swimmer everyone is talking about” rightfully deserves his well-earned press. He just happens to have won more Gold medals than anyone else ever in a single Olympic Games and his World Records aren’t too shabby either. I am glad to hear that you are training for a celebrity sprint triathlon and, sure, that’s also “newsworthy.”
There is a difference between rowing and paddling on paper but the reality is that both really, really hurt a lot!
If your car is more expensive than mine, please don’t think I might actually let you out into traffic.
If your car is less expensive than mine, please don’t think I might actually let you out into traffic either.
Speaking of cars, is it OK to have a 2 car garage so full of toys that there is room for 0 cars in it?
If I were young and entrepreneurial, I’d go door to door and try to sell sets of Wikipedia for home computers to those people who still have encyclopedias in their living rooms.
Hey, Brazil, it was cool when just a few of your athletes went by one name only but don’t you think it’s a bit much now?

Thanks for reading.

Bye.

.01

This is what it means to be an athlete...to want something so badly that you instinctively make the extra effort, to know that what you want is within in reach no matter how far away it seems, to know that you have done the hard work when no one is watching, to understand how to turn your demons into angels, to feel the energy of self-confidence and pride and to never, ever, ever give up on yourself and those who support you even when it looks like that last millimeter might as well be a horizon away. There is an athlete in all of us.

Reach...

Top 25 Things Vanishing from America...

Behold...The Top 25 Things Vanishing from America! Call me old fashioned, nostalgic or just plain old but there are a few items on this list that I’ll never let slip from my life (or at least from my memory). Who could ever forget the drive-in theater with family on a warm summer night, the taste of cold, fresh milk delivered right to your door, seeing the blinking red light of the answering machine when you return home at night, deciding to brave the cold and hit the outhouse because someone beat you to the indoor bathroom (and you’ve really got to go) and turning the ham radio dial ever-so-slightly in a dimly lit basement with the hope of picking up a top secret broadcast in an unrecognizable foreign language? I’m happy to see a few of these items like Mumps & Measles disappear from our lives but there’s nothing that will replace the site of a wild horse running free on the Outer Banks or a handwritten letter from a loved one!

Long live the bowling alley!


Outhouses
Yellow Pages
Classified Ads
Movie Rental Stores
Dial-up Internet access
Phone landlines
Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs
VCRs
Ash trees
Ham radio
The swimming hole
Answering Machines
Cameras that use film
Incandescent bulbs
Stand alone bowling alleys
The milkman
Handwritten letters
Wild horses
Personal checks
Drive-in theaters
Mumps & Measles
Honey Bees
News magazines and TV news
Analog TV
The family farm

Time to make the doughnuts (part 2)...

A while ago I posted an exercise video as a bit of visual motivation to get me up, out the door and moving in the morning. Here's a similar video I just found that I thought I'd share on the heels of a great early morning ride today (with the humidity down just a bit). Have a great weekend! I'm getting there...

Summer Reading...

So I'm almost finished *reading* Eat, Pray, Love and am trying to come up with an idea for my next summer reading book. I came across this list on my computer and thought I'd share it. Enjoy the Dog Days with a good book!

Johnathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Wisdom of Our Fathers, Joe Kita
Message from Garcia, Charles Patrick Garcia
Slay the Dragon – Free the Genie, Bennett A. Neiman, Ph. D.
Touch the Top of the World, Erik Weihenmayer
Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Nicholas Tomalin et al.
Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers, Mary Morris, editor
To a God Unknown, John Steinbeck
Walden, or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Adversity Advantage, Dr. Paul Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer (incl. good stuff by ME, too)
Running and Being: The Total Experience, George Sheehan
Moby Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville
Profiles in Courage, John Fitzgerald Kennedy
How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, Kathleen Meyer
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Values of the Game, Sen. Bill Bradley
In A Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson
No Pity, Joseph P. Shapiro
Who Moved My Cheese, Spencer Johnson, M.D.
The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson
Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom
Leading with the Heart, Mike Krzyzewski
Black Bird Fly Away, Hugh Gregory Gallagher
The Book of Virtues, William Bennett
The Amateurs, David Halberstam
Skackelton’s Way, Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell
The Immortal Class, Travis Hugh Culley
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Who’s Your Caddy? Rick Reilly
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam
Oh, The Places You’ll Go, Dr. Seuss
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Nothing is Impossible, Christopher Reeve
A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Tony Brown
Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau
When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses, Perfect Skin, Two to Go, Nick Earls (an Australian author)
Moving Violations, John Hockenberry
If You Fall, Karen Darke
Once a Runner, John Parker

Care to share some of your favorites?

Bye.

Of check counting and coin collecting...

It’s a fair bet that every one of us has our own little quips and interesting hobbies. Some of them are more main stream (like cooking, cycling and/or collecting cars). Others might be a bit more obscure (like raising exotic pets, collecting women’s shoes and/or pressing flowers). No matter what your hobby is (or could be), it’s probably something that makes you happy in your very own special way. Here are a couple examples of some fun hobbies in my life that have made me smile lately...

I always hate the end of the month because that’s the time that I have to slow down long enough to write checks and pay the Man. Know what I mean? Au revoir hard earned cash, it's time to pay the bills.

I’ve found a way to make it fun! Several months ago, when my check register hit 1900, I started playing a little game of "check writing history." Here's how it works...for every check I write, I look at the check number and research (or remember) one fact from the calendar year that coincided with the check number. Follow me here…

Check # 1929 = the year the Great Depression began
Check # 1963 = the year JFK was laid to rest
Check # 1968 = the year I was born
Check # 1986 = the year I graduated from high school
Check # 1987 = the *first* year I had a crush on Madonna
Check # 1994 = the year I graduated from business school
Check # 2004 = the year the Red Sox win the World Series

Get it? Give it a try…it might help take your mind off giving your money away and teach you something about history at the same time, too.

The end of July also marked the end of a somewhat busy travel time for me --- Houston, New York/Connecticut and Nebraska all in the span of a few weeks was definitely busy. How did I make those trips more memorable you ask? Collecting state quarters along the way, boy! That’s right, there’s almost no better way to collect the 100 state quarters (1 for each state from both the Denver and Philadelphia mints) than by traveling through airports and other cities and collecting quarters along the way. Call me a geek but I love coming home, laying out all the change I collected and checking to see if I picked up the quarters I still need to complete my collection. I love traveling west of the Mississippi because that means I'm in the Denver mint area and those coins with a little “D” on the front versus a “P” from the Philadelphia mint are hard to find when you live on the East Coast.

For example, on my most recent trip, I came home with 4 more Denver mint quarters from states like South Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon. And who would have thought I'd find a North Carolina quarter from “P” while I was in Nebraska? Now if I could just find a Kentucky quarter....

What are your quips and hobbies? Do tell!

Bye.