Category: Misc Thoughts & Rants

  • Cooperstown Dreams Park 2026

    Cooperstown Dreams Park 2026

    We just got back from Cooperstown, from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, for my younger son. It’s a giant 12-year-old tournament they run up there, and I figured I’d sort of jot down some of our thoughts from the stay — what worked and what didn’t, both for Cooperstown in general and for the tournament,…

  • My Unfortunate and Tragic Woodchuck/Groundhog Incident

    My Unfortunate and Tragic Woodchuck/Groundhog Incident

    I had one of those experiences the other day that was interesting and brutal and tragic and horrific all at the same time, and it left me feeling bad for a bunch of different reasons. Bad that I couldn’t figure out a better way to handle it, and bad because the whole thing was just…

  • Toddler Stick Regression

    Toddler Stick Regression

    I wrote a while back about my shoe philosophy completing a full lap back to toddlerhood — slip-ons, elastic laces, the whole embarrassing circle. If you missed it, Confessions of an Adult Toddler has the full account. I picked up a new pair of slip-on shoes recently, no laces at all, and it got me…

  • PVC Trim: Love, Hate, and Maintenance

    PVC Trim: Love, Hate, and Maintenance

    Let me be clear up front: I prefer wood. I prefer natural materials, full stop. But I’ve also learned — the hard way, and more than once — that my own limitations as a builder change the math. I don’t have the deepest knowledge of construction detailing, and when something eventually needs fixing, my track…

  • The Varstrom Bafang 500w Rear Hub E-Bike Conversion Complications

    The Varstrom Bafang 500w Rear Hub E-Bike Conversion Complications

    The whole thing started because my kids hate riding bikes. Every ride turned into a negotiation, and the negotiation always lost to the hills. So I did what any reasonable person does when their children won’t cooperate with an outdoor activity: I asked an AI what to do, and the AI and I landed on…

  • Backup Generator Buzz

    Backup Generator Buzz

    Ten years ago, right around our older son’s third birthday, a microburst tore through our road. We saw it coming — our nanny at the time, who was from the Midwest, took one look at a tail of cloud forming in dead-still air and said, “That’s a tornado, we need to get inside.” She was…

  • Vehicle Headlight Protective Film (PPF). A must have I never knew was a must have.

    Vehicle Headlight Protective Film (PPF). A must have I never knew was a must have.

    It took me embarrassingly long to figure this one out. For years, I’ve been annoyed by the same thing on every car I’ve owned: headlights that go cloudy and yellow long before the rest of the car looks old. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve taken care of the vehicle otherwise — foggy headlights make…

  • The Solar Story Is More Complicated Than the Brochure

    The Solar Story Is More Complicated Than the Brochure

    There was a window — and I think most people missed it. A few years back, the federal government and New York State were practically paying you to put solar panels on your roof. Between the federal tax credit and the NYSERDA grant, we were looking at roughly $10,000 coming off the top of a…

  • How We Ended Up With a Bernedoodle

    How We Ended Up With a Bernedoodle

    I’ll just say it upfront: the Bernedoodle is one of the most bougie dogs on the planet. Possibly the most bougie. We own one. His name is Hobbes. He’s been part of the family for three years now, and I feel like I should explain how that happened, because it wasn’t exactly a straight line.…

  • How I Ended Up Writing Five Protest Songs

    How I Ended Up Writing Five Protest Songs

    I’m not a musician. I can’t read music, never learned to play, took percussion as a kid and got confused by the notation. So when I tell you I made five songs, I don’t mean I sat down at a piano. I mean something a lot stranger, and a lot more stubborn, than that. This…

  • Enough Is Enough

    Enough Is Enough

    Before any of the songs, there was just this — a text graphic. Enough Is Enough, and then a running list of everything that’s wrong, with those three words hammering back in between each cluster: Enough Is EnoughBoth Corrupt Political PartiesFor-Profit Health ConHousing FailureEnough Is EnoughWealth InequalityAffordability FailureEnough Is EnoughCorporate WelfareRigged Tax SystemChildcare FailureEnough Is…

  • Old MacDonald Lost His Farm— Enough Is Enough (Song 1)

    Old MacDonald Lost His Farm— Enough Is Enough (Song 1)

    This is the one that cracked the whole thing open. I’d landed on “Enough Is Enough” as the phrase, and I was hunting for a hook — something already in the public domain, because there’s no money behind any of this. I started playing with the letters. Enough Is Enough, It’s Over. E-I-E-I-O. That’s Old…

  • Living the Dream — Enough Is Enough (Song 2)

    Living the Dream — Enough Is Enough (Song 2)

    Once Old MacDonald existed, it was obvious one song couldn’t hold everything, so I kept going. Living the Dream came out of a single thing I saw posted — where the US actually ranks against other wealthy, developed countries. We get sold this idea that we’re number one, the greatest country in the world, and…

  • Party of One — Enough Is Enough (Song 3)

    Party of One — Enough Is Enough (Song 3)

    Party of One is the one where I went after the machine itself — why nothing ever gets done. Start with the two-party system. It’s inherently flawed, and it was never built to handle the kind of money that’s in it now. Then Citizens United knocked the guardrails down: unlimited money, dark money, spend whatever…

  • Us vs Them — Enough Is Enough (Song 4)

    Us vs Them — Enough Is Enough (Song 4)

    Us vs Them is about the distraction — the whole left-against-right shouting match that keeps everyone busy while the actual story goes untouched. And the actual story is wealth inequality and money in politics. That’s it. That’s the thing. But it’s a lot easier to get people arguing with their neighbor, calling each other liars,…

  • Look Up — Enough Is Enough (Song 5)

    Look Up — Enough Is Enough (Song 5)

    Look Up was supposed to be the closer, and it’s the one I thought would be easiest — just list everything that’s broken. I kept thinking about how well Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” works: it’s not really about a single moment, it just lists, and the listing itself is the punch. So…

  • Confessions of an Adult Toddler

    Confessions of an Adult Toddler

    My shoe philosophy has done a full lap. It started where everyone’s starts — slip-ons and Velcro, because I couldn’t tie laces yet — and it has now, decades later, returned to that exact spot. Different shoes. Same logic. The toddler was right. For most of my adult life I was a laces guy. Tying…

  • The White Sole Argument I Lost to Myself

    The White Sole Argument I Lost to Myself

    For most of my adult life, white soles felt like a costume. Like I was dressing as a younger version of myself. The white-soled sneaker had a specific era for me — Air Force 1s, old Puma Clydes, that whole lineage of clean white rubber under suede or leather — and at some point I…

  • Spider Eyes

    Spider Eyes

    We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has rewired how I look at my own yard at night, and I don’t think there’s…

  • Look Up: Enough Is Enough

    Look Up: Enough Is Enough

    Watch It A Quick Note Before You Watch This I used AI to help write these lyrics, make the music, and put together the video, as you would probably guess. I have spent countless hours making these songs and people just assume oh you had AI do it, like that means it took an afternoon.…

  • Crashed My Bike Trying to Avoid a Garter Snake, And Then My Dog Wanted In On The Action

    Crashed My Bike Trying to Avoid a Garter Snake, And Then My Dog Wanted In On The Action

    We live right next to the rail trail — our property literally borders it — so we end up using it a lot. I walk the dog there. I ride my bike. The section closest to us is the rough version, just packed dirt that gets muddy after rain and stays covered in sticks and…

  • Vehicle Roof Philosophy

    Vehicle Roof Philosophy

    I Was Wrong About Moon Roofs

  • Union Strong: The Only Thing Standing Between Us and the Bottom

    Union Strong: The Only Thing Standing Between Us and the Bottom

    I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production office calculating how much cheaper everything would be if we just went non-union. And I…

  • My Wheel Philosophy That Became a Tire (Tyre) Philosophy

    My Wheel Philosophy That Became a Tire (Tyre) Philosophy

    I am a firm believer in snow tires and I think the fact that I have to say that out loud in 2025 is genuinely one of the more baffling things about living in the Northeast — like, we all agree the earth is round, right, so can we also agree that all-season tires in…

  • Youth Sports Is Broken (And I Helped Break It)

    Youth Sports Is Broken (And I Helped Break It)

    I’ll start with a confession: I was part of the problem. That’s not false modesty or a rhetorical device to soften what I’m about to say about the adults who turned our town’s recreational youth sports leagues into something unrecognizable. I genuinely made things worse. I yelled at kids. I put pressure on my sons…

  • A Picture to Replace the Thousand Reminders

    A Picture to Replace the Thousand Reminders

    I have two kids. Twelve and almost fourteen. And look — I know that whatever they are, that’s mostly on me. You are what you’re exposed to, right? I get that. But some of this is just kid behavior. And some of it is personality. And some of it, honestly, is just the particular era…

  • Why I Started My Ecom Shop as an Accidental Designer

    Why I Started My Ecom Shop as an Accidental Designer

    It started, as most things do in my house, with baseball. My kids got into it around six years old — right past the T-ball phase where everyone’s just spinning in the outfield catching dandelions — and from there it was spring ball, fall ball, soccer mixed in, the whole blurry chaos of youth sports…

  • Aphantasia, Dyslexia, and ADHD: How I Made a Career in a Visual Industry Without a Functioning Mind’s Eye

    Aphantasia, Dyslexia, and ADHD: How I Made a Career in a Visual Industry Without a Functioning Mind’s Eye

    There I was on 87, Ubering one of my kids to a travel baseball tournament in New Jersey — kid in the back with headphones on, or asleep, which amounts to the same thing. Half-listening to NPR because it’s either that or the silence where my own thoughts live. And a Radiolab episode came on…

  • Why Have I Started to Smell Like A Frito Corn Chip?

    Why Have I Started to Smell Like A Frito Corn Chip?

    I’ve been noticing something for the past few weeks. I smell like Fritos. Not after eating Fritos. Not near Fritos. Just as a default condition of existing. I’ll be sitting somewhere, not doing anything corn-adjacent, and I’ll get this whiff and do that thing where you look around the room trying to find the source…

  • My Clothing Philosophy (Who Even Has One Of Those?)

    My Clothing Philosophy (Who Even Has One Of Those?)

    If you’ve been following my ongoing clothing saga — the chore coat search, the Red Wing chronicles, the light duty boot quest — you might have noticed that I have opinions. Strong ones. Possibly unreasonably strong ones for someone who spends a meaningful portion of his life mowing a lawn and cutting firewood. But here…

  • Drowning in It

    Drowning in It

    There’s a moment every four to five weeks that snaps me back to reality. I load up the car, drive to our local transfer station, hand Dan a coupon, and drop off a single 44-gallon bag of trash. One bag. And I think — okay, we’re doing our part. We compost, we recycle obsessively, we…

  • The Peace President Needs to Fund His Wars Instead of our Health and Child Care. So Democrats Talk About Crayons?

    The Peace President Needs to Fund His Wars Instead of our Health and Child Care. So Democrats Talk About Crayons?

    Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are. WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously… Let me set the full scene, because context is everything here. IHere is everything you need to know…

  • My GMO Concern Confusion (Until I Finally Looked It Up)

    My GMO Concern Confusion (Until I Finally Looked It Up)

    For years, I walked past products screaming NON-GMO! and thought… so what? I’ll be upfront: I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’m also an optimist — or maybe a pessimistic optimist? An optimistic pessimist? I’ve never quite nailed that down, and honestly, that tracks with the fact that I spent years vaguely confused…

  • Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

    Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

    What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated them from the godless left — went quiet. Or shifted. Or decided that maybe context…

  • Are We About to Come Full Circle on Who We Trust?

    Are We About to Come Full Circle on Who We Trust?

    I was driving to yet another baseball tournament Saturday morning, half-awake, NPR on in the background, when a story about AI disinformation in the Iran conflict completely hijacked my brain for the next forty-five minutes. The segment was trying to walk through which images were fake and which weren’t. Iranian state TV had broadcast AI-generated…

  • Is the Iran War America’s Biggest Self-Own of Self-Owns?

    Is the Iran War America’s Biggest Self-Own of Self-Owns?

    Three and a half weeks in. Twenty-four days of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, oil at $112 a barrel, thirteen American soldiers dead, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, and the administration now scrambling to lift sanctions on the very country we’re bombing — just to keep gas prices from completely destroying what’s left…

  • The Metric System Makes Sense to Everyone

    The Metric System Makes Sense to Everyone

    When I was a kid, we started learning the metric system in school. There was an actual plan. America was going to join the rest of the world and switch from the imperial system — the one built on the length of some king’s foot — to a logical base-ten system that scientists, engineers, and…

  • How MTV Killed the Video Star (And Cable/Network Greed Finished the Job)

    How MTV Killed the Video Star (And Cable/Network Greed Finished the Job)

    I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this particular problem for more than a decade. So here’s my slightly obsessive take on how…

  • The Telo MT1, Almost — And the Truck I Actually Want

    The Telo MT1, Almost — And the Truck I Actually Want

    The setup, briefly: we have a 2016 Audi Allroad my wife loves, somewhere past 100,000 miles and probably pushing 125k by the time we replace it. Comfortable, capable, hauls everything. The brief for its replacement is simple — she wants an EV wagon. I did quietly float a small EV pickup as an alternative. That…

  • Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

    Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

    I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…

  • How I ignored a broken well tank for two years

    How I ignored a broken well tank for two years

    January 9, 2026 Looking back, I think the well tank bladder had been broken since at least summer 2024. It might have been failing for a year or two before that. What I was noticing: the water pressure would drop a little, then go back up when the pump kicked in. I thought the pressure…

  • Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

    Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

    Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in…

  • Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

    Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

    The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years…

  • The Argument Over Alex Pretti Is Bait. Don’t Take It.

    The Argument Over Alex Pretti Is Bait. Don’t Take It.

    By the time I started writing this, the videos of Alex Pretti’s last few minutes had been on my phone for three days and the argument about what they showed had hardened along the exact lines you’d predict. Half my feed saw a peaceful citizen being murdered by federal agents in his own neighborhood. The…

  • Oh My Goodness, I really like some of these G-Rated Burns

    Oh My Goodness, I really like some of these G-Rated Burns

    For those of you that like to argue on social media Ankles.(I had to dig to find what this one means) Thanks for helping. It was like doing it by myself, but harder. Cootie queen, lint licker As per my last email… Hope your pillow is always warm on both sides. Who ties your shoes…

  • I Hate Our Pella Architect Series Windows. They Look Good and that’s where It Stops.

    I Hate Our Pella Architect Series Windows. They Look Good and that’s where It Stops.

    I have to admit something before any of the rest of this will land. Our Pella Architect Series windows look beautiful. The proportions are right. The wood interiors took paint cleanly. The aluminum-clad exteriors have held up for sixteen winters. From across the room, from the road, in any photograph, they are the windows I…

  • Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

    Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

    Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…

  • Mamdani Madness

    Mamdani Madness

    So Zohran Mamdani was sworn in on January 1st as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and first democratic socialist mayor, and the outrage machine on both sides has been in full swing. Michael Rapaport, less than a week into Mamdani’s tenure, posted an Instagram announcement that he’s running for mayor in 2029 to save…

  • In Defense of Smart People (And Against Shopping Cart Abandoners)

    In Defense of Smart People (And Against Shopping Cart Abandoners)

    I’m not the smartest person. Not even close. But I’m also not the dumbest person. I think. Maybe. The jury’s still out, and frankly, I’m not smart enough to serve on that jury. I do, however, really like smart people. I like people who understand quantum physics even though there’s absolutely no way they could…

  • Big Tech Is Making Everything Harder on Purpose

    Big Tech Is Making Everything Harder on Purpose

    It has always amazed me how complex Big Tech has become and how poor their UI and UX are, given how much money they make. A simple task can take hours to slog through if you aren’t an IT person and only update certain things occasionally. If you’re stupid-smart like me — intelligent enough to…

  • The Gable Epidemic: A Plea to Modern Home Designers

    The Gable Epidemic: A Plea to Modern Home Designers

    What is going on with all the gables being added to homes over the last 10 years? Seriously, are there tax breaks for the more gables you have that I don’t know about? Or have architects and builders just gotten too lazy to figure out a coherent design plan? The logic seems to be: design…

  • Make America Great Again — Compared To When?

    Make America Great Again — Compared To When?

    I want to put this one in my own words because I had it backwards for a while. The first time I really thought about the slogan, I assumed the argument was about the again part — what year are we trying to get back to, what did “great” mean then, who was it great…

  • Who Actually Is a Patriot?

    Who Actually Is a Patriot?

    There’s a flag the size of a tablecloth on the back of a pickup that parks at the field where my kid plays baseball. The truck has a “Patriots Don’t Comply” sticker on it. The guy who owns it is probably very nice. But I find myself thinking, every time I see it: comply with…

  • Concrete Drain Board Repair Part Two: It’s Done. It’s Blotchy. Here’s What I Learned

    Concrete Drain Board Repair Part Two: It’s Done. It’s Blotchy. Here’s What I Learned

    I finally finished my concrete drain board refurbish. It’s blotchy as hell. The shape is perfect. It looks exactly like a drain board should look. But after all the layers, all the different materials, and all the well-intentioned repair attempts I documented in Part One, it ended up looking like a topographical map of somewhere…

  • The Drain Board That Broke Me: A Concrete Countertop Repair Saga

    The Drain Board That Broke Me: A Concrete Countertop Repair Saga

    Back in 2010, when YouTube had DIY videos but nothing like today’s endless stream of concrete countertop influencers, my wife and I poured our own concrete countertops. The information I found online was decent but limited. Most of the instructions involved pouring counters in a shop and then installing them. But my friend Marty, who…

  • Every Job I’ve Ever Had (Or At Least the Ones That Paid Me)

    Every Job I’ve Ever Had (Or At Least the Ones That Paid Me)

    If you laid my resume out chronologically, it would not look like a career. It would look like someone who couldn’t make up his mind. Farm chores starting around age four or five. Lawn mowing. Hay bales. McDonald’s. Roofing. Decks. Handyman. A summer in a Reynolds Metals can plant in Middletown, New York in 1988.…

  • What’s Old is New: My Dad Was Basically Elon Musk (Just 40 Years Too Early)

    What’s Old is New: My Dad Was Basically Elon Musk (Just 40 Years Too Early)

    My dad died in 2007, which means he never saw the Tesla in my driveway, the heat pump in the basement, or the solar panels on half the houses on my road. Which is a shame, because everything he did in the 1970s that we found weird at the time has, in the intervening fifty…

  • What’s the Future of EVs/ICE? Why Aren’t We Talking About Onboard Generators?

    What’s the Future of EVs/ICE? Why Aren’t We Talking About Onboard Generators?

    I own an EV. I am not opposed to EVs. And the more I drive mine, the more I think going fully electric — meaning battery-only, plug-only — is short-sighted. ICE alone is a worse answer. The complexity, the maintenance, the dependence on a fuel that has to be extracted, refined, and trucked everywhere —…

  • My C and D Pillar Design Rules: Why So Many Cars Have Ugly Backs

    My C and D Pillar Design Rules: Why So Many Cars Have Ugly Backs

    I have a long-running obsession, unusual for an American, with station wagons. Why the wagon got such a bad rap here, I’m honestly not sure. They were never considered cool even before National Lampoon’s Vacation permanently chained them to the suburban-dad image — but Europe figured out decades ago that the wagon (and its cousin,…

  • Something Chewed Through My Tesla’s Charging Cable

    Something Chewed Through My Tesla’s Charging Cable

    Walked out this morning to find my Tesla mobile connector cable chewed through, wires exposed. No idea what did it — squirrel, rat, rabbit, the chipmunks under the deck. Something out here decided a $300 piece of EV equipment looked edible. Going to need to replace it. If anyone has tricks for keeping cables safe…

  • Tesla Renamed the Bug to Make It a Feature

    Tesla Renamed the Bug to Make It a Feature

    Tesla’s latest software update supposedly fixed the automatic high-beam adjustment. The release notes said as much. Mine still doesn’t work — and I think I’ve figured out what happened. The car is not switching down to low beam when it detects an oncoming car. The blue high-beam indicator on the dash stays lit the entire…

  • Tesla Model Y LR 7-Seat: The Four-Month Reality Check

    Tesla Model Y LR 7-Seat: The Four-Month Reality Check

    After four months and about 6,000 miles with my first EV — a used 2023 7-seat Model Y Long Range with the Acceleration Boost — I’m ready to give an honest report. The short version: I’d probably make the same decision today, but with significant reservations about which parts of the car I actually got…

  • How We Ended Up With a Model Y 7 Seater (And Which Parts I Actually Liked)

    How We Ended Up With a Model Y 7 Seater (And Which Parts I Actually Liked)

    I had a 2019 Honda Ridgeline and I really liked it. But we’d decided we needed a third row — for the occasional extra kid, or for piling everyone into one car when the grandparents came along. With two boys around 11 and 12, we started looking at hybrids as our first toe in the…

  • Defacing My Own Tesla Before Anyone Else Could

    Defacing My Own Tesla Before Anyone Else Could

    Yes, I bought a Tesla in November 2024. I want to address that up front, because it matters for everything that follows. By the time I bought the Model Y, the politics around the company were already fully on fire. Musk had spent the election cycle as the world’s loudest surrogate for a candidate I…

  • Snowboarding: $30. Urgent Care: $3,000

    Snowboarding: $30. Urgent Care: $3,000

    I spent a good part of my teenage and college winters skiing, and I’d always wanted to share that with our kids. But here’s the thing: skiing (or snowboarding) is now REALLY expensive. Rentals, helmets, tickets, clothing — it adds up to more than $1,000 for a family of four. All for an outing our…