Baby Power

The doctor’s visit threw off my whole Friday rhythm. When my daughter asked if I wanted to get groceries with her, I said yes before she finished the sentence.

To be clear, I wasn’t excited about Walmart. I was excited about the little face that was going to light up the moment I walked in to pick them up. There may be something wrong with Ellie’s wiring. The girl genuinely loves her grandpa, and I’ve learned not to question gifts.

We hit Sam’s first. My daughter doesn’t have a membership there, so I’m basically her black-market access point to bulk paper towels and cheese. She has a Costco card of her own, so I don’t flatter myself into thinking this is a scheme. She just also likes my company. That makes at least two women in my life who can either see past the rough exterior or have some kind of vision problem. I’m grateful either way.

Sam’s was disciplined. Six items. She knows what she needs and gets it. I am the one running a full moratorium on buying new meat until the freezer is empty, and Friday I was actually holding the line. My only purchase was generic Zyrtec because the generic Claritin had quietly retired against Oklahoma allergies. The doctor confirmed things had been bad that week, which either means he’s genuinely concerned or he’s decided I’m qualified to be one of my own junior practitioners. After forty-something years of doing exactly that, it’s nice to have a professional finally acknowledge it.

Then we crossed I-35 at lunch hour. I do not recommend this.

I drove like the maniac my phone’s driving app is convinced I am and arrived intact. Some guy was doing a multi-point turn out of a handicapped spot right by the entrance, blocking the whole row. I was building up a reasonable annoyance when he leaned out his window and yelled “sorry” as he passed. Forgiven completely, with bonus points left on the table.

My daughter was shopping for ingredients to cook dinner for friends who just had their fourth child. While she worked through her list, she parked the cart near me and I stayed with Ellie. Ellie had other ideas.

The moment her feet hit the floor, she grabbed the lower bar of the cart and started pushing. Not pretending to push. Actually pushing. She got low, got her feet under herself like a determined sled dog, and moved that cart through the meat department like she had somewhere to be.

My job was to steer and keep us from taking out anyone’s ankles. When the cart slowed, she just got more parallel to the ground and found more traction. Stopping was not part of her plan. We dropped her mother off in various aisles like a shuttle service while Ellie kept the operation moving.

I helped a little. A very little. Mostly, she was either trying to earn her nap or fishing for grandpa’s applause. Both worked.

Eventually the baby power gave out and she shifted to crawling, which moved the cart at a speed incompatible with other humans trying to shop. With the child seat buckle broken, I carried her the rest of the way out while her mom handled checkout like the responsible adult she is.

I’ve been thinking about where I was when my own kids did things like this.

Maybe I was there and just forgot. Maybe running on that little sleep meant anything not critical to survival got quietly deleted. The brain makes cuts. Whatever the reason, I missed a lot.

Watching a mind that young make those kinds of leaps in real time—the decision to push the cart, the problem-solving when it slowed, the commitment to the whole thing—is a kind of wonder I didn’t have the capacity to notice the first time around. I’m not ready to explain it well enough to do it justice. What I can say is that I’m embarrassingly glad I get a second chance at it.

Not everyone gets that role. I should probably feel bad about that.

I don’t, though. I’m not ready to share.

The Mercy Rule

I showed up at 8:15 for an 8:30 appointment with an empty stomach and low expectations.

That’s the deal with the annual physical—no breakfast, no coffee, and a brain running at about 60% of its usual speed. I don’t fast for spiritual reasons or wellness trends. I fast because my doctor needs clean blood numbers, and I comply like a slightly resentful teenager.

The elevator was out. I walked to the third floor instead of the second, which meant the man behind me who was more upset about the elevator than I was slipped ahead at check-in. He seemed like he needed the win more than I did.

The waiting room was generous with its space. Nobody had to sit near anyone else, which suited me fine. I have a tendency to turn my extrovert on in public, and once it’s on, it doesn’t always know when to stop. A stranger in a medical waiting room has things going on under the surface you can’t see. So I did what everyone else did. I stared at my phone like it owed me money.

They called me back second. First was the scale. Shoes weigh something. They used to account for that—a five-pound mercy rule, basically. Someone decided to eliminate it, and now the number just stares back at you. My BMI is what it is. A functional chubby-ness has carried me this far, and I’m not prepared to be dramatic about it.

The nurse ran through the standard questions, and I gave her honest answers, which felt like a small personal victory. At some point in your early-60s, you develop a reasonable ability to answer medical questions without editorializing.

Blood pressure: 122/68. I nearly fell out of the chair. When I give blood, which I do regularly and usually after at least one cup of coffee, that number climbs. This time I forgot the cuff was coming, which meant my body didn’t have time to manufacture anxiety about the reading. I’m holding onto this number like a trophy.

My doctor has a name that sounds like something you’d order at a tea shop, which I mean affectionately. He is good on the dialogue but a little lean on checking the reflexes. We had a brief negotiation about who was holding the microphone during my update, but we found a rhythm. He touched me exactly four times with the stethoscope. Four. I don’t know what number I was expecting, but it felt light for something called a physical.

I was hoping he’d look in my ears so I could mention my shower routine, but I suppose that joke keeps until next year.

Upstairs for the blood draw, which is where the morning got interesting.

The waiting room was full. The promo board cycling between health tips and marketing content included a note that visually impaired patients should swipe with three fingers on the check-in screen. I sat with that for a moment

A woman came in with a four-year-old and a seven-month-old. I’d guessed three on the older one, which she politely corrected. There was one open chair next to me and one across the room. I asked if she’d like me to move so she could have two together. The baby was still in that loading-personality-coming-soon phase, but watching the mom manage both kids with one hand free reminded me we were all young and exhausted once.

One woman checked in, glanced at the open seat next to me, and immediately chose to lean against the wall until a chair opened on the far side of the room. I took no offense. If I had to choose between sitting next to a guy who might start a conversation and leaning against a wall, I might avoid me too.

When my wife Judy was still waiting for her draw and I was heading out, I gave her a fist bump. “See you at home, dear.”

A few people smiled. One older woman held onto it a second longer than the rest. Maybe she had a husband she adored. Maybe she missed one. Either way, she smiled like the gesture meant something, and that was worth the empty stomach.

Monday, I’ll get the call about the results. Neither my doctor nor I is expecting anything alarming.

If I could write my own prescription, it would just say: daily laughter, refills unlimited. I’m pretty good at finding it. Family close, health stable, nothing urgent on the horizon.

Lucky doesn’t quite cover it, but it’s the closest word I’ve got.

The Remarkable Adventures of an Unremarkable Morning

There’s a meeting at 9:00, and I have a small window before I put on my babysitting hat. So naturally, I ate a bagel, drank two cups of coffee, and chugged the last of a quart of orange juice left over from last month’s wedding shower — because apparently cleaning out a refrigerator is a noble act of self-sacrifice rather than the most basic form of adulting imaginable. Nobody asked me to buy a quart of orange juice for a party. My wife bought the party supplies. My conscience would bother me no matter who did the shopping. I drank it anyway.

Then I scurried outside.

The 4.5-mile walk had to be done before 9:00. I already knew my meeting was starting at 9:05, minimum. Knowing he’ll be five minutes late has never once made me log into Zoom five minutes late. I don’t understand myself either.

The first obstacle was a forklift hauling lumber for one of the new houses going up on the other side of the neighborhood. Our side is the older part — mature trees, individual mailboxes, the kind of street where the mail carrier drives from box to box. The new side has consolidated mailboxes, one big cluster where you can knock out six streets in three minutes. Efficient. I’d be a disaster at it. The numbers would run together, and anything less than five mistakes per day would be a good day. Not my problem, because I don’t have that job, and this is why.

The forklift detour wasn’t much of a detour. What it actually cost me was thirty seconds of my audiobook, paused while a yard crew fired up a leaf blower to redistribute freshly mown clippings to somewhere other than the driveway. Somewhere, presumably, but I didn’t stay to confirm.

The wildlife situation required judgment calls I’m not sure I was qualified to make.

Oklahoma is flat. When it rains, the water has to go somewhere, and at the neighborhood level, that means toads and turtles living in the drainage areas, occasionally making ill-fated decisions about road crossings. I saw a baby turtle sitting dead center in the street. I saw a large turtle just off the curb. I stood there for a moment, fully aware that a decent person would move them.

I did not move them.

I have a thing — a completely reasonable and well-established thing — about touching animals that could carry germs that might somehow, in some freak sequence of events, find their way into my mouth or my granddaughters. I know how that sounds. But I grew up watching a turtle crawl under a sliding wooden door and disappear, and something in me was permanently shaped by that. The turtles were on their own. I am sorry. I walked faster so I didn’t have to see what happened next.

Four rabbits in the park. No squirrels — our trees aren’t mature enough yet for what I can only describe as “tree rats” to fully establish themselves. They have earned my dislike, and I won’t apologize. .

At the park, a young woman was doing sprint intervals on the soccer field within the walking path. I’d seen her the other day running full laps, and today she was going hard, then walking, then going hard again. I admire that kind of self-motivation — the kind where you show up and push yourself with no external pressure, just because. I don’t have that relationship with exercise. I walk because it’s a good time to listen to books and because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t. It’s not suffering, but it’s not ambition either.

The highlight of the entire walk — maybe the entire week — was watching the OKIE811 utility locator do his job.

I assumed these guys walked around spraying paint on the ground and bending over to stick the little flags in. Reasonable assumption. That is not what this man was doing. He was marking a gas line (yellow flags, per the Universal Utility Color Code), and when he finished the spray, he reached into his vest, pulled out a flag, and with one smooth downward flick of his wrist sent it arcing through the air so that it landed perfectly upright in the ground.

I applauded him inside my head as I tried not to stare.

I have no idea if the rest of his flags that day went in on the first try. Maybe he fumbled twenty of them the moment I turned the corner. But what I saw was a man who had mastered something so specific and so useless outside of his exact job that it became a kind of art. I thought about how many thousands of flags you’d have to throw before your wrist just knew the angle. Nobody is going to put that on a highlight reel. And I loved it.

The last stop was my son’s house. He and his bride are finishing up their honeymoon, so I let myself in through the garage, removed my shoes at the door (they have an Asian household — shoes stay outside; I assume the mounted cameras confirm compliance), and found all their houseplants arranged in the kitchen sink with their vines draped across the drying racks in what I can only describe as a botanical hostage situation. I’d like to think my daughter-in-law staged this deliberately before they left. The alternative — that the plants organized themselves — would require a conversation I’m not ready for.

I turned on the spray nozzle and gave them all a drink. They may be sun-deprived, but they weren’t dying of thirst on my watch. Small win.

The walk takes a little over an hour. I listen to my book, I sweat a little, I make no meaningful impact on local turtle populations. By most measures, it’s an unremarkable way to spend a morning.

But I keep showing up for it. A forklift reroutes me, a utility worker throws a flag like a tiny javelin, a turtle makes a bad decision at an intersection I hope he saw the other side of — and somehow that’s enough. More than enough. I’m not sure when ordinary started feeling like something worth paying attention to, but at some point it did, and I think that might be the whole thing. You live long enough, you stop waiting for remarkable, and you start just noticing what’s actually there.

That’s a pretty good trade.

The Giraffe Named Ellie

I arrived at my daughter’s house at 8:30 with the “Ellie-approved” stroller and no ambiguity about whether I wanted to be there. The night before, I’d said, “Are we going to see Ellie tomorrow?” She said, “Do you want to go to the zoo?” As if Ellie’s presence made the venue negotiable.

She drove. She recently quit her job to become “Mom of One with a 2 girl upgrade before October arrives,” and OKC morning highways are somehow the least chaotic part of her current life. I had no objection. I rarely fight someone else doing the driving — and when she stays at the speed limit, the car tracking app on my phone briefly believes I’m a responsible adult. When my wife drives, that same app apparently concludes I’ve been drag racing on the interstate.

At the gate, my daughter bought the membership: two adults and as many kids under 3 as you can account for at any given moment. The zoo seemed optimistic about that number.

I should be upfront about something. I’m not a zoo person.

I understand what zoos do. Children see animals, become fascinated with the natural world, and some of them eventually become veterinarians. I applaud all of that from a comfortable distance. I grew up near the Columbus Zoo, which is a good one. I don’t remember how many times I went as a child, and I think that tells you something.

What semi-retirement gives you, though, is availability — and decent enough eyesight to qualify as a tag-team partner for a daughter willing to tolerate your company. I’ve done this before. I’ve taken children to zoos before. I’ve come close to accidentally enrolling a son in the chimpanzee exhibit on a Mother’s Day in the early 2000s, and I only exaggerate that story a little.

My approach to animals is efficient. I look at a wildebeest, think something like, “That is a genuinely unfortunate head,” and move on. God apparently designed these creatures with total confidence. My wife and I cannot pick a paint color for a hallway without four trips to the hardware store, so the idea of just deciding to make a wildebeest is beyond me.

One thing the OKC Zoo has over the Columbus Zoo: at Columbus, the exhibits have large sweeping names like “North America.” At this zoo, they have a section called “Oklahoma,” which appears to contain enough variety to cover most of the continent. Having lived here awhile, I’ve stopped being surprised by that.

Ellie’s highlights were specific and, if you blinked, easy to miss.

The Cheerios in her stroller cup holders were the main event. She’d glance at passing animals, then return to the serious work of gumming the oat circles into paste. The animals were ambient. The Cheerios were the feature.

The flamingos got real attention — they were close to the path and practically fluorescent, and her eyes tracked them for a genuine stretch. For reference, thirty seconds of eye contact from a one-year-old is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

The dinosaur at the entrance barely registered on the way in. On the way out, she leaned back against my chest, looked straight up at the brontosaurus (I think), and smiled at him. I don’t know what she thought it was. The dinosaur didn’t smile back, but she held up her end of the exchange.

In my world, large reptiles are always “him.” I know this isn’t scientifically airtight, but I’ve been consistent about it for decades, and I’m not changing now.

The whole trip ran about three hours. My daughter ran the operation; I pushed the stroller and kept the headcount accurate, both of which I managed.

One of the giraffes is named Ellie. I’d go back just to point at her and say, “Look, there’s the other one.”

Our Ellie fell asleep before we made it out of the parking lot. When babysitting, she can convince me sleep is a hobby she hasn’t fully committed to yet — she’ll run the living room like she’s training for something and still have energy when I don’t. But three hours of flamingos and Cheerios and stroller traffic, and she was gone before I finished a sentence.

That’s why we took our own kids to the zoo, too. It’s not something you say out loud at the time, but everyone knows it. The animals are fine. The nap is the whole point.

The Washer That Tried Its Best

We are about to hit the two-week mark without a washer, and I want to be very clear: this is not a hardship narrative. Nobody needs to organize anything. We have children nearby who are more than happy to earn nonspecific parental approval points by letting us use their machines. We’ve already run three loads through our daughter’s washer, and she now leads the family leaderboard by a comfortable margin. She doesn’t know what the points are for, and we don’t know how she’ll cash them in, but somewhere there’s a spreadsheet that leans slightly in her favor.

The real story here is that our washer lasted as long as it did.

When the hockey boys arrived in the fall, the washer was—by all available evidence—normal. Quiet. Cooperative. Not auditioning for the role of bucking bronco at a cowboy bar. But somewhere along the way, it decided it wanted more out of life. A second act. And once it committed to that dream, it went all in on every single load. Jeans, towels, delicates—didn’t matter. If it went in, it came out after six rounds of thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

Naturally, we blamed the hockey boys. “Those boys are trying to cram two loads into one,” we said, as if we were seasoned forensic laundry experts. It felt good to believe. It gave the chaos a villain.

We tried all the classic home remedies. Lean it forward. Drop it back. Hope gravity and optimism would realign the drum. I didn’t research any of this, of course. Judy probably talked to someone on the phone and then got ambushed by several reels on the subject—assuming she’d already burned through the videos of toddlers missing t-ball pitches and animals losing their minds over garden hoses.

We did warn the hockey boys about overloading. They nodded, then returned to their natural habitat: upstairs, headphones on, video games absorbing all earthly sound. They would drop a load in and disappear, completely insulated from the consequences. Meanwhile, if we forgot to close the laundry room door, it sounded like something had gotten in and wanted out badly. Six cycles of thump-thump-thump-thump-thump will make you question how many seconds you have left.

The more unsettling development was our own adaptation. When our son came over and heard it, he’d stare at us in genuine disbelief—two people sitting calmly on the couch, our only concession to the impending structural failure being a single, unhurried click up on the TV volume. The machine had become part of the family. Not a pleasant family member. More like the uncle who starts every holiday dinner with, “Now don’t get mad, but…”

By the time the season wound down, we knew. Post-hockey-boy life was going to include a new washer.

So for date night, we went to Home Depot. Chick-fil-A handled dinner. The appliance aisle handled the foreboding. Judy walked the lineup like a judge at a talent show, hoping for something that would at least surprise her. Instead: a lot of meh and buttons that seemed to require a minor in engineering. She was disappointed. I was, if I’m being honest, strangely relieved.

We made the decision that only people our age can make with a straight face: let the monster keep haunting its corner of the first floor as long as it was able.

We’re hoping for a repeat of the air fryer situation. We didn’t realize how dead the old one was until the new one showed up—and suddenly reheating a slice of pizza no longer took longer than ordering a fresh delivery. That was a genuine revelation. The bar for the new washer isn’t high: mostly we just want it to sound like an appliance and not an escape attempt.

The hockey boys will probably still find ways to provoke it next season, but we have the summer to recalibrate our noise expectations before we slide back into the familiar soundtrack of domestic chaos.

Now we just need the thing to actually arrive. Home Depot already pushed it back a week, and someone’s delicates are starting to form geological layers in the laundry basket. The text says Tuesday, 2–6 pm—which in delivery company language translates to “remain in your home and abandon all hope of making plans.”

We don’t do mountains of laundry around here. The cooking has scaled back, and the dishwasher spends most of its life wondering if it still has a purpose. The machines in this house are creeping toward semi-retirement, honestly.

At our age, you stop pretending everything is fine when something is clearly broken. You don’t make a fuss. You just sigh, adjust, and text your kids to see who’s home and whose washer is open for hosting. We’ve already built all the character we need. Now we’re mostly interested in functioning appliances.

I don’t call it lazy. I call it convenience-inclined.

Is that so wrong?

The Watch Situation

I used to wear a watch constantly. Not because I was punctual—there has never been enough evidence to support that theory. I simply liked having one.

I graduated through the full evolutionary timeline of affordable timepieces. Started with a small analog watch, moved into the glamorous future of digital, first an LED display that required pressing a button to reveal the time as though it were protecting classified information, then an LCD that felt like owning technology stolen from NASA.

Then came the stopwatch phase. I spent an embarrassing amount of childhood trying to stop it on an exact second rather than some renegade hundredth.

I’d hit the button. 10.13.

Again. 9.87.

Again. 12.04.

Eventually, after several minutes of concentrated effort, I’d finally land on exactly 10.00 and feel a sense of accomplishment wildly disproportionate to the achievement. Kids today have streaming services and unlimited entertainment. We had a stopwatch and imagination.

Somewhere after that I developed opinions about watches—never more than one at a time, but I cycled through several of them, each paired with a twist-o-flex band engineered specifically to remove arm hair one follicle at a time. Whether my sweat was corrosive enough to slay the watches before the bands finished the job is a question science has yet to answer. Either way, eventually something inside me snapped. Or maybe it was the band. Watches and I were done.

Was it the sweat under the band? The vanity of not wanting tan lines beyond my already well-established farmer’s tan? The first cell phone clipped to my belt like a middle-aged Batman? The details are lost. The important part is I quit wearing watches and never looked back.

Until I did.

More than half my kids walk around with smartwatches now, closing rings and tracking steps like it’s a competitive sport. I started thinking, I walk a lot. Maybe I should get one so I can receive official electronic confirmation that I am, in fact, moving. Without verification, how does anyone really know?

I also get accused—regularly and fairly—of being impossible to shop for. Apparently my habit of buying things immediately rather than letting them sit on a wish list for six months makes me “difficult.” So I thought: Father’s Day. Put the watch on the list. Prove I’m giftable. I even imagined everyone pitching in together, which was generous of me to consider.

Let’s be honest about what Father’s Day actually looks like at my stage of life. A phone call. Maybe a card. One gift from the daughter who has benefited most from my extensive unpaid babysitting services. The new daughter-in-law might nudge my son toward participation, but I keep expectations low. Low expectations are the bubble wrap of emotional life.

Before officially adding it to the list, I consulted my wife and my local daughter. Their responses were different and spiritually identical.

My daughter used to be in the “sure, Dad, get a watch” camp. Then she spent more time with me and quietly switched parties. Her verdict: “I think you’d get way too much information off that kind of watch. I don’t recommend it.” She wasn’t talking about technology. She was talking about me. Give me access to heart rate data, sleep scores, and recovery metrics, and within a month I’ll be convinced something has moved from green to light green and we need to discuss it with someone. That vote went straight into the “no” column.

My wife came at it from a different angle. She reminded me I’d already broken up with watches once and expressed full confidence I’d abandon this one in about two months. Not hope—confidence. Nothing says supportive spouse like betting against you in your own fitness journey.

So that’s that. My Father’s Day list is empty again, and I’m back to trusting my phone to track my steps and shame me into movement. I already get a little unhinged when I miss my daily goals. If you want me to work hard, make me compete against myself—I hate letting myself down, and I do it often enough that the stakes feel real.

With summer heat arriving, I’ve shifted my walks to 7-9 a.m. I don’t avoid all the misery, but it keeps my wife from worrying I’ll become a cautionary tale on the side of the road. And I get to start the day knowing I’ve given this body another reason to keep going.

Some technologies improve with age. I am doing my best to be one of them.

Hot Tub 3.0: I Finally Got It Right (Mostly)

I take my hot tub water to Leslie’s for testing every week. Sometimes monthly, when I’m feeling particularly confident in my abilities as a hot tub owner—which, as it turns out, I should not be. Cyanuric acid has never technically failed me on those tests, but it shows up on my report card the way my kindergarten teacher’s notes did. Not quite a problem. Just a little glare. A suggestion that maybe you could do better.

This week’s test was unnecessary. I knew the water was fine. I went anyway, because I had a plan, and I needed the ritual of confirmation before I could commit to it. The plan was simple: Andy empties the hot tub for the third time, but smarter than the last two.

That is a low bar.

I bought the Purge, which is a product designed to flush the pipes and biofilm before you drain. The night before, I added it to the water, ran the jets briefly while I sprayed out the filters, and watched in mild horror as bubbles cascaded over the sides of the tub and started a very serious attempt to take over the backyard. Five minutes of filter-spraying produced enough foam to threaten the pergola. Eventually it settled down, and I buckled the cover back on to hold the temperature at 95 degrees like the instructions said.

Morning comes. I stretch the hoses toward the street, drop in the submersible pump, flip the switch, and stand there feeling like a man who has his life together. Then I pick up the Purge instructions to give them one last look, and I find a line I’d skimmed past the night before.

“Run the hot tub pumps to flush out the pipes before emptying the tub.”

The pump is already running, but the water level is still high enough. I flip on the jets, let them circulate for a few minutes, and quietly note that catching this before the tub was half-empty probably counts as personal growth.

I ate breakfast. Did some unimportant things. Came back about an hour later.

The hot tub has seating recesses built into it, which is what separates it from being a very expensive, very shallow bathtub. Those recesses, however, do not drain on their own. When the water level drops below the seats, you’re left with little puddles of the exact stuff you were trying to get rid of, like a hoarder who survived the eviction.

This is where the wet/dry vac came in. It’s lived in my garage for years, hauled from Texas, where its entire career consisted of vacuuming acorns. This was its first water. I hosed down the sides of the tub, vacuumed out each seat recess, dumped that water into the lowest point where the pump was still running, and repeated until there was almost nothing left.

Then the pump hit its depth limit, and I had a thought that felt, in the moment, like genuine engineering: drop the pump directly into the vac tank and let it empty that too. No hauling. No sloshing a heavy vac across the yard. The pump did the work while I supervised, which is my strongest skill.

For context on why this matters:

HT 1.0, I dealt with the entire hot tub using five-gallon buckets, hauled by hand, over and over, and never got within a foot of the bottom. HT 2.0, I had the pump, which helped, but I was lazy about the seat recesses and left behind enough shingle granules to form a small gravel path. (The hot tub sits under a pergola with gutters. Rain still finds a way. It always does.) HT 3.0 ended with clean pipes, almost no residue, and no buckets. It was the first time this process felt like something a competent person might do.

I went for a walk while the tub refilled. About an hour, I figured. When I got back, I thought, “I’ll let it fill a little more while I play online chess.”

Chess, apparently, required my full and extended attention. By the time I turned the hose off, the water level was higher than intended, and when I flipped the fuses back on, the pump had to take a couple of dry gulps before the water reached it. A minor thing. Noted for 4.0.

The water temperature at fill was 73 degrees. It takes time to climb back up to soak-worthy, but by evening we were both in the tub, my wife and I. 35 years of marriage, celebrating with chlorinated water and clean plumbing.

There was a problem. The water was a little high—my fault entirely—and my wife couldn’t sit in the recesses without the water reaching her chin. I offered to remove myself from the equation. My body, as I may have mentioned, takes up a meaningful amount of space. She said no, it was fine.

That is love. Gargling hot tub water voluntarily so you can spend a few minutes together outside. She has many good qualities. Being married to me is just one of the things she tolerates.

Hot Tub 4.0 will involve filling through the filter housing to avoid the dry-pump issue. I’ll read the directions first next time. Maybe.

For context on why this matters: I documented the original bucket disaster—The Hot Tub Hero—if you want the full humbling backstory. HT 1.0, I dealt with the recesses using five-gallon buckets, hauled by hand, over and over, and never got within a foot of the bottom. HT 2.0, I had the pump, which helped, but I was lazy about the seat recesses and left behind enough shingle granules to form a small gravel path. (The hot tub sits under a pergola with gutters. Rain still finds a way. It always does.) HT 3.0 ended with clean pipes, almost no residue, and no buckets. It was the first time this process felt like something a competent person might do.

The World’s Most Disappointing Sports Fan

I was raised in central Ohio, which means I was issued an Ohio State Buckeye fan card sometime around kindergarten. I still follow the team. Sixteen years after leaving the state, I still know enough to have opinions.

I am also a terrible fan.

Not the kind who paints his chest in freezing temperatures or argues with strangers online who type exclusively in capital letters. I mean terrible at the actual job description.

If Ohio State is winning by 35, I find something else to do. Some people call that enjoying a comfortable victory. I call it “having access to a remote control.” And if the game is close, I get personally annoyed that they aren’t dominating. My ideal game is apparently exciting enough to hold my attention but not exciting enough to threaten the outcome. I recognize this is irrational. I have made peace with it.

My fair-weather tendencies hit new heights during Game 6 of the Thunder-Spurs series.

My wife and I faithfully watched the first quarter. Then we remembered our son is on his honeymoon and the HBO Max subscription attached to his account expires next month. This created urgency. The Thunder would understand. We switched over to The Pitt.

Our plan was simple—watch for a bit, check the score, return in the third quarter if Oklahoma City was still in it. Professional sports teams have benches. We were simply taking advantage of ours.

When we checked back, it was clearly a two-episode night.

For what it’s worth, we didn’t miss much worth watching. The Spurs outscored OKC 32-13 in that third quarter, including a 20-0 run. Our emotional support from the couch would not have changed the trajectory.

My son Jeff, for his part, is a real Thunder fan. His father-in-law figured this out before the wedding, watching Jeff sweat through games and pace and shout at the TV like his voice was patched into the coaching staff’s headset. At some point, he quietly pulled us aside to ask whether Jeff was betting on the games—because in his experience, nobody gets that stressed unless there’s money involved. Apparently, cricket fans are calmer. Jeff wasn’t gambling. He just genuinely cared. I continue to find this fascinating.

Here’s my most embarrassing sports opinion: I think other cities deserve a turn.

I like the Thunder. I own the shirts. I wear the hats. But I also think championships are more interesting when they move around. Maybe OKC gets a good two-year run, raises some banners, and then hands it off. Let another city have the “wait, we’re actually the best?” feeling for a while. The big markets will be fine. The big markets have been through this before and will be again.

The same logic applies to the junior hockey league our boys play in. The Lone Star Brahmas have won the South Division of the NAHL three years running and took the Robertson Cup one of those years. They’ve earned every bit of their confidence—they’re good, they know it, everyone else knows it. But fans from other South Division teams apparently aren’t allowed to feel neutral about it. You’re supposed to convert and cheer for the Brahmas as your regional representative, and if you don’t, they take it personally. The league gets healthier when different towns get to feel something. More fan bases believing they have a shot makes for a better sport.

Tonight is Game 7, right here in Oklahoma City. I’ll watch.

Well, mostly. The middle portions remain negotiable.

What I actually want is a contest—teams that refuse to say uncle, favorites made uncomfortable, nobody handed anything before the clock hits zero. In a best-of-seven, you don’t have to be the better team all month. You have to be the better team tonight. That feels honest.

I’ll accept whatever verdict the court delivers, assuming the referees don’t completely ruin it. Even a terrible fan is allowed one irrational opinion.

ABC’s Wide World of Sports used to open with “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Most fans spend their time trying to avoid the second part. But the agony is what makes the first part worth anything.

Even if I did miss it because of a TV show.

The Freezer Reckoning

Our son got married last weekend, and the hockey boys cleared out about six weeks ago, and somewhere in there I started walking around feeling like a man who had just solved a very complicated equation. Fewer people. Less food. Maybe I’d finally figure out what a normal grocery run looks like.

I have not figured that out.

What I’ve figured out is that our three freezers — the kitchen one, the garage one, and the chest freezer that operates mostly on faith — contain a fairly accurate biography of the last several months of our family’s life, and that biography is not well-organized.

The honest version is that I did this. I buy a ten-pound tube of hamburger because that’s who I am, probably during some kind of Sam’s Club fever dream, and then I brown it and portion it into freezer bags I’ve flattened out because flat is more efficient. Except they’re not flat. They have ridges. They develop personalities. They stack the way things stack when the person doing the stacking is optimistic but not precise. Over time they’ve been joined by what I can only call the Chicken Bag Cousins — bags from three different cooking sessions, a couple of optimistic grilling sessions that nobody finished, reheated once and found wanting, frozen again on the theory that Past Me was looking out for Future Me. Future Me has since learned that Past Me was overconfident. There’s also a respectable quantity of brisket, some sausages I can’t fully account for, and enough frozen banana halves to suggest I had real smoothie ambitions that I haven’t quite followed through on. My job is to rotate all of this back through the kitchen before it becomes archaeology. I am failing at that job.

The problem isn’t just volume. It’s that everyone eating out of these freezers wants something different. My wife is dieting, so there’s browned turkey in there for her taco salads. My son’s new wife is vegetarian, so we’ve got black bean burgers, vegetarian pizzas, and somewhere north of a dozen sweet potato and bean burritos she can heat up when whatever I’ve made for dinner doesn’t work for her. The hockey boys left behind pizza rolls and mozzarella sticks the way other people leave behind furniture — just part of the place now. And then there’s me, standing in front of an open freezer at 5pm, trying to figure out how to turn any of this into something that resembles a meal.

My daughter gets a tour about once a week. I open the chest freezer and make my case. “Wouldn’t sloppy joes be good? I’ve got the beef right here, already browned.” Last visit, she left with a few things and agreed in principle to two dinners next week, which I’m counting as a genuine win. Our granddaughter Ellie is less useful — she’s refusing to grow teeth at any kind of reasonable pace, which I respect as a personal choice but doesn’t help with the chicken situation.

The cruise is in mid-summer. That’s the finish line. Every freezer-excavation dinner between now and then is doing something — keeping us honest, keeping us from buying more food we don’t need, keeping my wife and me from just staring at each other while eating tonight’s protein selection and pretending we planned it that way. The dining room on the ship is going to feel earned.

I grew up in a house where you didn’t waste food, and that’s still in me. Some of what’s in those freezers isn’t exactly what I’d serve company, but it deserves better than the trash, so we eat it, and we move on. It’s a strange thing, eating your way through a freezer that was packed for a different version of your life — when the house was full, when I was buying for a crowd, when nobody thought twice about four frozen pizzas on a Tuesday night. The house is quieter now. It’s a good quiet, mostly. Our son is happy and our daughter’s family is close and Ellie is growing up even without the teeth. Things are good.

The freezers will catch up eventually.

Inherited Love, Acquired Like

After a wedding, you don’t just gain a son- or daughter-in-law. You gain a brand-new human you are now morally obligated to love, whether or not you’d voluntarily spend three hours in a car alone with them.

You love your kid. You love the person they chose. The spouse becomes an extension of your child, like an emotional annex. You don’t need a sociology degree or any other “-ology” to know that doing right by either of them is a good long-term investment. Love one, love both, everybody’s happy, Hallmark can roll credits.

But “loving” the new spouse does not automatically convert to an immediate “like.”

For the purposes of this little ramble, love means treating the spouse with the respect and honor your child would appreciate. They’re married now. They’re one. Your treatment should reflect that, whether or not you fully understand every choice this delightful new person has made and will continue to make with great confidence.

Like is different. Like is earned. Like is slower.

“Fake It” And Then What?

There’s that old line, “Fake it till you make it.” With in-laws, it becomes: fake it until you really love them. The initial love is inherited—you love your kid, so their spouse gets swept into the coverage area like a dependent on a health plan. Basic kindness and benefit of the doubt, grandfathered in by your affection for your child.

The “spousal like” is acquired. It’s not instantaneous. It shows up in oddly specific moments. You know you have it when you’re both stuck in a car together and the conversation just keeps going—serious to stupid, jobs to movies to “what is wrong with that guy’s driving?”—and you realize you’re not just being polite anymore.

Then there’s the social setting version, which is its own beast. One-on-one is not the same person who walks into a party. For some of us, parties are draining. A room full of small talk feels like being slowly pecked to death by well-meaning ducks. Give me a corner, a chair, and one solid conversation partner.

My married son is far too extroverted in a group for my taste. He works the room like he’s on a campaign trail. But he knows his dad, so we can drop out of the noise and settle into something real—serious enough to matter, sarcastic enough that it doesn’t turn into a lecture series nobody registered for.

The Introvert Who Won My Heart

My daughter has been married almost four years to an introvert. He doesn’t give you a lot to work with. Conversations are never hard, but they’re not the same elastic back-and-forth I have with my kids. More pauses, fewer punchlines, less verbal jazz.

But he won my heart anyway—by how he takes care of my granddaughter and looks out for my daughter. I wouldn’t volunteer for a ten-hour road trip with him. But I know he puts the women in his life on a pedestal, and that matters more than whether he appreciates my running commentary on the state of the universe.

That’s a kind of like that grows from watching, not talking.

The Many Versions of a Daughter-in-Law

My son’s new wife is a different kind of story entirely.

First she was simply our son’s girlfriend. Then the woman he wanted to marry, from another faith tradition—which added some complexity and a few extra conversations. Then she got baptized, and she became our future daughter-in-law in a much more layered way.

On top of all that, she spent the better part of this year as a near-aunt to our granddaughter, a doctorate candidate who crossed the finish line one week before walking down the aisle, a bride planning her dream wedding on a budget that kept shrinking in her imagination, and a person who loves her life in Oklahoma while missing parts of the family and culture she grew up in.

That’s a lot for one person to carry, and she carried it without visibly unraveling—which, having watched the whole thing unfold, I find genuinely impressive.

Now the wedding is over. Real life starts.

I’m looking forward to the spouse she’ll be once the adrenaline settles. I’m looking forward to watching them build rhythms and traditions and eventually a family of their own. And selfishly, I’m looking forward to the car ride where the conversation bounces between serious and sassy and neither of us has to work too hard at it.

But even if we never become natural road-trip buddies—if the rapport stays warm but never quite effortless—I’ll still be grateful if she loves my son well. If his heart got handed to someone who’ll protect it carefully for the rest of his life, she’s earned a lifetime pass.

She’s just starting. So are we, honestly.