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Todd Grooms

Drinking coffee and monitoring the weather as we prepare to start our week long DisneyWorld vacation. We’ve always been very lucky and have avoided significant rain on our previous trips. We may not be so lucky this time. Hoping for light rain the entire time. 🤞🏻

Twenty Years

The passage of time is omnipresent in my digital life. Photos regularly surfaces memories of past events. I frequently enjoy with these memories, but there are occasional reminders that outline just how much time has passed. A memory and reminder of my nephew’s twentieth birthday hit me especially hard this week.

I had just started college when my brother called me with the news that my nephew was born. My nephew, Dallas, was named after my brother’s favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. Fittingly, he was born during a Monday Night Football game featuring the Dallas Cowboys. You can’t make this stuff up.

Twenty years feels impossible. I understand that transition period is in the past, but it doesn’t feel possible that it was twenty years in the past. When I think of Dallas, I still think of him as being four or five years old, his age when I graduated college. It’s wild. I was also warned about the speed at which time passes as you age, but even with those frequent warnings, I feel as though I am ill prepared for this experience.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

Quote from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, an attempt at capturing a certain Aristotelian sentiment. I ran across the quote this morning while reading Make Something Wonderful. Steve attributed the quote directly to Aristotle, but I found the origination of the quote thanks to Check Your Fact.

Third day in a row of spending the majority of my time in my bed. Two negative rapid antigen Covid tests, but you never know. Whatever it is has really taken me down. I was scheduled to travel for work this week. Honestly dejected that I had to cancel, as I had made quite a few plans. C’est la vie.

After much consternation, I got back on my bicycle last month. Sixteen rides for over eighty-seven miles in August. Just took my first ride of September this morning. Hoping to exceed one hundred miles this month.

🔗 Ten weird NHL facts that bother me more than they should (News+)

That was the year Boston took Joe Thornton with the No. 1 pick, and at some point, the Bruins apparently decided they wanted to have both the first and the last pick of the draft. So they called up the Avalanche and asked if they wanted to move up one pick for free, at which point the Colorado staff presumably rolled their eyes so far into the back of their heads they could see the Nordiques.

Chef’s kiss.

🔗 Shine On, Ride On, Bill Walton

After Bill Walton passed away earlier this year, I read a few articles that touched on his adoration of bicycles and riding bicycles. I recently started riding as a low impact way to exercise. As strange as it sounds, my back feels better after a week on the bike.

Finished reading: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Ashley’s suggestion. She’s a Vonnegut fan. I enjoyed it. That happiness is mine.

Finished reading: The Perfect Thing by Steven Levy 📚

Loved the nostalgia. My iPod Mini was my first Apple product and I still occasionally use it. It’s such a fun device and living through this time period was such a fun experience. I just wish I had kept my iPod 5th Gen.

Finished reading: California by Edan Lepucki 📚

Before moving into our current home, we hired an interior decorator to furnish and decorate our living and dining rooms. She purchased this book and put it on our book shelf as a decoration. That was six years ago. I just got around to reading it. I enjoyed it. Wasn’t sure how it was going to wrap up, but it was good.

📘 Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they’re still working to make the next great personal computer, then I will feel that my genes are still in there.

🔗 Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise

I love this post by Cabel Sasser about The Firehouse Five Plus Two. I especially love this reminder:

Also, a Cabel reminder to always buy the music you want to keep forever — these albums can, and will, disappear from streaming services at some point in the future.