My 2-year-old often runs around the house saying, “Run for your life!” but the other day she said something different. She said, “Run to your life!” What great advice! If you’re in a bad situation—a bad job, a bad relationship, a bad community—get out of there! Run to your life! If you’re not happy where …
Author Archives: Mitch
You’re going to fall
Today we took my 5-year-old boy out to try riding his bike without his training wheels for the first time and as I pushed him along and then let go of the bike, he of course didn’t go riding straight off into the sunset. He expects everything to go perfectly and gets loudly upset when …
Stay close to the source
I used to live in San Francisco by this taqueria that had one of the best salsas I’ve ever tasted. I would buy jars of it regularly and once I even thought about sending a refrigerated jar of it to a friend on the east coast, it was that good. When I moved out of …
The unknown enemy
Peregrine falcons are birds of prey but they are not without their predators. Golden eagles and great horned owls are larger and both will attack peregrine falcons when given the chance. In the 1960s and 1970s, peregrine falcons’ numbers were dwindling and at first, no one knew why. It wasn’t because of their predators, golden …
Everything is figureoutable
Our garbage disposal stopped working recently and my first reaction was that I might have to call someone to repair or replace it. I know nothing about garbage disposals, after all. But after a YouTube video and just looking at the thing, I learned enough about garbage disposal to take it apart and fix it …
The weakness of cement
I usually think of cement as very hard and as the type of thing that breaks other things, rather than the type of thing that breaks. But everything has its weakness. Or its downside. Or its particular way that it can go wrong. Worth thinking about before you pour the cement. What will you do …
Talk to one person
One of my friends convinced me to build a storage shed using wood as the base, rather than concrete. It sounds a lot easier to work with and easier to fix than a cracked piece of concrete done wrong. Another one of my friends changed my mind about which image to use for the main …
Boiling a swimming pool
I was using an electric air pump to blow up an inflatable pool today and the sections that I needed to inflate were different sizes. Some were small and inflated really quickly. Others were so large that I wasn’t sure that they were inflating at all, because the initial evidence of progress was so hard …
300 years
Greenland sharks live 300 to 500 years. If I knew that I would live that long, then I’d likely still be procrastinating. As it is, I hope to live to be 100. That probably still causes some procrastination. We should probably do the opposite. How would you live if you knew you had 5-10 years …
The biggest fish
Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea. You might think they eat the second biggest fish or the large fish or at least the medium sized fish of the sea, to get so big. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The biggest fish in the sea eat plankton, which are some …