Category Archives: About Me

February 23, 2013 · 11:29 am

Learning to Run

For the last 3 months I have been learning to run. Here is how:

Born To Run Book

Step 1 - I read Born to Run.

It was super awesome, educational,  easy to read, and most importantly, inspirational. Instead of making you guilty for not running or watching TV, by telling stories of super disciplined olympic athletes, it told stories of individuals and even cultures who ran just because they liked it. It reminded me of my days in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade when I used to race the bus to school and ran just for fun before competition and fitness ruined it for me. I’ve bought the book  as a gift for 3 people and you should consider checking it out. If you do, let me know what you think. BOOK LINK

Step 2 - I set up a way to run naturally.

I knew that treadmills weren’t going to cut it. I wanted it to be a part of my life so I incorporated it into something I’m already doing. For me, this is going to work. I decided to run into the office. It’s 6 miles roundtrip and I don’t need to provide myself some imagined or lofty purpose with my runs. I’m just trying to get to work and enjoy the outdoors and city on the way. It’s a great way to decompress and clear my head after a day of meetings too. It was kind of a pain to set up but I gave myself 2 weeks to get everything in place. For me this means extra clothes and shoes at the office, I bought an extra laptop to leave at the office because I want to run light, and I don’t plan any engagements 45 minutes before or after my last meeting. Continue reading →

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Filed under About Me, Family, Outdoors

August 28, 2012 · 10:55 am

A few of my random thoughts from the Wonderland…

It’s strange that our children (and even us) may grow up thinking that water comes from a tap or a bottle. That’s not where it comes from. It comes from the ground and the sky. From glaciers, snow, and rain.

I think there is a benefit to putting your children in a situation where you can imagine them dying. Although they are probably more likely to die on a freeway than the wilderness we have adopted an illusion of safety that prevents us from true appreciation and faith.

In our culture it’s unusual to spend an extended time in close proximity with your children. I’m not talking about hours in the same house. I’m talking days within 20 feet of each other. For 9 days we were staying in a 8 foot tent. It was practically and emotionally uncomfortable. At the end of it all, we came back to a nice house with beds and privacy. We now found our family separated by stairs, doors, and walls. Both Kami and I actually found ourselves missing our children even though we are in the same house. It makes me wonder how many cultural living norms in the first world are an actual advancement for relationships.We had a strange interaction where we met a family that recognized us as “the family from the computer”. They had seen our previous YouTube videos of the trail and said that we were the reason that they were out here. This launched into a talk with our children about how beautiful the gift of true freedom is and how exciting it is to show and share that with other people. True freedom is deep, personal, emotional, spiritual, financial, rare, and contagious.Our culture sees babies as a very cute major practical inconvenience. They are so much more than that. One baby can completely transform an entire trip by unifying a team towards servanthood and providing a re-orientation of what un-hindered joy, curiosity, and discovery are like. Having Filia on our trip did not just add a 7th wheel. It completely changed the depth and enjoyment of the experience for every single member of our family. Leaving her behind would not have made a very permanent difference in her life but it would have for everyone else.

To generalize, there are 2 major way of interpreting the existence of a beautiful mountain range. The first is that it’s a unintentional geological byproduct. The second is that it’s a very personal expression of a God who wants us to more know and understand him and his beauty. If you believe the latter, we should be putting a fair amount of energy and resources towards understanding this God though the expressions that he has given us. This will probably come at the cost of the comfort and technology of our modern word.

For more details about our trip..

You can watch the video on YouTube

 

 

Or you can view our Facebook photo album by clicking on the image.

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July 19, 2012 · 7:28 am

Your “Friends” Are Distracting You

Be relentless in filtering out the channels, and even people, that distract you from the best. There’s a lot of good and entertaining people but very few of them will help you towards the goal of accomplishing what it is that you have uniquely been put on this earth  to do. Many of these channels ask for you to adopt their story. But not in a committed, life changing sense. In an entertaining, debilitating, yet temporarily satisfying sense – the worst kind. Go outside. Delete apps, un-subscribe from people till it hurts. Make your own content and share it with the people that are REALLY close to you.

 

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Filed under Culture, Ideas, People, Rants

September 14, 2011 · 7:59 pm

It doesn’t matter how “good” your idea is.

Once a week I get someone that comes to me and pitches me a brilliant idea. The problem is that it doesn’t matter. Before they start their pitch I know that their idea will not come to fruition. And it’s not because their idea isn’t brilliant. It’s because ANY idea is only one of 10 necessary elements that lead to success.  Here are some of the things that I think are necessary to take a good idea to market:

  • a network of talent for hire
  • a dependable team or partnership with diverse talent
  • personal experience in project management
  • relationships with people in the perspective field
  • experience with technology
  • the ability to sell your product to investors and consumers
  • the ability to get sh*t done Continue reading →

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October 8, 2010 · 8:02 am

Tattoo #10 – Ship with Stars and Clouds

Location on Body: Chest

 

Mark Treas Inspired Art

 

Shop: Mother’s Tattoo in Covington, KY

Time it Took: 8 hours? Who knows? Can’t remember

Cost: $450…I think

This last year was a strange year for our family. We spent 8 out of 12 months doing (for the most part) unplanned travelling. It started with God telling us to go to Portland (where we were for almost 5 months) and ended with us in Cincinnati for about 2 months.  During that time we noticed some things change about our family.

  • We became more and more detached to our house. We lived out of a suitcase and packed light. The question of where  we “lived” took on a level of complication. Every time we would come home from traveling we would fill garbage cans full of things we once considered essential or beneficial to our lives.
  • We depended more and more on faith. Picking up your family of 6 to head to a city with your job, mortgage, and their education up in the air does not fall in the “common sense” category. The more we traveled in obedience in the direction we felt Jesus was leading us the more and more we found stability in faith and the less secure things like income, houses, and other temporal systems became.
  • We became more of a family. When we first set out for Portland by biggest fear was that we would be compromising the benefits of stability that you hear a family needs.  I was prepared to pull the plug the second I felt like our family goals were being threatened. So of course it came as a surprise when the relationships within our family took on more strength and energy than we had ever seen. Continue reading →

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December 15, 2009 · 9:31 pm

Finding Meaning on the Mountain: Thoughts for my friends Katie, Luke, and Anthony.

This past week has been hard for our family.  3 people were found missing on Mount Hood in Oregon. Two of the three were friends of mine that I have climbed with in the past. Of those two that I knew personally one was found dead while one is still missing. In a time where there is so much hurt and confusion, the inability to help seems  unbearable. Upon hearing about the situation, my wife Kami and I instantly thought of driving to Portland or even the mountain. Our goal would be to try and provide support practically and emotionally to friends and the families. Today, I realized I think that my greatest support can be offered in writing my thoughts as a friend and fellow climber of Luke and Katie. This writing is dedicated to the family of Katie, Luke, and Anthony. My hope is that it will provide some comfort and a small respite from the grief you are experiencing.

Katie Nolan and I on the summit of Mount Hood, April 2008 (You can see Mount Saint Helens and Mount Rainier in the background)

This past week I was reading  a book about K2, the “World’s Most Dangerous Mountain”,  by Ed Viesturs. He tells of the “tragedy” that took place in August of 2008 when 13 climbers died in a 36 hour period while attempting to summit the mountain.  More interesting than the actual event was the response of the general public. Continue reading →

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May 14, 2009 · 10:55 am

Fire Roasted Beef Brisket

Two days ago I had a pretty awesome idea for a recipe and wanted to share it with you. I know this isn’t a cooking blog, but hey, it’s a part of my life.  I remember going to this friends house about 5 years ago and hearing how he cooked this flank steak by burying it with coals under the sand overnight. Anyways, it was awesome so I decided to try my own variation. After searching all of the internet for recipes and not finding anything I realized I would have to improvise.

  1. I bought a $30 piece of beef brisket. This may not seem like a lot to you but I almost never buy meat and $30 is a lot for me. It was almost 7 lbs and came with a fancy steak rub that can be seen on the right hand side.

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2. I marinated it for about 6 hours in fresh squeezed lime juice (4 limes) and 10 cloves of garlic. Flip every hour.

img_0491

Continue reading →

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April 16, 2009 · 9:48 am

The 12 Traditions and Church Structure

makutiframeAlmost everyone has heard of the 12 steps. A little lesser known are the 12 traditions. These were designed to preserve the integrity of the meetings and the purpose that they uphold. While the 12 steps focus merely on the content the 12 traditions focus on the structure. I recently read them and asked this question: What would it look like if the church applied the 12 traditions to their model?

Here are a few examples. I replaced CHURCH for A.A. (alcoholics anonymous).

  • Our common welfare should come first; personal growth depends upon CHURCH unity.
  • For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority – a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
  • A CHURCH ought never endorse, finance or lend the CHURCH name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
  • CHURCH should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
  • CHURCH, as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
  • Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

Even after writing this, a part of me cringes at the first reactions of myself and possible others. “Remain nonprofessional”! “Never be organized?” That sounds like chaos. EDIT: The most fascinating thing to me about these principles is that A.A. does not think that any of these structures are evil. The biggest danger is that they are distracting (from their mission.) In fact it would seem that distractions are far more dangerous than overt conflict based upon the protections they have put in place.

I have asked myself these two questions:

  1. What is the purpose for each of these traditions within A.A.?
  2. EDIT: If A.A. Considers these things distractions, how is that the Church is not distracted? Or is it?

Would these things destroy the church, explode the church? What do you think?

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March 26, 2009 · 10:11 am

(the worst movie on) “EARTH” – a movie review

I took my kids to see a screening of the new Disney movie “Earth.”

earthmovie It was miserable. These are the top 3 things that I hated about it.

  1. It was boring. This movie is based upon a 5 disc dvd series that we own called “Planet Earth”. Somehow the producers managed to make the 90 minute movie more boring AND less informative than any one of the 40 minute DVD or even all of them COMBINED!! It’s literally unbelievable.  I can’t figure out  how they did it. You would think that they could just go through the entire DVD series and make the movie a “best of” compilation.  Some how BBC managed to make watching the desert for 40 minutes on DVD entertaining AND informative and somehow Disney managed to make even a 5000 lb great white shark flying out of the water and catching a flying seal seem more drab than soduku. Which is what you’re going to need if you go and see this in the theater.
  2. The soundtrack was insulting. It was like listening to the Anne of Green Gables soundtrack over Terminator 2. Seriously, how many times do you want me to laugh and cry in 90 minutes while watching seagulls and fish all because you raise the volume of your cellos? And having James Earl Jones narrate? Is that really necessary? As if the visual of watching our entire world change through 4 seasons,  over 12,000 miles,  with 2 ton species battling it out for survival isn’t enough; nope we need Darth Vader to dramatize it.  Thanks disney,  until this movie, I had never even noticed a soundtrack in a movie.
  3. It was confusing. Polar bears in the snow, elephants walking through the desert, whales swimming, polar bears in the ice water, elephants walking through the desert, whales swimming, polar bears dying, elephants swimming, whales….still swimming for twwoooooooo hoooouuuuuurrrrss.  It wasn’t until I re-watched the preview after I watched the movie that I realized that there was supposed to be a point to all of that. picture-13The “story ” (and subtitle) is “The Remarkable Story of Three Families and their Journey across our Planet. “ I hate to keep on doing this, because I don’t consider myself some foreign film snob, but when the BBC told the same story of each of these “families” it took 5 minutes. Somehow, Disney managed to stretch it out to 90! It was the characters of Lion King, with the plot line from Magnolia, with the intensity and length of Chariots of Fire.  Maybe they thought watching animals mating,  ripping each other to shreds, and going to the most exotic places on our planet wasn’t enough. It’s like a reality version of the incredible Journey except that the Incredible journey was actually an Incredible movie. incredible-journey


Here is a trailer I made on what the movie “earth” is really like.

To verify that the soundtrack used is the actual soundtrack from the original trailer click here.

So why all the ranting on a Disney Movie?

Here’s the deal. The reason why this movie was such a tradgedy is because the actual BBC series called “Planet Earth” was so mind-blowing incredible. It’s the only DVD that I have ever purchased in my entire life. Sooooo…instead of going to the theatre and blowing $8 a ticket, go to blockbuster and rent the first disc and watch the episode”From Pole to Pole”, or better yet, borrow it from me. The footage is insane and the narration is really captivating. The have a whole episode on caves and another one on the desert and they are super informative and entertaining.

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Filed under Rants, Video

March 5, 2009 · 10:41 am

On Humility and Recovery

“You can’t save your a** while you’re trying to save your face.”

- Todd

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Filed under 12 Steps