Lucky Me.

 

Lucky me.

It only cost $25 this time. And three hours of my life I won’t get back.

Every spring, the house reminds me who’s boss.

A new broken pipe. Or two. Sometimes more. Always outdoors.

The indoor plumbing is mostly civil.

The yard, though?

It’s a calamitous, confounding, concatenation of shallow-buried pipes laid like a drunken game of Tetris over decades.

The frost heaves the ground.

The ground breaks the pipes.

The pipes break my resolve.

Back in winter, one line froze and started gushing.

I ran to shut off the main outdoor valve—just in time.

The valve stem sheared off as I turned it.

Good thing it happened after I got it closed.

If it hadn’t, this post would be about a flood.

I left it like that for months. Let the problem hibernate. It was too cold anyway. The ground was frozen.

Now that the frosts are gone, I went out to assess the damage.

I thought I’d be digging deep, replacing the whole mess.

But somehow—miraculously—I managed a workaround.

New tool. Bit of pipe.

And now the valve turns on and off slowly, and with some trepidation. And that's good enough for me.

For now, anyway.

Lattes & Loitering, Episode 52: A New Book (with a twist)

It started, as these things often do, with a book.

Not a new book, exactly—just new to me. One of those titles that practically taps you on the shoulder from across the digital aisle:

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.

Catchy, right?

Enough to make me hover over the “Buy Now” button for a moment.

But then I pictured it—the sorting facility, the barcode scanner, the box making its journey across three states and four highways just so I could sit in a café and feel slightly more emotionally fortified. And I thought: maybe not.

So I let the AI do the lifting.

In a few minutes, I had a clean, thoughtful summary. A clickable mind map. A podcast voiced by two eerily calm digital humans, swapping insights over a topic they technically can’t feel.

And honestly?

It was enough.

I didn’t burn any fuel. I didn’t wait three days. I didn’t add another object to the great domestic archive of unread personal development literature.

I got what I came for. And then I lingered.

Because sometimes strength isn’t about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about knowing when not to.

And loitering with a latte, apparently, still makes the cut.

Here's some clickable stuff:

• PDF summary 

• Simulated podcast

Mind map of '13 Things'

Oh, and speaking of loitering:

Red Hats, Cold Feet

Meet MAGA Mick

Something new is brewing.




I’ve started work on an animated cartoon—limited animation, to be honest. We’re talking slow blinks, head tilts, awkward shuffles. The kind of movement that mirrors the mental gymnastics of a man caught in a moral midlife crisis.




His name is MAGA Mick.




He’s a dyed-in-the-flannel Republican. Trump voter. Used to shout at the TV. Used to own more flags than shirts. But now… something’s shifting. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But enough that you can see it in his eyes.




The man’s starting to wonder.




The cartoon is satire, yes—but it’s not a hit job. It’s a portrait. It's short and punchy. A study in contradiction. A bit of absurdity laced with humanity, because that’s the most honest way I know to explore what’s happening in the bones of this country.




Mick is fictional. But his story? It’s everywhere.




The project will grow slowly, the way real doubt does. A still photo is the one above. No voices or narration, just a lot of cards that, one after the other, probe the unsettling issues gnawing at Mick. This is my attempt to speak to a fracture in our collective story using the only tools I’ve got: humor, pixels, and a deep love for asking inconvenient questions.

Shrek Rehearsal Continues Apace

Getting there. We're about a month away from the premiere.