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We’re out in California for a family vacation before my life gets substantially more complicated later this week when I start grad school again.  We forgot our cell phone chargers, so I am powering-up my phone at the Verizon store while I sip coffee here at Starbucks.

I’m just going to write. Let’s see what happens.

• I have a hard time stomaching hipster music. For ten years I’ve read a gazillion music reviews of indie bands and I’ve tracked down the most promising bands. After a few listens online, I can’t find the fortitude to keep listening. It seems to me that the gushing fans that surround a lot of these hipster bands are often so in love with the image of the band that they somehow overlook the fact that their songs kinda suck. What good is a song if it’s not catchy?  But what they play here at Starbucks is different enough to be unfit for popular radio, but it’s still pleasant to my ears.
• Trucker Hats. They’ve lasted a lot longer than I would’ve imagined. When I filmed the Road Rules Challenge in 2003, I wasn’t sure if I should wear one because I might look behind the times. Here we are seven years later, and people still like them and they look cool wearing them. The guy sitting on the other side of the window on the patio is perfectly confident rocking his trucker hat. By my rough estimation, they’ve been cool now longer than they used to be uncool/whitetrash.
• Cargo Shorts. I’ve read no less than a dozen fashion experts proclaim that cargo shorts are out dated. Unfortunately, those declarations were all made over a course of the last 15 years. So apparently they were all wrong. Have you ever actually gone to a store and try to buy regular khaki shorts? It’s harder than you think. Me? I don’t like cargos because they’re too hot and floppy. Yet I still wear them.
• Flip Flops. There are a lot of pretentious fashion editors that despise casual footwear. I share their concern that people wear flip flops to way too many places–weddings, funerals, baptisms—but you will lose credibility if you wholly dismiss flip flops all together. Why? Because they’re casual, affordable, and freeing. That’s why bazillions of people wear them around the world. I’m one of them and I like it.
• Classic Cars: My father-in-law asked me what I imagine car collectors will look like in another 20 years. Who will they be and what will they be collecting? This paragraph could turn into a book, so I’ll keep this quick. There will never again be a car culture that we saw between 1944 and 1972. That was a rare time in America with a “youth culture” was formed and shared amongst Baby Boomers through some very good years for cars: hot rods, 1950s Mercys and Chevys, and of course the late 1960s Pony Cars & Muscle Cars. I know this because I’ve been to many car auctions, and all I see is a bunch of aging Baby Boomers trying to recapture their youth. By the time any of my generation gets super-loaded with cash, I doubt we’ll be fighting over a Hemi Cuda that was first enjoyed before our birth. Dudes will always like cars and try to collect them, but it’s not going to be as focused on a handful of American cars. It’s going to be more niche: Classic VWs, Kustoms / Sleds, Rat Rods, New Muscle Cars, Donks, Trucks, Vintage Luxury German, Supercars, etc.
• In two months I will be holding a newborn girl. Becoming a dad has been the most defining experience of my life. Although it’s hard being a parent, I’ve yet to find a life experience that’s as rewarding and affirming as parenthood. I’m eager to see Norah interact with a little sister. Norah has a lot of love. She takes care of her baby dolls like you would not believe. Whenever she can’t find one of them, she’s an absolute mess. Every Sunday at Mass, Norah looks up a the crucifix and opens her arms wide and says, “hug me.”  There’s just so much love beaming out of that 2-year old.
• There are many adults who work at this Starbucks. Seriously, I’ve seen several well put together people in their 30s serve coffee here this afternoon.
• Mom blogs. Candyce is addicted to blogs run by hip housewives and mothers.  Every time I get on the computer, I see a dozen open tabs in the browser, each featuring a different beautiful mom writing about her life experiences. After a year of this, it’s become easy for me to believe that moms rule the Internet.
• Twilight. I don’t care about these movies at all. Perhaps I’ve reached that point of adulthood where I am not expected to understand why these movies are popular. I suppose I could watch them and see what the fuss is all about, but again, I don’t care about these movies at all.
• Amusement. Last weekend I rode roller coasters in San Antonio and then played in a water park in Phoenix. Lots of fun. I will say that 1 out of every 5 adults at the resort’s water park had a tattoo. The wave pool looked like a flooded biker rally.

Alright, my coffee is all sipped-up. Time to pick up my phone and ride my bike home.

We just got back from a 5-day trip to Houston, Texas. I had two responsibilities when I was there: speaking at the Archdiocesan Youth Conference in downtown Houston and then filming in The Woodlands out in the ‘burbs.

Highlights from the trip:

1. The Hotel. Our view of the Houston Skyline from the Hilton was gorgeous. Other perks were the top floor pool and complimentary car service. Across the street was a beautiful city park called Discovery Green where Norah could be entertained by the splash pads and the mega-playground. Plus we ate at the park’s two Dwell-like restaurants: The Grove and The Lake House.
2. Downtown Living. It was fun to explore the city to see what it would be like to live there. We did the whole deal: museums, cafes, shops, and parks. You can see from the photos below that it’s a beautiful downtown that feels older than most people would have guessed. Like many Western cities, unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of residents downtown. Lots of buildings, not many people.
3. Norah speaks. Norah’s vocabulary and enunciation seems to have improved in the past couple of weeks. She now calls me Dah-Deee! instead of Dah-Dah. She now refers to herself as Nah-Nah whenever she needs something. Every time the train passed by us in downtown Houston, Norah would tap her chest with her little hand and say Nah-Nah to let us know that she really wanted to ride the train. It’s adorable. Another cute one: hmmm has become shyesh (yes). These little words just fill me with joy like you can’t even imagine.
4. Lovely Woodlands. Seriously, if you have to plan a suburb, do it like The Woodlands. All big retail stores and their parking lots are hidden from the main streets with a 100-foot deep band of forest. Signs are low to the ground and not tacky. Plus they have a newly built downtown that should have been featured in my previous blog series called Suburban Shopping that Doesn’t Suck. (Read it: Part 1, 2, and 3.) I could go on about the details, but the end result is a suburb that doesn’t feel like a generic suburb. It feels like a charming forest.

Right now I am at the courthouse in downtown Phoenix because I’ve been summoned for jury duty. I’ve postponed this whole deal three times now because of big responsibilities with school, family, and work. But now it’s my time to come and do my duty. So far, I’ve just checked in and nobody has spoken to me since. I’m glad I brought my laptop so I can distract myself from the celebrity gossip that’s booming out of the television that’s strapped to the wall.

Here are photos from the trip:

It’s been an awesome few weeks: first Palm Beach, then Covecrest, then Hiawassee, then Carlsbad. Now we’re back in Phoenix. Here’s photos from the past week in Carlsbad.

Here are some of my favorite photos from our week here at home with my parents.

It’s been almost two years since the Financial Crisis began here in America. I’ve been thinking about how this massive shift in our economy and job market has impacted my life. It’s not something you’re aware of at the time, but the Financial Crisis made an impact on my life in many different ways.

The most obvious is that I chose to enroll in graduate school to earn my MBA. I know it’s cliché, but when the economy takes a plunge, people go back to school because there is not much room for growth in the job market. Or because it’s not clear whether or not their company will be strong enough to endure the recession.  Although both of these fears rattled around in my head, the primary reason I went back to school was because I wanted to get a graduate degree before my family got any larger. I had flirted with the idea two years prior, but it was more important to focus on wedding, a new marriage, a baby…

The Crisis had impact other parts of my life as well. The story isn’t over yet, but one could guess that it’s been difficult for me and everyone else was invested in land, houses, or buildings. I don’t have enough time or humility to write any more about it, but I will say that I had to redirect my creativity and passion for building into new things.

I focused intensely on building Life Teen into a better organization through innovative websites that served as tools for our staff. Plus I tried to improve my level of professionalism, time management, and to improve the projects where I collaborated with other teams. Of course, these were not new priorities to me, but how I did it changed—I invested all of my creativity and passion because it had nowhere else to go.

Finally, I focused more on my relationships, particularly with Candyce and Norah. I know this should be an obvious choice for a husband and father, but it’s easy to be distracted by the “projects of life” and miss those golden moments with my family. A product of this refocusing on the family was Candyce and I starting a small ministry for newlywed couples. We figured that we weren’t the only couple to struggle in our first year of marriage, so we decided to do what we could to help younger couples through the challenges of early marriage. So far we’ve worked with four couples and it’s been terrific. Again, this is a different type of building and investing for me.

In the end, I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from the Financial Crisis is that success is not the guaranteed outcome of hardworking people. Plus once you have success, it’s not permanent. I guess the good news is that the inverse is also not guaranteed: that hardworking people can achieve success, and that depression is not permanent. Regardless of how you look at it, I’m not going to reduce life to a series of investments. Life is too good to be wasted obsessing over money.