Kids are Savage

Toddler: “Mom, Mom! I want to tell you a joke!” My wife: “Okay, honey, what’s the joke?” Toddler: “Dad!” Me:

Layoffs and Leadership

TL;DR: If you can’t trust your employees with 24 hours’ access to email to say their goodbyes after you let them know they’re being laid off, you have a major problem with your hiring, firing, and/or internal communications. In the first season of Game of Thrones, we get an immediate sense of Ned Stark’s basic…

Career Move: Dad

I have just made both the scariest and, I believe, best decision of my professional life. My wife just returned to the workforce after having parented our daughter full-time since her birth in 2020. Our daughter is enrolled in half-time daycare, so for the immediate future, at least, I am taking care of her from…

Shameless Plug: Ithaca Shakespeare 2022

The Ithaca Shakespeare company has been performing outdoor summer theater for 20 years, and I’ve been fortunate to be a part of it for many of them. First, through friends (and students) of mine who choreographed their fights beginning around 2006, and more recently, choreographing, training their actors, and occasionally performing since 2016. Community theater…

How I Think About Risk: Insurance

I recently decided to purchase more life insurance. We are a single-income household, and while my wife could go back to work in the event of something horrific happening to me, I wanted to make sure that she and our daughter would have ample time to grieve and decide what made sense for them. I…

Tensions Between Freedoms

America is the “Land of Liberty,” and we hear “freedom” invoked for nearly every political position or campaign imaginable. But there are three “freedoms” (or rights, if you prefer) discussed in our founding documents that exist in inherent tension with each other. These are: the freedom from fear of one’s safety (or the “right to…

Haiku Break

Heron overheadLarger than the branch it’s onUnafraid to fall. Branches for the nestBrought back from some other woodsPerfect at their role.

Agnes of Concumbria: A Fairy Tale

The kingdom of Concumbria was a small but happy one, blessed with beautiful waterfalls, hikable mountains, and soil that grew the most exquisite flowers of all varieties. Its people prospered from the cultivation and sale of exotic plants, and the kingdom thrived for many years, until the monks of the Camellian order set up their…

The Path to Sainthood

There are three different ways to become a saint, each indicating something different about the individual involved. If the purpose of reading saints’ lives is to be inspired to live well and become a better person, some of these paths are more applicable to a modern context (at least in America) than others. First, there…