They must have been on the Pineapple Express

They must have been on the Pineapple Express when they shot the movie Pineapple Express. In one scene Seth Rogen’s girlfriend, who is in high school, and her family are in a motel room hiding from the drug dealers. There is a whole scene where she fights with her parents and then with Seth Rogen and on the TV in the background is the UFC fight between Chuck Liddell and Rashad Evans. Why in the hell would that be on in a hotel room with a high school girl and her parents. I can’t imagine any situation when a high school girl and her parents are sharing a motel room and are flipping through the channels and stop on UFC Unleashed and think, “this is a good show to watch as a family”. The crew that shot that scene must have been high and watching the fight and then when they went to shoot the scene, they were so high they forgot to change the channel on the TV.

Horse Wrecks

I adventured out into the night on Thursday to get to work on my Christmas shopping. As I drove through Burbank, navigating the traffic, it hit me how crazy driving in a crowded city is. We have rules and laws that we have all accepted and follow, we drive on the right side of the road, we go on green, yield on yellow, stop on red, and so on and so forth. Millions of people just inching along following the rules and sometimes people make mistakes and crash into each other. How my brain made the jump to this next thought is beyond me but here it goes. I started to think about the Wild West when everyone rode horses. There were no lanes, no traffic signals, no right of way rules; everyone just went where they wanted. Do you think people ever got into horse wrecks? For example a guy is riding through Tombstone on his horse and he sees a hot girl and isn’t watching where he is going and he t-bones another guy on a horse. What happened then, did they exchange information, did they call the sheriff, and was the guy at fault responsible for paying the vet bill for the damages done to the other horse? These questions all have answers that are useless information but information I wonder about nonetheless.

40 is my magic number

I have found that when anything costs $40 or less it’s easy for me to say, "it's only forty bucks (or whatever the price is)". Anything over that I can't really blow off, it's decision time, do I really need this. I sometimes wonder how much you have to make a year to be able to say, "it's only a hundred bucks" or "it's only a thousand bucks". Can you imagine having the type of money where you could say, "it's only a million bucks"!?

Don't text and walk

It is illegal in California to text while driving; it should also be illegal to text and walk. On my way to work yesterday I approached an intersection where I would be making a right turn. There was a woman standing on the corner texting, the light hand been green for a few moments and she wasn’t crossing the street so I proceed to make the turn. Just then she looks up from her phone, sees its green, steps off the curb, and goes right back to texting while crossing the street. I hit the brakes hard and swerved to avoid running her over. The amazing thing was that she never even noticed that she just almost died, she was so focused on her phone that the rest of the world ceased to exist.

Don’t text while walking.... the life you save just might be mine, can you imagine the guilt I would have felt had I run her over!?

World's Greatest Dad

I just finished reading Jens Pulver’s autobiography Little Evil. Jens was the first ever UFC Lightweight Champion. In the first chapter Jens tells the story of being 7 years old and having his drunk, abusive, father line him and his two younger brothers up in the living room, while they stood there he went into the other room and rummaged through a closet until he found a shotgun. When he returned he put the barrel of the gun in Jens’ 7 year-old mouth and said that he was going to kill them all. I have always known that I have probably the greatest dad on this planet, but reading those words and thinking back to when I was 7 and my dad was the world to me, I stopped for a moment and just soaked in how lucky I am.

My dad is and always will be my hero. There has never been a moment in my life when I needed him and he wasn’t there. My childhood memories are filled with images of my dad coaching my baseball teams, my soccer teams, my basketball teams, teaching me to work on cars, do home repairs, and to play golf. My dad would work 10-12 hour days and still make sure he was home in time to pick me up and take me to practice, sometimes there wasn’t time enough for him to change out of his work clothes. Not only was he taking me to practice but also he was there to coach. He wasn’t getting paid to coach, most of the time he was never even asked to coach, he was just always there and the next thing you knew he was on the field helping out and then he was one of the coaches. I never had one of those moments when I looked for him in the stands and he wasn't there because he was right there in the dugout or on the sideline.

I have always been close with my dad and in recent years have probably become closer to him than I have ever been. I have lived my life by the motto, “If I am just half the man he is I am doing pretty good”. Everything I am as a man is based on what I learned from him, whether directly or just by watching him and what he does. He truly is something special and I hope I have made him proud.