Today’s training was great, but at the end I was ready to head off to my room to chill.  My brain was full and there were too many ideas rolling around to even begin to think about anything else.  I figured I’d go back up, slip into pajamas, relax and be asleep by 8pm.  Sounds both old and glorious at the same time, doesn’t it?

As it worked out there was an opportunity to hang out with an old friend of mine  We figured we’d go out of a beer, shoot the shit, and call it a night.  Nothing crazy, we were both in the same mindset of calling it an early one.  Next thing we knew a few hours had passed by and we’d had a great time catching up and shooting the bull.

Sure, we talked about business, that’s what we’re both here for, but it was more than that.  We also talked family, life goals, values, parents, and spirituality.  We were able to bond on many fronts and it was great bonding with an old friend.

Funny thing is that I had written a blog about being thankful for him a year and a half ago after he sacrificed a day to help me out.  ( see Day 137 ).  Spending time with him again was a great reminder for me of both how far I’d come since the last time we’d had a good chunk of time together and also how much his one day had influenced me.  As I think back to that previous conversation I can’t help but smile as I realize just what an impact that talk had on me and how it helped get me to a very good place.  Had it not been for his unbiased insight things may have been very different.

Throw in some talking tonight about my dad and reminders of some of the incredible gifts that Dad gave me and it was a pretty great night of conversation with Jeff again.  It’s funny how stepping out of the craziness of day to day life has led us to some fantastic bonding time.  We’ll have several opportunities for conversation over the next several days, I’m sincerely looking forward to them!

Thanks!!!

One of the things I look forward to with camping with the Thums Clan each year starts on Saturday morning.  As the boys wake up they slowly exit the tent and Becky and I get to sleep in a bit.  After a little while we start to stir, stretch out, get dressed, and head out for a run.  This year followed the standard pattern. 

Staying at a new campground this year we quickly realized that there were some nice trails to run so we quickly got off the pavement and enjoyed running on dirt, mud, and grass.  There’s something peaceful about running in the wild like that, so quiet and free of stress.  As Becky and I kept going we were reminded of past training runs and races and had fun thinking back to each.  It was very relaxing.
Running with Becky is always nice, but today it felt even better thanks to getting off the road and on the trails.   It also helped me think forward about when the kids are grown up and we’re traveling more…  wake up on any day, not just a Saturday, and find a trail nearby the place we’re staying.  Ahh…  I love times like this when I’m able to simultaneously enjoy the present and the thought of the future…  all from one simple trail run with Becky.

Thanks!!!

The whirlwind weekend is here and we picked up Dominic in a car that had just enough room left for him and his scouting gear…  Dominic just wrapped up his week of scouting and was pretty pumped to share the experience with us.  

He had fun dumping his rowboat as a part of his merit badge.  The crafting counselor reminded him of Grandpa Pete and he enjoyed making several leather items.  One night they got to fly in a small airplane as a part of their Aviation merit badge.  Last night he slept in a shelter that he and some fellow scouts build themselves for Wilderness Survival.  They enjoyed the counsellors’ skits.  He climbed the climbing wall, all four sides of it.  The kid is crazy tan, covered in big bites, over tired, and smiling huge!

Over the past couple of days I’ve had a memory that’s kept popping back in my head.  My dad picked me up one year from Camp Tesomas.  I’m not sure why, but I remember it was right as Iraq invaded Kuwait and Dad and I talked about that for a while.  The majority of the conversation was focused on my camping adventures and he just smiled as I shared all the stories.

As a dad I’m now smiling as Dominic tells us about all of the fun he had.  I’m also understanding that there was another reason he was smiling so big…  Each story I shared queued up old memories of his fun times at camp, just as Dominic’s stories are doing for me.  What an incredible gift to see my son so happy, and, at the exact same time, smile inside remembering scouting stories I hadn’t thought of for a very long time.

I know Dad is smiling somewhere with us as he hears all the stories too, and I’m sure he’s smiling about his own stories too.

Thanks for sharing all of the scouting adventures you had his week Dominic, I hope that you remember them as your kids share their adventures with you!

Thanks!!!

Over the past 30 hours or so I’ve had the opportunity to meet with each of my teams to discuss the successes of the first half of the year and decide what we want to improve for the second half of the year.  Now that they’re all wrapped up I’m still super proud of all of their accomplishments in the first six months of the year, they’ve busted their butts and seen excellent results.

When I was growing up I always envisioned business owners being these super uptight and very professional people.  The views I had f them never quite lined up with the way I saw myself and that led to self-consciousness about my own ability to fill those roles.

What I am so thankful for today is that I am completely comfortable being myself with my teams.  I don’t have to put on a front and be something that I’m not.  I can be relaxed, funny, driven, focused, inappropriate, frustrated, opinionated, loving, compassionate, big hearted, happy, sad, independent, ornery, micromanaging, under managing, professional, unprofessional, and pretty much everything in between.  Just like family they take me for who I am.  I give them a hard time, they give me a hard time, but at the end of the day we’re one team and have great respect for each other.

I can’t begin to say how liberating it is to just be me with them, it is something I’m incredibly grateful for.  Thank you to each and everyone of my teammates for taking me as I am and helping to coach me in those many moments when I need it!

Thanks!!!

Each day there’s a point in the day that I get a broad smile of satisfaction knowing that I’ve found it, the thing that I’m thankful for.  The topic of my blog.  It’s crossed my bow, I’ve recognized it, and in the back of my head I’m already starting to write the post.

Today I had found that moment, an event that touched my soul very profoundly.  Later in the day there was another great moment of revelation.  Sometime shortly after that there was another moment.  I started to panic a bit, which was I going to choose?  And that’s when it happened…

As I ended a call and went to set my iPhone down it vibrated and alerted me to a voicemail that had come through while I was on the phone.  While looking at the voicemail screen I smiled and an idea crossed my mind.  Feverishly searching my deleted voicemails I found what I was looking for…  Two voicemails from Dad.

Hearing his voicemail immediately brought happy tears to my cheeks.  I’ve tried typing what else to say and deleted it four times already, so let me put it this way…  Hearing that voice again was music for my soul.

If you’d like hear his voice again you’ll find the recording below.

Today was filled with many wonderful gifts, I’m thankful for so much today that my heart is full.  Thank you to all of you!!!

Thanks!!!

Whew…  That title is a mouthful, isn’t it?  The funny thing is that this is what I started typing yesterday, but it just didn’t feel right.  I wanted to let it ferment and have the right words bubble up to the surface to do justice to this topic…  or these topics…  they’re all pretty much tied and interlinked like the roots of closely packed trees, all stemming from the same place.

As my dad’s passing slowly drifts further and further into the rearview I’m coming more and more to grips with “my new dad.”  The Dad I’ve known my entire life was real, physical, tangible…  The Dad I know now is a ghost of sorts.  Don’t worry, I’m not going off the deep end and seeing crazy things, it’s nothing supernatural like that.  I can feel his presence more than I could in the past.  More than ever I’m hearing his voice in my head, I’m remembering great times we had, and having random thoughts about him pop into my head.  I’m talking with him just as much or more than I used to, still asking him to help, asking him for advice, and joking with him.  I can’t hear his laughter and voice with my ears, but I can feel it in my heart.  There would be almost anything I would give to have the original version back, but I’m getting more and more okay with this new dad…  Which leads me to the other “new Father.”

Our church’s new associate priest gave his first 9am Sunday mass yesterday and before the service even began I knew we had a winner!  In a pre-mass sound check he had many of us smiling and laughing, a sign of what was to come.  We’ve had many excellent priests over the decade and a half that I’ve been going to our church, but there’s just something about Father Matt that I was able to instantly connect with.  An incredibly genuine, upbeat, humorous, insightful, and energetic person with a strong passion for helping people, he did an incredible job of winning our congregation over in no time.  I’m very pumped and excited for our new Father!

In his homily he shared the contrast of what many of us want to be as men and what Jesus calls us to be.  He started off by discussing the painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich.  In this painting the wanderer is alone, independent, ready to head in any direction they choose.   We can’t see the face – is there a look of excitement, contentment, nervousness, fear, thought, remorse, or satisfaction?  We’ll never know for sure, but I do know that I love this painting, me alone, me against the world, me taking something on alone…  The sweet elixir of independence.  A blessing and a curse depending on how it’s used.

Father Matt then contrasted it with Matthew 11:28-30 – “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.   For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  The historical version of the yoke Jesus is referring to is a harness made for two, a spot for Him and a spot for each of us.  Learn from Him, be like Him, let Him help you shoulder your load.  What a contrast to the painting, right  As opposed to living the hard way and carrying our weight alone why not let Jesus be there to help us with our burden?

As he shared the message my thoughts went to two different but very similar places.

First, bearing the weight of losing Dad has been helped by how he’s right next to me in the yoke of my life.  Knowing that he is always with me brings me happiness and eases the incredible tough load of knowing that Dad is gone.  It was specifically because of his homily that I realized just how thankful I am to have my “new dad” in my life.  The thought of his presence helps me daily.

The other thought in my head brought a smile to my face…  It was a beautiful reminder of my blog post from about a month earlier Day 255 – Thankful for Letting Go of the Wheel.  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I realized he was helping me out with a similar message to the one that I started to learn that day.  It was also sobering to think of how I’d already started to stray from that thought process.  I really hope the Big Guy Upstairs keeps sprinkling these reminders into my life, this seems to be a lesson that is going to take me a little while to really and truly get.

Whew…  That was a long one!  While I’m thankful for many things today, new fathers, an excellent homily, and a reminder to let go of the wheel…  let me throw out one more thing that I am thankful for today.  I’m thankful for learning from my blog post from yesterday.  Instead of just firing off a half cocked blog post last night on this topic I knew I needed to take a deep breath, make sure it still resonated today, and do it the justice it deserved.

Thanks!!!

After my mom left this afternoon I started knocking off some of the tasks that have been slowly piling up on my To Do list at home.  One of them was to bust out the trimmer and cut down the tall grass that was starting to build up along our fence in the backyard.

As I started making some headway on the weeds part of the weed whacker fell completely off.  The engine was still running, but the cutting attachment, the bolts holding the attachment, and the cable that connects the attachment to the rest of the motor were laying next to it in a pile.  It was pretty frustrating, all I wanted to do was to check this off the list, but it all fell apart.

I took a deep breath and tried to figure out how to make it all work.  Examining all of the pieces I started the process of figuring out how everything fit together.  After a while it all came into view and I was able to reassemble the broken trimmer.

Back in business I fired it up and went back at it.  After making some pretty solid progress there was a loud noise and it all fell apart again.  Almost the same issue as before, and I was far from done.  If I thought I was frustrated before, I was beyond frustrated now.

Taking another deep breath I scooped up the parts and went back to the drawing board.  It took everything in my power to continue to look at this as a learning moment.  Inspecting the wreckage I was able to figure out where I’d gone wrong and a quick trip to Menards helped me get the new parts I needed.

After a short period of time I got it back up and running and was able to finish up the weed whacking.  It was frustrating and took a lot longer than expected, but I got it done…  and learned a lot in the process!

Thanks!!!