Steph got me this killer Nokona baseball glove for Father's Day. It's quickly become one of my all-time favorite things. It's not so much the glove itself, but the idea of playing catch with Sonny in the years to come. I'm already wearing it as I pitch him Nerf balls inside the house. He'll bring me a Nerf ball and tell me to get my glove. He loves baseball. One day, I will take him to the factory in Texas, and we'll pick out his glove together. How can you not be romantic about baseball?

***a string of random life updates***

Fourth of July in Oregon

Steph in the iconic ASICS Gel Kayano 14  

"USA USA USA!"
Great photo of Sonny by Nic

Ask any local who makes the best drinks in town, and they will all say the "Screw and Brew." It is the only place where you can get a cocktail while you shop for new tools – very Oregon.

Stephanie Inn at Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon

Spent the entire week in my father-in-law's huge Dodge Ram truck blasting Toby Keith. Left the trip wanting a bigger car – now seriously considering the Z71 Tahoe.

The older I get, the more deeply I appreciate time spent with family. It's such a blessing to be able to go home and share a holiday.

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you

Father's Day 2025. We went to the Broadmoor. Ate donuts. Fought dinosaurs. Your favorite color is purple. You have a walrus named "Wally" and a seal named "Sealy" that we play with at bath time. You tell everyone your name is "Butch." Tonight you asked me how snakes poop. I love you.

One day, I will have an immaculately organized, clean garage.

It's funny as you get older, the things you start to notice and appreciate more... like sealed garage flooring. This is the final frontier of adulthood. The rest of the home is so nice and dialed in that sealing your garage is all that is left. I really look forward to this stage of my life.

My garage is an absolute DISASTER. Embarrassingly so. It's basically one big storage unit. I avoid it at all costs.

I look forward to walking out into my garage one day — it smells clean, no dust, everything is organized — I look down at the floor and it’s just shining back at me, quietly saying, “you’ve made it… you can rest now.”

New Bon Iver

Each Bon Iver album has seemed to arrive at very distinct moments in my life. The sound always found a way to meet me where I was.

That's probably the case with all art, but for me, Bon Iver has been a profoundly meaningful backdrop to so much of my life, through many changes. We've seen him 3 times in concert. Steph walked down the aisle to Beach Baby. Sonny was listening to Beth/Rest while he was still in the womb.

All that to say, we are long-time Bon Iver fans. So I've been very excited for the new album.

First listen through, and I think there are some reeeeeeeaaaalllly good songs – some that take you back to the early Bon Iver (reminding everyone how and why he became so insanely famous). Songs like SPEYSIDE – VERY GOOD. Sounds like For Emma Forever Ago era Bon Iver – super minimal, acoustic, with hauntingly sad lyrics (what a waste of wood). 

But there is one track that really stands out. AWARDS SEASON. This song, for me, is maybe the most touching song he's ever written. Feels like a letter from God or a prayer I said to myself in some past season of life.

‘I can handle. Way more than I can handle. So I keep reaching for the handle. To flood my heart.…

Oh how everything can change. In such a small timeframe. You can be remade. You can live again.

What was pain now is gain. A new path gets laid.

And you know what is great.

And nothing stays the same.’

🎶 Listen to AWARDS SEASON

Nintendo Nostalgia

There’s something deeply satisfying about clicking an old Nintendo cartridge into place – it's like ASMR for kids who grew up before the internet. Sadly, that  tactile ka-chunk has been lost when gaming moved online. Today, like everything, gaming is digital, online, and endless. There are no cartridges, manual inserts, or downloads and microtransactions. It's cool to buy a game instantly, but we lost some magic in the convenience. 

Lately, I’ve been chasing that old console feeling—a specific kind of nostalgia wrapped in chunky plastic shells, from the SNES to the N64.

I've been having some truly bizarre dreams. To be fair, the whole house is sick, and my go-to survival strategy involves unhealthy doses of NyQuil (If I ever drop a mix-tape my rapper name would be Lil' Quil). But let me tell you—whatever sorcery Dextromethorphan (DXM) is working, it’s cranking out the kind of hyper-real dreams that linger.

 

The most vivid one yet... In this dream, someone was explaining to me—very matter-of-factly—that theatres exist because they create the ideal conditions for transporting people to other dimensions via sound and visual stimuli.

Then, I'm sitting in this dark theatre and hear a male narrator introduce "the process" before these binaural sounds begin playing over the speakers. The screen is completely black, but I become transfixed, staring blankly into this black void as these tones play. Suddenly, the exact point I’m fixated on stretches, like it's being pulled away from me, and the whole room starts expanding at warp speed. I sit in this state for 10-20 minutes, almost as if I recognize some meditative benefit to it all. I then get up, walk out of this theatre setting, and into a long hallway where I encounter a staff member of whatever building I am in – they are clearly surprised that I was in the theatre – I walk down the hall further and exit through a museum and wake up completely confused.

That's it. Just needed to document this weird dream.

St. Regis Punta Mita

A Week in Madrid

Steamboat, Colorado

Nasdaq Tower

I had a big week in New York for work. 

I think moments like this make startup work super rewarding.

In bigger companies, you don't have the freedom to build stuff the same way. A larger, more established company would have never let me put a 20-foot skeleton shooting lasers out of its eyes on the Nasdaq tower.