My Main Squeeze

The First Lady and I are still going strong – nearly thirteen years into this marriage thing now. In the past year, we became debt-free (thanks Dave Ramsey!), bought a house (thanks GNND program!), and had some other cool stuff happen.

As far as unions go, ours had been fairly uneventful and void of earth-shattering events.

Until last week.

My eat-mostly-healthy-runner wife had a spinal infarction – fancy talk for a stroke in her spinal cord. Five days in the hospital and continued numbness and tingling in her legs have given us our first major medical problem. Even though she seems to be recovering quite rapidly, we’re still humbled and grateful that she is recovering.

The facts say that there is a good chance of full recovery. Reality says that not all situations follow that prognosis. If in fact this is our new normal, we’ll make the adjustments needed and go with it. As my dear wife has been telling everyone from our two year old to our nurses, “God’s got this.”

This possibly-new-normal isn’t easy. But just as I decided to eat some chocolate ice cream right now, we have to decide to stick it out.

In the hospital, my wife kept saying, “Thank you for being here.”

Where else would I be?

What’s the State of Your Union?

~Brian

But…we DO have lions roaming around. One of the biggest “lions” is naked women.

The Lion’s Den is a perfect name for a porn shop. Lion’s Den Adult Superstores had 38 locations as of 2009 in the United States (so says this article). Almost all of them are located along interstates. Men drive on interstates. Men are prone to like looking at women. It makes good business sense to put porn shops on interstates where men who like to look at women drive by.

If you’ve seen The Ghost and the Darkness you saw the fear that a prowling lion can strike in a human’s heart. You probably don’t want to see a lion because they are relatively scary and fierce.

So how is it that we miss THE lion who plans on killing us? He’s a sneaky devil. Oh wait, he IS the devil.

The problem is that the nasty porn lion is everywhere, not just lonely truck stops. Billboards, bookstores, grocery-store checkouts, hotel pay-per-views, the mall. It’s hard to look anywhere and not see cleavage and leg. When you’re married or want to be married, cleavage and leg that aren’t your wife’s aren’t good for you.

Peter wrote “Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” Devouring is serious stuff. It’s not taste-testing.

If you’re a man, this is what porn does to you. You can’t taste-test porn or near-porn and come away unscathed. IT WILL KILL YOU! (And I don’t give a care about someone’s “rights” to be naked or semi-naked. Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t make it beneficial.)

Are you married? Watch out! Do you have a girlfriend? Watch out! Do you have kids? Watch out! Are you alive? Watch out! Porn can getcha, for real.

Abigail Tucker wrote an interesting article called The Most Ferocious Man-Eating Lions. She opens with this:

In encounters with the king of beasts, an unarmed person is “one of the most helpless creatures,” notes Charles Guggisberg in Simba: the Life of the Lion. “Man cannot run as fast as a zebra or a gazelle, he has not the horns of the sable antelope or the tusks of the warthog, and he cannot deal terrific blows like the giraffe.” People are, in other words, easy pickings.

In my fight against the porn lion, I am not defenseless. I’ve learned where the lion hides. Plus, I’ve got a secret weapon: I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.

My family is better for it.

I love that my wife and kids all had a hand in making a pie from scratch. The cherries were on the tree outside but they’re about to be in our bellies. Gracious, it smells good!

~TV STiNKS

As a teacher, I have some time off in the summer to do nothing. As a man, I can’t spend much time at all doing nothing. A few days of nothing was enough for me. So I was thankful when my brother-in-law asked me to paint some rooms in his house.

I don’t mind painting. I’m not fast by any means but I enjoy making a space look good when I’m finished. The other day, though, my painting taught me a lesson.

As I was turning a hallway bathroom from forest green to something more appealing, I took a shortcut. Well, it was supposed to be a shortcut. I thought I could paint around the toilet paper holder without taping it or removing it. You can guess what happened. Instead of having two steps (take off and replace) I now have three steps (take off, scrape off paint, replace). It would have saved me time and effort if I had made the effort in the first place!

My marriage can be the same as my painting job. It’s work, for sure. But it just takes a little prep work to make it easier. I can spend time and energy with my wife now building our relationship (even after 12 years of marriage) or I can have more work later when things inevitably become more challenging. There will be challenges.

The paint on the toilet paper holder taught me an important lesson. I choose to do the work now.

~TV STiNKS

You love your dad, right? Do you want him to look like this? Enough said. Don’t buy Dad a TV for Father’s Day.

Enjoy your Saturday!

~TV STiNKS

Demetri Martin hits it on the head. It’s funny because it’s true. Or is it sad because it’s true?

Commercials fall into two camps for me. On one hand, I enjoy the creativity of a good commercial. On the other hand, commercials make me want to buy stuff I don’t need.

But when I read that economist Juliet Schor estimates that for every hour of TV a person watches each week, they will increase annual spending by about $200, I don’t seem to like commercials so much. With the average person watching nearly five hours of TV a day, that’s close to $7,000 a year. I wish I were making this up.

Seven. Thousand. Dollars.

That’s a pretty good raise for just about anyone and can be had just by cutting out the advertisements and artificial lifestyles we see on television. We’re less likely to keep up with the Joneses if we don’t know what the Joneses have.

Have you tried going TV-free? What’s your take on this? If you agree or disagree, sound off below.

~TV STiNKS

Definition of a Gentleman

A gentleman is a man who is clean inside and outside, who neither looks up to the rich nor down on the poor, who can lose without squealing, who can win without bragging, who is considerate to women, children, and old people, who is too brave to lie and too generous to cheat and too sensible to loaf, who takes his share of the world’s goods and lets other people take theirs.

When is the last time these traits were demonstrated in the media?

We all need a little more wisdom when it comes to the people we elevate to hero status. Most often, the people we should be looking up to receive no media attention at all. Here’s to choosing wisely!

~TV STiNKS

One day not long ago, the topic of the day was oral care. I’ve known for a while now that fluoride is a toxin and have asked not to have the standard fluoride treatment for our kids when we’ve taken them to the dentist. But we haven’t done anything about the fluoride that we buy.

I found a great website with a simple recipe for homemade, natural toothpaste. So we gave it a shot.

Here are the ingredients.

This is what my girls did after tasting it for the first time.

So we added more mint, more mint, and more mint until it tasted somewhat close to store-bought toothpaste (I shouldn’t have added the salt.). What resulted gained mixed reviews from a normally liberal panel when it comes to approving the taste of things.

We’ll see if the kids get used to it. It’s worth a shot! Maybe I am a hippie…

~TV STiNKS

If you’ve seen the classic movie A Christmas Story then you probably remember the excitement of little Ralphie when Little Orphan Annie came on the radio. Dramatic radio was a tremendously popular medium before television and in the early years of moving pictures. We’re trying to bring it back, in a way.

Our seven year old daughter recently checked out some audiobooks from the library. She couldn’t stop listening to them. She closed the door to her room so she could give full attention. She gave us updates about the story. In other words, she loved it.

I used to have a looong commute to work so my brother-in-law suggested audiobooks to help pass the time. I didn’t think I’d like them because the idea sounded so old-fashioned. But I was wrong! The books I listened to were fantastic and fascinating. And because of the limited selection at our library, I was forced to pick stuff I wouldn’t have normally read but enjoyed them anyway.

If you haven’t given audiobooks a try, check out www.audible.com or www.librivox.com. Librivox offers free books that are public domain. Pick the Brain has more places to find audiobooks and podcasts. Check them out, err, download a book today and give it a try.