As a rock climber, I often find myself in situations where I’m in control. Controlling the speed I climb, the route up the wall, and where I place my hands and feet.

Climbing is also a partner sport. You work in tandem, one person scrambling up the route while the other holds the rope, ready to catch you in a split second if you slip.

The other day I got sloppy. I had one job to do, and that was to provide the catch to my climber. …

What I noticed first about the book Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson was the cover. I’m sure we all feel surrounded by people with, how should I put it gently, less than stellar mental sharpness at one time or another.

But with the book’s title being metaphoric and not literal, it did offer up some questions. How do we deal with the people we let into our circle? And more importantly, are we one of the idiots?

Reading the book jacket, it’s a study of behavior personalities for people. The idea behind it is that each person has predictable…

There is a lull at my day job. I’m standing here waiting for members to check-in, and it’s mind-numbingly dull. For the second week in a row, work isn’t busy, but it’s expected when the weather turns nice.

Looking out the front door, I can see the sun shining, but it doesn’t improve my mood. Because I’m not out in that sun, I’m stuck behind this desk thinking about a quote I read recently.

A job is trading your time, for their money.

It’s never been more true than when you’re working, wishing you were on your own time. …

Books often captivate us because we feel connected to the protagonist. There is a trait in them we recognize in ourselves. We imagine struggling and succeeding alongside them as they go through their journey.

These stories are the essence of why we read — picking up a book hoping to find this connection and then hanging on for the ride that follows.

But in other books, we find ourselves at odds with the protagonist. Unable to recognize any traits in common. Looking at them as if they were an alien.

After the first few chapters of John Green’s Turtles All…

When I was four, my mom and I picked eight quarts of strawberries. We got home, and I pulled my stool up to the sink to help clean them.

She would pull off the stem, wash them, and hand them to me to place in the containers. My mom was a machine at doing this, and she didn’t notice I was eating about every third one she handed me.

As she finished the last one, she looked my way and saw I had strawberries smeared all over my face and down the front of my shirt. …

Today was the first time in two months I let my weekly blog slip past. I want to think it was for a good reason, though. More on that in a moment…

What I’m trying to do is expand my comfort zone. Over the past two years, I’ve learned that that queazy feeling you get in your stomach is your mind trying to keep you from doing something outside that zone.

I’ll tell you a secret…

What it's trying to keep you from doing is almost always Awesome!

For the longest time, I felt that writing was something reserved for…

For those who read for pleasure, finding an author that we connect with and gets us is rare. In the span of five years, there have been only a few times I’ve put the book down and thought, “I want to read anything this author writes.”

Currently, my stack of “golden ticket” writers number at three, I’m excited to add a fourth this week. I admit I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this author. She has quite a body of work to go through. …

This past week was an explosion of reading, or at least it looks that way. I had logged five books in the last seven days. When I started writing this, I had to double-check my count. It seems like so much reading, but the longest book was only a tad under 6 hours. The rest were in the 3-hour range. Together they combined to around the size of a typical novel.

What always surprises me is the stories that can be told in such a few number of words. It reminds me of a challenge I read about once. Neil…