In capitalist America, upsells are everywhere, and that includes the world of medicine. No longer are doctors trying to treat your ailments and keep you healthy; now they're just trying to meet their quota for number of prostate exams they book each quarter. And that's exactly what happened a while back with a specialist, so I brought it up with my doctor. Surprisingly, he didn't upsell me on...
The Author Goes Full Funko

Funko Pops are dumb. There, I said it. And if you stop me on the street tomorrow and ask me if Funko Pops are dumb, I'll still say yes. I cannot understand why anyone would waste their money on what is obviously a money grab designed to play on our love of pop culture and fill our shelves with molded plastic so we have to buy more shelves which ultimately lines the pockets of Big Shelving. Up...
Tao of the Dog: Sitting Pretty

Years ago when we were taking both Cheyenne and Jetson to Sit Means Sit here in Austin, we were told by one of the instructors that dogs have two ways to sit. One is the straight-forward one leg on either side position that most dogs do, while the other is more relaxed, where the dog has both hind legs to one side and is leaning essentially on their hip. The relaxation distinction was important...
The Summer of Heat and Despair

Central Texas has been under an Excessive Heat Warning for what feels like months now, and I can't remember a time in my 42 years when I've seen a more pointless advisory from the National Weather Service. What exactly are you expecting us to do, NWS? Get under our desks? Put wet paper bags over our heads? We know it's hot; we've been outside, trying to live our lives. Oh no but it's like, really...
Poems I Wrote In My Closet: Daddy
Welcome
The Minimum Jetpack Plan Needed to be Included in WordPress Reader
If you don't know, Jetpack is a plugin that adds a bunch of extra features to your WordPress blog. Those features used to be contained in a single subscription, but now they're available a la carte. With the goal of saving some money in mind, I started to wonder, What's the minimum Jetpack plan required to be included in WordPress Reader?
And woe betide the creature who steps into her garden

Since Jetson’s passing, Cheyenne has been reasserting herself as the unequivocal Alpha of the Verastiqui Pack. She demands table scraps. She shoves her ball in our faces. She sleeps at the head of our bed. If she were still a pup, we’d probably take steps to correct this behavior, but she’s getting on in years and already has a couple of good cancers (emphasis the vet’s...
This I Love: Dell 32-inch Curved 4K Monitor (S3221QS)

Big-ass monitors. You love 'em. I love 'em. We've both spent our lives trying to find the right one. For the longest time, I've been putting off the move to 4K based on how strange my wife's 5K iMac looks. But then: providence. I was randomly looking around and came across this Dell S3221QS at a pretty steep discount. Ordered it, took a week to get used to the curve and the 4K, and now I don't...
Louis Sachar and the Literary IDGAF

For the first three years of his life, my son has enjoyed classic books like Goodnight Moon, The Pout-Pout Fish, and The Going to Bed Book. More recently, I've been trying to expose him to more mature books like The Ghost on Saturday Night, My Teacher Fried My Brains, and of course, the absolute best children's book in history, Sideways Stories From Wayside School by Louis Sachar. I can usually...