Well, it’s a New Year and that means a new, commitment to regularly updating my blog. Maybe this year I’ll make it into April before something shiny catches my eye and sidetracks my progress. I feel like I have a ton to say, and there are probably even a handful of people who’d like to hear it (and, in turn, a handful of them who may find some value in my thoughts). Settle in, this one turned out to be kind of lengthy.

Over the next couple of posts I’ll touch on 2020 and share my thoughts on covid and how it’s affected both me and the world at large. I'll get to that down the road, but today I’ll share a thought that came to me today as I was standing over the bar on the holiest of weight lifting days: deadlift day. 

In a statement that will foreshadow a future blog, there were plenty of positives that came from 2020. Sure, I put on 12lbs, but I also didn’t miss a workout (surplus of both time and calories). Due to that caloric...

In this installment of “finding positives in this unprecedented clusterfuck”...

It was March 12 when things went quiet in our house. It was right the middle of hockey playoffs. By 6:00pm Russ had just won the Winnipeg High School Hockey League D2 championship  and I left that arena to head to where Char was set to play game 3 of the best of 5 Bantam AA female city championship. You see, nights like this are commonplace in our house. Since Char also played for her highschool team and Jojo played as well, we had four hockey teams between our three kids. As I walked into the rink at 7:30pm, word had just been passed down that all games were cancelled. Over the next couple of days, the remainder of playoffs were axed as well. It ended that quickly.

All of a sudden we went from four teams to zero. In addition, most nights I trained Brazillian Jiu Jitsu after work if there was no hockey (which was also limited and eventually shut down). All of a sudden I had all my...

It doesn’t seem like very long ago and I was holding Russ in the palm of my hand. He came a little early and although he was a long baby, he was only 6lbs 3oz (now he’s almost 6’2 and 165 lbs - so basically proportional). 

Now he’s almost 17. Between his two jobs, hockey, other activities and a girlfriend, he’s not around much anymore. Char just turned 15 and isn’t far behind. Thank goodness for Jojo - she’s only turning 11 this year so we have some time left.

There’s a reason this fits into the “what positives can I take away from being locked up with my family due to Covid19” blog series (that hopefully won’t go on indefinitely).

In a blog titled “The Tail End”, Tim Urban brings up the idea of how much time we spend with our parents throughout the course of our life. When you account for the time that you’re around them 24/7 when you are young and live at home, it turns out that by the...

For some reason, I’ve always been somewhat of an optimist. My yearbook quote in high school was along the lines of “shit happens, but everything works out in the end”. When I was 40 I discovered the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and started studying it. A book that I recommend to everyone is “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday. My big takeaway from that book was the idea that even something that can be perceived as a negative event can have some upside if you just look hard enough for it. In other words, when a problem or crisis pops up in your life, learn to ask the question “what is the opportunity in this that I can’t see right now”?

So let’s take this shitshow-of-unprecedented-proportions that we find ourselves in right now and run it through that question with the twist of what I know a lot about and like to talk about here - health and wellness. This specific post won’t comment on Covid19 itself (I do...

I’ve shared in the past that because I’m a chiropractor and teach and lead people to living healthy lives that somehow I’d escape the physiologic absolute of ageing. Turns out, I was wrong.

In a similar vein, I have always heard people say “just wait until they’re teenagers” about raising kids - even my wonderful, angelic ones. Some of you may dispute the fact that my kids are the best on the planet (probably due to some irrational built in bias about your kids being the best that you have but I obviously don’t). For some reason, I figured that since my kids were so amazing when they were younger, we were going to be the first family EVER to just bypass the “difficult/stubborn/moody teenage years” and jump straight into “responsible adulthood”. Turns out I was wrong about that too.

Now I want to take a minute to make one thing clear - even though I’m referring to my kids as occasionally...

In an unforeseen plot twist, this blog is actually going to give you some useful information you can apply to your life instead of my usual esoteric ramblings about regrets and death and so forth (or maybe a bit of both). Don’t get used to it though...

My path to health over the last few years has led me to a keto/carnivore way of eating. In other words, I eat almost the same thing every day - meat and eggs. And I eat a lot of it. Most days it’s between 3-5lbs of red meat with up to 6 eggs. 

My intention when I started making changes to my lifestyle back in 2016 wasn’t to end up here. Eventually, as I lost weight and became healthier, I just stopped craving veggies. That, along with an incident when I was cooking broccoli in the middle of January 2017 where I looked out my kitchen window and realized how unnatural it was. There’s no way I could grow broccoli in my snow-covered garden when it’s -40 outside. In order for me to be...

I guess in a way I can piggyback on last week’s post about regrets to talk about fears. You see, one of my biggest fears (in addition to spiders) is that someday, when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll look back on my life and have regrets - specifically that there are things that I wanted to do or experience but didn’t in the moment for whatever reason. In fact, the only recurring nightmare that I have is probably tied to this somehow… I’m in high school and for whatever reason, I never go to math class. At first it’s because I don’t want to, but after a while I want to go but don’t feel like I can because I’ve missed so many. Eventually, I’ve missed too many and have to drop the class… only to realize that I needed that credit to graduate. The regret I feel in that dream for not going to class when I had the chance is real and visceral.

In a lot of ways, that dream is a metaphor for life - math...

So what’s with the beard? Well, it’s a long story…

It starts in the mountains of eastern Idaho this past September on my annual trip to hunt elk with my bow. This year, I brought my 16 year old son Russ with us. Because of the way the winds work (the diurnal thermals blow down the mountain in the early morning then switch and blow up the mountain as the air at the bottoms warms with the sun - usually around 9:00am), we hunt uphill and into the wind early, get to the top, and turn around and hunt downhill into the wind on our way back to camp.

The climb we did that morning is particularly steep - almost a 45 degree slope. It took us about 90 minutes to climb the 2500 feet, and by the top we were gassed. Our effort paid off, though as we were into bulls right away. At one point, (there were four of us that morning - me, Russ, and my buddies Dave and Greg) we had a bull come into about 10 feet but none of us could get a shot. They say in archery elk hunting...