We just got back from our big 2025 trip to Portugal - Porto, Cascais, and Lisbon. Originally Portugal was nowhere on our radar, but we were supposed to go with a group and they all wanted to check out Portugal. After Daniel had finished planning the trip, they all had to back out for one reason or another, which left just us. But what the hey, let's check out a new country. Then we started seeing celebrities and influencers all hawking Portugal so we got excited.

It was pretty damn good. Daniel is ready to immediately move to Porto, and I wouldn't mind it. It's a little hilly for my liking, but the weather, geography, and people were all amazing. We did a little port wine tasting. I like port as much as the next guy, but it's not my favorite thing in the world. But you had to have some there since that's where it all comes from. We did a little tour/tasting at Calem, one of the big port houses, but we were hung the fuck over so it was a little bit challenging to get through. But we persevered.

The night before, we'd done a day tour with a guide who stopped and had a few drinks along the way. Then we did a 1-star Michelin meal at our hotel. Then we decided to hit up a gay bar our tour guide had pointed out that was just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We were kind of sitting alone sipping aperol spritzes, but then old David emerged and started telling women how beautiful they were, and saying hi to randos, and chatting up anyone who would listen. We ended up meeting some chick from London and her South African boyfriend and partying with them well into the morning. At a certain point we looked at each other and were like, "We have to leave." And we bounced. But I was still wearing her sweatshirt. Oops. It was just a jokey thrift store find she'd purchased that afternoon, so later on Instagram where we'd connected, she said I could have it.

Cascais was a beautiful, little ritzy beach town. Not quite as much to do there but that was fine by us. We took a boat out one day and rode the coast up to Lisbon and back, then out into the swells of the open Atlantic for just a few minutes. Ate lots of seafood, then headed for Lisbon.

Lisbon was super cool, but a big crowded city. It reminded me a little bit of Rome. It was basically erased from the map by a huge earthquake in the 1700s, followed by raging fires, followed by a giant tsunami. So the whole low lying area was planned out and rebuilt, and that made getting around easier than some other medieval towns. We had the second best meal of my life at a 2-star Michelin restaurant, Belcanto. Just a superb 10-courses with outrageously good service. And we splurged on a bottle of Krug (our first), and it was worth every penny!

The other fun part of the trip is that I spent the last 3 months racing through Portuguese lessons on DuoLingo. I always hate being in a foreign country and not knowing what signs say. I dunno. I don't CARE what they say, I just hate not knowing. So I wanted to learn as many words as I could. In that respect, it was a raging success and will be the standard operating procedure for every trip. I am getting started on Spanish for our trip to Spain next year.

On the other hand, I didn't realize I was learning BRAZILIAN Portuguese, not European. And they're different. All of our tour guides were super chill and friendly. And they all expressed that they appreciated the little bit of effort I'd made before visiting their country. But then they all laughed at me for speaking with a Brazilian accent and using Brazilian words. I said, "Você fala inglês?" and they were like "Você?! hahaha" Apparently "você" is super duper formal in Portugal, to the point of being comical/offensive. They use "tu" instead. Brazilian also muddles the constants and Europeans say them like they're spelled, more similar to Spanish. Just little things like that. I think that will be unique to Portuguese though. DuoLingo doesn't even have an option for the European variety, so if we move to Porto we have a lot to unlearn.

Anywho, we home now. Fighting jetlag. Got a few days before we're all the way over it but we worked 3 days this week without any problem. I'm about to head to my StretchLab appointment and see how much flexibility I've lost in the past 2 weeks. Ciao!

A while back I started using an app called Goodreads. I scraped my memory to think of every book I'd ever read and entered it into the app with an approximation of the date I read it. The grand total was abysmal. I realized I had severely abandoned reading in my adult life, which was completely counter to just about every goal I've ever had.

It was also around the time I was getting fed up with social media, Reddit in particular. The other apps have really subpar algorithms, but Reddit is so dialed in. It just sucks you further and further down the rabbit hole. So the first idea of how to combat that was to allocate an hour before bed for reading books, instead of laying on the couch halfway paying attention to some streaming show while I endlessly scrolled Reddit. That turned out to be a fantastic idea that really stuck.

I then made it a Febrehabruary thing to set a reading goal. And from there I set a goal to have read 43 books by the time I was 43 years old. I know that's not a stellar average, but I felt like one book per year sure beat nothing. Well I happily crushed that goal and kept right on going. Granted I'm 44 now, but my total is up to 82.

I'm also really trying to focus on the classics. Those books that "everyone" has read. And sometimes that means I'm stuck with a book I hate. Pride and Prejudice was like that. Man, I could cut that thing down to about 35 pages and make it a compelling read. Other times, I deviate and read some science fiction space odyssey or something as a little treat. And sometimes those two genres overlap, which is always nice. I certainly have a ways to go though. My "Want to Read" list is at 250 books, which at my current cruising speed of one book per month equates to about a 20 year runway. Which is fine, but that list is growing much faster than its dwindling. I suppose I could allocate more than an hour before bed each day, but for now I'm liking this change of pace.

It's so stupid that I have to STRUGGLE to stop looking at my phone. These things are so sinister, but so hard to ditch. Anyway, that's all, leave me a comment and let me know what book I should read next. On a side note, another reason I decided to blog today is because my "This Day In History" has no entry. I've NEVER posted on Aug 23 in my life. How weird is that. Now I have to go edit the code for my website to take that section away if nothing exists. Literally hasn't ever happened before. I wonder if there are any other days of the year where this is true. Oh well, not true for today any longer!

In our series of returning to blogging, I thought I should maybe fill in the larger details with a wide brush. I could probably sum it up as steady as she goes. And that probably wouldn't surprise any of my loyal viewers.

I just had my 21st anniversary at work (shocking I know). Daniel and I will have our 20th anniversary next year. We still live in Dallas, although we have switched houses a couple of times since we last spoke. Up until recently, I was driving the same car, but I sold it to my brother for my nephew to drive. I was sad to see it go, but glad it stayed in the family. Now I lease, which is against my religion, but with EVs, the technology is improving so rapidly that you don't really want to drive one for 10+ years.

For a long time, I would write in my Book of Secrets every year on my birthday. I would make predictions for 1, 5, and 10 years in the future. The idea behind it is to illustrate how terrible humans are at actually predicting the future. You always think to yourself, "I knew it! I KNEW that would happen!" but that's hindsight bias. You actually had no clue. Except, in my Book of Secrets, I'm almost always right. Mostly because I predict that nothing will change. Then I make concerted efforts to not change anything. Then I pat myself on the back for being right. Solid as Iraq!

Some time around the height of COVID (hey, remember COVID? That was crazy), I had filled one of our patio planters with potato vine. Unbeknownst to me at the time, squirrels LOVE to eat potato vine and they were absolutely decimating my plant. I thought, what if I put a pile of pecans off to the side to distract them? Then they might lose interest in the plant. I was partially correct. It did get their attention for a short time.

There was one squirrel in particular, though, that didn't act like all the rest. She didn't run away at the slightest sight of me. She also never ate the nuts on the ground. She would pick one up, jump up onto the comfy couch, and eat it there. When she was done, she would go down and get another, and then right back up onto the couch. I thought it was so funny that leaving some nuts out became a regular practice.

Also during this time, I had been partially furloughed from work. I was working from home just 3 days per week, and with lockdowns in full swing, had shit all to do the rest of the time. So I set out to see if I could befriend this squirrel. That involved countless hours sitting motionless in the backyard, hands outstretched with pecans. Little by little, we gained the trust of our new friend, we dubbed "Muffin."

As an aside, a lot of people ask me how I know she's a girl. Well, first of all, the girls are way sweeter. They're timid and gentle and cute. Boys, on the other hand are mean and aggressive and like to injure the girls. They also have scrota the size of their heads. So in review, to sex a squirrel check:

1. Demeanor
2. Da ballsack

I wish I knew the exact moment we met her, but all I know is that by 2021 we were regularly documenting her visits with photos and videos and posting on Instagram. It's now August of 2025 so we have known her for 4 or 5 years. She doesn't come every day, but for periods of time she will. A few times we've gone months without seeing her, convinced she would never return, but she always does. One time she showed up severely injured, unable to use the right side of her body, and we just knew she would be a goner. But we left out clean water and plenty of nuts, and damned if she didn't bounce right back. She has a pronounced lean, a slight limp, and a split right ear, so she's very easy to spot from far away.

There was also a moment when we were feeding her that we realized the ear no longer had a notch. And we realized this was a second squirrel who looked, and more importantly, acted just like Muffin. Enter: Cookie. So we have two squirrels now who come by almost daily, will eat from our hands, and enjoy year round guaranteed food sources. They have a little picnic table our friend Ashley got for us, and our days are centered around checking to be sure nobody is waiting for a handout. I even repurposed our old Nest doorbell as a motion sensing camera so I can be notified when we have a customer.

So much of my life centers around squirrels now. I've taken two squirrel rehabilitation classes from the ASPCA, and know more about these little animals than I ever thought I would. Anyway, for the sake of catching up on what's been going on for the past 15 years, I felt like introducing Muffin and Cookie was a key piece of the puzzle.

I have a couple of things to report. The first is news from the eRECt Center that I just returned from. I spent about an hour there, and never really got around to lifting any weights. Instead, I sat in the corner and stretched and stretched and stretched. My yoga teacher is going to be proud of me. Anyway, I tried desperately to touch my nose to my knee and I came ever so close, but no cigar. The way I see it, though, I'm only about two weeks away from it being effortless.

I bought my yoga book today and read part of it. Frankly, there were chapters in there that just plum made me blush. This yoga shit is going to be the best thing for my sex life since accidental tantra.

In other news, I was over at Josh's watching some TV, and his friend Kyle or Carl was there. I didn't really listen to his name the 100 times I heard it. I hope he doesn't somehow read this and get offended. Anyway, Josh brings up the fact that if you put salt on an ice cube and hold it in your hand that it will burn you. Ky(Car)l(e) claims that is bullshit. They bicker back and forth, eventually daring each other to try it. When they both wouldn't, I stepped forward as the guinea pig.

It's not uncommon for me to test theories out on myself. One time I stuck a 9V battery to my braces ... that felt like god had donkey kicked me in the face. Another time, I opened my eye right on a camera flash and set it off to see what would happen. I couldn't open my eye for about 2 hours and when I finally could, everything was red. Anyway, back to my story.

So Josh hands me an ice cube and pours a moderate amount of salt on. "Don't be shy," I prodded. More salt. After doing some research on the internet, the best explanation I've found of what happens is this. Pouring salt on ice is an endothermic reaction. That means it must draw heat into the reaction from the surrounding environment. This plunges the ice (normally around 32-33 degrees) to much, much lower. So when you hold it in your hand while this reaction is going on, it draws heat, not from the air, but from your hand. End result: frost-bite.

It was quite painful at the time, but not excruciating. Today, however, I have an ice cube shaped red mark on my hand that hurts pretty bad. Most people would encourage you to not make the same mistake, but I'm not most people. I want you to try this right now, and then leave me a comment letting me know how it went for you. Until then, my little plebeians. Peace out!

I love weekends. This one was a great one. Friday I all went to class and stuff, which is really studious for me. That night my friend Serge was having a party over at his place. I showed up around 11 and ended up being the first person there. People eventually showed up though and it ended up being a great time. I ended up catching a ride home with a friend and leaving my car there. Always the responsible one. The next day my parents showed up around noon. Luckily I just happened to wake up early and shower and drink some water (and get my car). My parents brought me a new kitchen table for my place, its totally sweet. Then we sat and chatted for a while. We went out for lunch at Texas Roadhouse, and then they took me grocery shopping. When we got back from Krogers they left for Houston to visit my brother, Stephen. It was a nice little visit.

Last night I went over to Ryan and Todd's place. David was in town yet again with their friend Sam. Frank and Stoner showed up and we started off the night with a little bit of 6-cup. Once the majority of us were sufficiently toasted, we busted out the drunken Pictionary. That is such a fun game. Me and Frank completely dominate when we're partners. We won the first game by more than half the board. Its pretty ridiculous, to be honest. I ended up not drinking for the rest of the night and driving myself home around 3am. Good times. Today I didn't do shit, but I'm about to go look at some homework and get it done. But right now I'm watching Pleasantville and really enjoying it. So I'll talk to you all later.