Month: February 2026

Last night I took Mara to lacrosse practice. As we were leaving she asked me if we could go to Dick’s to buy her a new mouthguard. She got braces a month ago, and lacrosse season is back, and she needs a new mouthguard. Dick’s is kind of far away and I was tired. I said, “can’t you just get a mouthguard at Academy?” And she said, “yeah, I get them confused.”

I figured Academy isn’t that far away. It’d be a little detour on the way home from practice. So we went to Academy. And it was a nice little detour, and a chance to hang out for a bit with Mara — something we just don’t do often enough anymore.

We did some aisle perusing. We asked an employee where the lacrosse mouthguards could be found. They only had one. We went to the football mouthguard section and Mara found the one she wanted (fruit punch flavored, of course). So we grabbed the mouthguard. For grins we went to the clothing section and I found two pairs of my tried and true running shorts that I thought had been discontinued. So we killed three birds with one stone, and I was glad that Mara asked to go get a mouthguard. We got to hang out, she got a new mouthguard, and I got running shorts that I thought had been discontinued.

We went home, had dinner, and Mara boiled water to form her new mouthguard. She’s 13. She doesn’t require much supervision. She can read instructions. She’s formed a mouthguard before.

The mouthguard got stuck to her braces. She fought relentlessly for 45 minutes to get the mouthguard unstuck from her brackets. No dice. She tried holding hot water in her mouth. She tried prying. She became quiet and weepy. I decided to try to fight fire with fire. I went to the garage and got two difference sized wire cutters. She was able to get the mouthguard unstuck from her back teeth on the right side of her mouth. After some careful amateur orthodontia I was able to cut 1/3 of the mouthguard out, but the rest just wasn’t budging. I had her lay her head in my lap on the living room floor while I, with headlamp on my head and armed with wire snips, tried to see if I could cut out more of the mouthguard without clipping a lip or gums, but there were no dice there either.

We finally settled on her just sleeping with the mouthguard stuck to her braces and Elise would have to take her to the orthodontist in the morning.

Mara got up at 6:00 a.m. I checked on her. She was okay. She said her lips were a little sore. I guess that’s from all of the mouthguard tugging and me moving around her lips to try to cut out the rubbery plastic.

I guess the moral of the story is: RTFM.

I don’t recall exactly, but if I had to guess, the memory was stirred from an image that was displayed on the Amazon Echo Show this morning. It was a photo of the house or the neighborhood blanketed in deep (for Austin) snow. It was the crippling winter storm Uri that hit us in mid-February of 2021. Five short years ago.

I immediately went to my laptop and started looking at photos from this day five years ago. I’d taken quite a lot of photos because we’d had a lot of snow and ice. The ice broke trees. School and businesses were shut down for weeks. We were without water. COVID was still a thing.

Call it survivalism, optimism, or just-not-giving-a-shitism, but I remember those days fondly. Seems like the rest of the region (especially our community, on social media) was freaking out and the ice and COVID were the apocolypse. I knew my family wasn’t going to endure the worst: death. We could melt snow. We had a pantry and freezer full of stuff that could sustain us. We could drive somewhere if we had to. We just accepted what we couldn’t control, settled in, hunkered down, and made the best of it. And our best was fun. I remember there being laughter.

I’d forgotten in recent years that, amidst the goings on at that time, I’d lost my job just 10 days prior. And it was a loss that swept me (and the rest of the team) off my feet. There were no hints or reasons to fathom layoffs. I was blindsided. I was comfortable at the job. It provided my family with stability and security. I’d no plans or reasons to look elsewhere.

And thus began a winter of discontent and some years of job floundering.

But I still look back on that February of 2021 and remember the happy times. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have school. We didn’t have a steady income. But we made out pretty alright.

Yesterday I started the day with a run with some of my homies. We’ve done this for 8 years now, since Chad, Scott and I went on our first Circle C Run Club official group run together. It’s the clubs longest-standing group run.

Early in the afternoon Elise and I went on a sporadic “date.” We went to Suds Monkey for pepperoni rolls and a beer for Elise. That was relatively inexpensive and fun, unlike most everything else in Austin which has become expensive, crowded, and not fun. I was still hungry, so we drove down the road (mind you we’re in what’s probably considered Dripping Springs, not Austin, but is pretty much a ‘burb of Austin now) to Dos Olivos and ordered off the brunch menu. We had barbacoa donuts, chicharrones nachos, and patatas bravas, and a glass of wine for Elise. That was also fun, and a little more pricy, but a lot less expensive than what we could’ve spent for the same food and ambiance on the other side of the county line.

Then we spend a good hour at Breed & Co. just browsing and procuring supplies to re-seal the girls’ bathtub. A couple more errands, and then over to Iram’s house to help him pickup some firewood.

By the time we got home, I was hungry again, so Mara and I went to HEB. She wanted stuff to make some kind of quesadilla breakfast sandwich thing. I bought dough so I could make my own pepperoni rolls. Can’t have too many pepperoni rolls in one day.

On our way to HEB Mara played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I mean, that’s cool when your 13 year old listens to that album. The theme of our trip to the grocery store was music. I think they were playing Foo Fighters at HEB. I told Mara that the best thing to come out of Nirvana was Dave Grohl. Well, that and the pioneering of the grunge music genre. She told me that two years ago all of the kids at school thought that Nirvana was a clothing brand. I guess because throwback Nirvana shirts were popular for us Gen Xers and our children.

I then told her the story about how Matt and I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform at the Unicorn in Houston in 1991. The opening act was a new band called Pearl Jam, and that there was a photo published in a music magazine from that concert where Eddie Vedder was crowd surfing. The photo was taken as Eddie was above yours truly, and we were grasping each other’s hands.

Mara said, “I can’t believe you’ve never told me that story before!” And we listened to the Foo Fighters on the way home from the grocery story.