STUFF

Young kids are small and generally don’t take up a lot of space however their STUFF sure does. No one told me that when you have 2 young children, not only do you need a bed, a crib, a couple of dressers, a bookcase etc. but you also have to dedicate half of your living room and garage to storing multiple strollers (a BOB, a double stroller, a fold up), a swing, multiple exer-saucers, activity tables, many boxes of clothes, tricycles, wagons, and scooters.

Prior to having our two daughters (Charlotte 3 and Abby 7 months), we lived in a San Francisco apartment that had 3 small closets so moving into a home in Novato with 3 times as much storage and a 2 car garage was storage Shangri Lai. My wife Amie had already begun to acquire baby and kid related STUFF while she was pregnant with Charlotte. Apparently people really like it if you take stuff off their hands. They’ll often give it to you free and sometimes even drop it off. I now see why.

Once Charlotte began to outgrow her infant and toddler clothes, toys and crib – everything eventually accumulated on one side of our garage. If you needed to get to something from that side of the garage, it was like playing a game of Tetris as you moved and restacked boxes and oddly shaped objects to clear a path. Any attempt at organizing the garage was an exercise in futility. I always like to say that I’m up against the First Law of Thermodynamics which I’m pretty sure states that no stuff is created or destroyed – it just gets moved around.

Finally, I caved and got a storage unit. Now that I’ve got one, its $66 a month I consider well spent for a couple of reasons. It provides more room to put our STUFF and most importantly, trips there with 3 year Charlotte is some of the best Father/Daughter time we spend. She loves it and it’s one of her favorite things to do. First, we get to drive there in our VW Van and she’s a huge fan of the van. When we get there, we to go into the office and get a wheeled cart and she gets a lollipop which couldn’t make her more excited. Next, we load up the cart with our STUFF and squeeze Charlotte on there as well and go inside which requires entering a passcode to access the building. One of Charlotte’s favorite hobbies is pressing buttons so keying in a 7 number code is about as exciting as it gets. Once we’re inside, we’ve got to take an elevator up the 2nd floor so you know what that means. Bonus buttons! Once we reach the unit and open it up, it’s like Christmas morning for her as she’s reunited with all of her old pink plastic horsey and shopping cart. Her toys keep her occupied while I search for and swap out the STUFF. If she’s lucky, we need to make more than one trip which means more buttons and more cart rides.

At the end of the day I’m usually bringing home as much STUFF as I brought – remember the First Law of Thermodynamics – but at least it makes me feel like I’m winning the battle against the STUFF and reclaimed some of our garage back while spending some quality time with my daughter.

Hindsight

They say that 'hindsight is 20/20', 'the past is the past', and 'what's done is done'. Oh yeah...and my favorite, 'it is what it is'. Generally, I think that's good advice to not live in the past, however I can't help but thinking of what could have been if I knew 20 years ago, what I know now - particularly when I applied to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and eventually graduated with a degree in Agricultural Business. (Why that major? Long story. But hey, I've got a strong business background and a solid understanding of production agriculture and that can never be taking away from me!)

In hindsight, I wonder what I'd be doing now if I had pursued a degree in Journalism or Communications. Right now my dream would be to be Bill Simmons, aka 'Sports Guy'. He's editor of an ESPN owned website - www.grantland.com that covers sports and pop culture - records a podcast a few hours a week - often just BSing with his buddies about their sports teams - and travels to the Super Bowl, the NBA All-Star game and various other sporting events around the country on ESPN's dime so he can write a weekly column. Not a bad life if you ask me. He's also written a New York Times bestseller - The Book of Basketball (which included no less than 6 pages on the parallels between the career of Kobe Bryant and the movie Teen Wolf). His columns and podcasts are often about gambling, TV (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Sopranos, Breaking Bad etc...), fantasy football, video games and entertainment in general. Until recently when he opened up a new office/studio in LA he worked out of his home office/man cave where he's got something like 6 TV's and every imaginable sports package that's available on cable or satellite. The bromance continues. He's buddies with Adam Carolla, Jimmy Kimmel, Cousin Sal and Jon Hamm of Mad Men fame.

Between reading his column, following him on twitter and listening to his podcast, I feel like I spend more time with him then I do with my wife and kids. Clearly, I've got a serious man crush on him - or at least on his life so I'm going to keep living vicariously through him until my wife catches me and stomps on my iPhone. I know she' tempted to (damn you Words with Friends!) and I've barely had it for 2 months. (BTW: HTF did I live without an iPhone?)

I'm 38 now, have 2 kids, a mortgage and I'm not exactly in a position to quit my job, go back to school and start a new career. But I can at least start by writing something...this is something.