Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #129: New England Weather, Bike Trail Radar, Suddenly Salad, etc.

1. The famous saying around here is ‘if you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 minutes.’ Last week, we had three straight days of temperatures well into the 90s with a heat index in the high 100s. It was no fun and left me looking forward to fall already. It was as if the weather gods said, ‘ok if you don’t like sweltering heat, we’ve got something different.’ To start the new week, it was the total opposite side of the weather. It was raining, and buckets of it. We went from a heat advisory to a flood watch in a matter of days. I’m not sure if I have to choose which of those types of weather I’d rather have, extreme heat or oceans of rain. My ideal weather is partly cloudy, mid-70s, and low humidity. Why some clouds? Easy, to make for a perfect sunset.


2. I finished and enjoyed all three seasons of Travelers on Netflix. It was on from 2016 to 2018. The show is about time travelers who come back to their past to try to change events to make the future a better place. After liking Dark, it was fitting that the next show I watched was another time travel show. With 34 total episodes, the show does a good job of expanding and solving all of its storylines. Even though it’s been finished for eight years, it still felt like there was room for a 4th season, but it is probably way too late for that. The travelers come back to the past by their consciousness entering the body of a living person in the present who historically dies at a certain time. That means the original person was going to die, and sort of still does, but their body remains and becomes inhabited by a totally new person. That’s a big part of the plot: the traveler trying to keep up the charade of being the person who they replaced. As usual, I am trying not to spoil much but give you enough info to entice you to check it out. Who knows what my next show choice will be? So far, I’ve liked every show I’ve chosen, so I have to keep my streak alive.

3. Perfect summer days need to be appreciated. Your definition of ‘perfect’ might vary. Mine is temperatures in the low to mid 70s, sunny to partly sunny, and low humidity. We had one such day this week, and oh boy, did I enjoy it. I finished work and headed to the local bike trail. I did some walking and a lot more running over the span of close to 3 ½ miles. It felt great to put more running miles on my legs than I have in a long time this week. I’m not saying that a return to racing is in my future, but if I can slowly increase my stamina, I won’t rule it out. Overall, my route on this perfect day was filled with sweet breezes, river views, quiet neighborhoods, and loads of other people enjoying the day. Yes, fall is my favorite season. However, when you get a perfect summer day, at least weather-wise, there are few things better.


4. Some investments are just stupid. One such investment is a radar speed detector on a bike trail. Yes, you read that right. I have seen two pairs of speed detectors so far, like you’d see on any road, located on a bike trail. I don’t know how much each one costs, but whatever it costs, it is a waste of money. Seriously, what the hell are you going to do if someone speeds? Are there cops somewhere to pull them over? It is mind-numbingly stupid. A better idea from these towns would be to put cameras up on the trails to catch the large number of motorized vehicles on the trail. I always see dirt bikes on the trail when signs are everywhere saying ‘no motorized vehicles.’ I say that, but even if someone got caught riding a dirt bike on the trail, nothing would happen. But seriously, speed detectors on a bike trail? Good lord, how dumb.

An incredible waste of money on the bike trail.

5. This week I wrote an article about a fascinating psychological phenomenon known as the ‘music reminiscence bump.’ It is how music from our adolescence registers with us more deeply than anything that comes after. It’s why we all say music was better when we were younger, no matter what our ages are now. For me, music from 1991 to 1994 falls into this category. I was aged 14 to 17. As a capper on my article, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and create a Spotify playlist featuring my favorite music from that era. It is still not finished, and already it is nearly 200 songs and over 13 hours of music. I was not shocked at just how many songs I loved and that needed to be on the playlist. I recommend everyone try it on their own. Find the year or years you feel music was best in your life, and then go craft a playlist. I am betting it will be much longer than you anticipate.


6. I’m sorry, but based on my age, I find the product Suddenly Salad to be one of the funniest names out there. Why? Little Shop of Horrors. In the 1986 version with Rick Moranis, there is a song that he sings with Ellen Greene called Suddenly Seymour. I have needed to write this down to get it out of my head because every time I see the box in the supermarket, I just want to sing the name Suddenly Salad. I can’t be the only one in their 40s who grew up watching Little Shop of Horrors to make that connection. Or maybe I am a special kind of crazy who will sing a random song because a pasta salad shortcut product by Betty Crocker has a similar name?

Cue the music

7. In an event that should surprise no one, this week I saw my first ‘back to school’ ads. Mind you, on Cape Cod, school got out less than 3 weeks ago. These greedy corporations are so geared up on squeezing every last cent out of their customers that they start promoting going back to school right after the last school year ends. I remember hating that so much as a kid. It’s like, just give us some time to enjoy summer before reminding us that it has to end and we have to go back to school. There must be a mandate with a lot of these companies, certain dates that mark when to begin promoting the next holiday or event. Before kids get back to school, you will see Halloween candy laid out. Time moves fast enough as it is without greedy bloodsucking corporations speeding it up by promoting things that are months away like they’re happening now. Oh, and by the way, it was Old Navy promoting back-to-school clothes for kids.


8. Every summer, we have throngs of tourists on Cape Cod. Most of them are fine. They come down, enjoy themselves safely and responsibly, contribute to our economy, and leave. Of course, when so many people come down, there are bound to be a small percentage of stupid people among them. That’s just life. What I don’t get is how some of these tourists seem to have no idea of how to navigate through life once they get over one of the canal bridges. For example, one-way streets. Are there no street signs where you come from? Unless you live in the most rural of small towns in the middle of nowhere, I’m figuring people have seen one-way street signs. Still there it was during a run this week, some idiot with their New York plate driving down a one-way street. Thankfully, nobody was going the other way. Like, I get the people who can’t seem to understand that dogs aren’t allowed on the beaches during the summer. There are signs, but they are smaller, and you could lie and say you didn’t see them and didn’t know. One-way streets have big signs at each end telling you to not go a certain way. So these people from New York were either totally illiterate or just smug, entitled jerks. I’ll let you decide which they were.

Yeah man that's really hard to understand

9. Something that means well but is pretty dumb is the sign that is seen in a lot of places on Cape Cod, and I’m sure everywhere. It says ‘walk left, ride right.’ Simple enough. If you’re walking or running, you stay on the left to face oncoming traffic. You ride on the opposite side. It makes sense, except for one major issue. If I am headed north on a road and running on the left side of the road, then when I am headed back south down that road, I would now be running on the right side. Left or right is all relative depending on which way you’re going. So, in reality, the well-meaning sign makes literally no sense. It should just say ‘walk wherever, ride wherever, just stay the hell out of the middle of the road.’ When I’m running on a road or bike trail, people just go wherever they want, so obviously the sign is pretty pointless.


10. There is something so soothing and refreshing about getting up early in the morning and sitting next to an open window as the summer air floods your senses. I’m not a fan of 90 degrees and humidity, but when you are sitting on a day off in a comfy chair, and it’s mid 60s with a sweet breeze trickling in all around you, it is magical. I am trying harder to take one day to fully relax and recharge. That means little to no content work. That means sitting outside and enjoying the weather (if it’s not boiling hot). After going all-out with my content work for over 5 years, it can be easy to feel burned out if not given a chance to actually recover. It was hard at first as I’d feel like there was work I could be doing and I was falling behind. Sitting in the early morning summer breeze, though, gives such a sense of peace that any sort of worry about work just falls away.



11. I am my own harshest critic. Most of the time, I feel as though I am not good enough. I believe that it goes back to my childhood when I had a neglectful biological father and an abusive stepfather. My mother did the best she could, but one ray of sunshine through the storm cannot keep you dry. Today I am chasing validation. I pursue success in creative fields on one hand because I enjoy creating things, but on the other hand, to show those who tried to snuff out my passion for life that they failed. Dreams of becoming an undeniable success in some sort of creative field kept me going through my darkest times growing up. I owe it to that younger version of myself who struggled with self-esteem and self-worth to not give up on the dreams he chased. That being said, there has never been any guarantee that success comes from chasing dreams. It’s where my criticism of myself comes in. I wonder if I should not have been stubbornly bushwhacking my way through the forest when there was a highway beside me. I chose the more difficult road long ago. It is a road where the successes could be great, but the failures could be more likely. So I keep working hard. Books, podcasts, videos, filmmaking, any sort of creative venture, I push myself to do more and more in the hope that the next thing is the thing that changes everything. I might be my own harshest critic, but I also know that I am at this point in my life for a reason. Dreams only expire when you stop pursuing them.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #99: Speed Changes, Bad Parents, Cheap Store, etc.

1. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I am driving slower on a road if there is a car in front of me. What I mean is that if I am going 40 and there’s a car in front of me, I feel as though I am actually going slower. If I am going 40 with an open road ahead of me, it feels faster. Am I the only one who gets that feeling? Maybe with an open road, I know I could go faster if I wanted to? There has to be some reason for it. Just like how if you drive the same route repeatedly, you can basically black out and still get to where you’re going. It’s like muscle memory.


2. In 2025, when I played Spotify, I typically stuck to one of two playlists. I played my Chill Mix, which consists of a lot of downtempo music, at home. At work, I played a Best of the 1980s playlist since much of my clientele is 50+. It should have come as no surprise to me that when I got my Best of 2025 playlist made by Spotify that it was basically both of those playlists crammed into one. I scrolled through it once and decided that since I heard those songs so much as it is why would I bother playing it? I guess I should try to play more of a variety of music in 2026 just so my best of playlist will be exciting next year.


3. There are tons and tons of great parents out there...and then there are these next people. So I was at the supermarket when I spotted a boy who must have been 4 carrying some food item that he kept dropping, intentional or not, on the floor. The parents kept telling him to stop, but didn’t take the thing he was dropping away. Cut to 5 minutes later, and they come rolling in after me at the little self-checkout section. The mother and daughter, who was probably 10, started checking out and immediately getting mad at the self-checkout register. Behind me, the boy is still dropping that item he had, which I saw was a bag of chips. Then he stepped on it until it popped. Again, the parents tell him to stop but don’t take it away. Oh wait but the best is yet to come. I check out and am leaving. It’s probably 40 feet from the self-checkout to the automatic front doors. Who do I see standing there, not letting the doors close? The 4-year-old boy. No parents around. They had no clue where he was. And it was nearly 8pm. Lucky for them there were no kidnappers around. I can’t be too shocked, though, since the parents looked like if you added them together they’d have the same IQ as a piece of chewed bubblegum.


4. An interesting phenomenon occurs around this time each year. Once the weather starts to get consistently cold, I remember that there is a small hole in the ceiling right above my desk at work. It happened this week. I was sitting doing paperwork and noticed that I had an urge to put my coat on. Out in our lobby, it is consistently 70 degrees, but in our therapy room, where my desk is the temperature slowly drops as you walk across the room. That’s because the warm air is being destroyed by a funnel of ice-cold air above my desk. It comes from the warehouse. In the past, I have taken to shoving a shirt up in the hole, but the air still makes it through. I feel like I’m going to end up with a storm forming in front of my desk where the cold air and warm air meet. I can add it to the list of things we need to have the new owners of the building fix. Sealing the wall in the gym that abuts the warehouse so our heat doesn’t fly right out. Fixing our mini split so we can have quiet heat in the gym, not a 1960s-looking jet engine heater. Putting some adequate lighting in the shady back parking lot. Getting some lines painted in the customer front parking lot. Paving and putting lines in the employee's back parking lot. Any one of those would be great.


5. It’s an interesting window into my life as a child when I look at a piece of pottery I made in school when I was probably in 5th grade. My mom has kept it and now has it as a part of a really cool display with photos and candles, and such. I believe that I have a great imagination and a pretty good creative gene. I mean I do create books, podcasts, YouTube videos, this blog, etc. That being said, pottery was not going to be my chosen path. I made a sort of goblet, and besides the fact that I was 10 or 11, I believe that it shows a bit of possible ADHD. A bunch of different colors, lines, and holes, it’s so busy that it has to be ADHD at least a little. You be the judge.

6. In one of the most shocking stories in sports this year, the Indianapolis Colts have signed 44-year-old quarterback Philip Rivers to play on their team this year. 44 isn’t old in real life, but in sports it is. It’s doubly old when you have been retired for 5 years and are a legit grandfather. It’s kind of a no-win situation for the NFL. Either Rivers plays and does well, and it makes the current players in the league look bad. Or he comes back, and plays badly or worse, gets hurt, and it gets people asking why the NFL allowed it to happen. It’ll definitely be an interesting weekend of football. I must say, though, that the images floating around the internet of the Philip Rivers render for Madden ‘26 are pretty funny if they’re legit. He looks like some dude cosplaying as a football player. Here’s the image if you want a laugh.

7. My friend Mike and I spend our Monday afternoons in the warmer months doing Monday Runday at a local track. We have a running (no pun intended) joke about a store located across the street in a little strip plaza. It is called the ‘cheap store.’ Mike made it up, and I always figure it’s because it’s a low-end convenience store. I also believe it gets this name because of the stream of weirdos that frequent it. I stopped in to grab a few giant 5-Hour Energy drinks. They are the only place I know locally that has them. I was in there a total of 3 minutes, and in that time, I saw 5 people who could have been posts in the blog on their own. If I had to whittle it down to one, I’d go with the guy in the fur coat wearing shorts (on a 35-degree day) with sandals and socks. He was very interested in all of the specific nips that were behind the register. I got out of there as fast as I could to avoid any unseen shankings from the cheap store crew.

Greetings from the 'cheap store.'

8. The irony of old people going on social media to complain about younger people using social media isn’t lost on me. I see more people in general doing it, and I have to laugh. It’s like if you want to prove a point about social media, how about deleting your accounts and living your life? Or better yet, get a pencil and paper and write a letter to the opinion column of your local newspaper, like you would have done in the 1980s? It’s the need to feel important. I put this thought into practice this week. I realized that I got 5-10x more engagement on my photos on Threads rather than on Instagram with half of the followers. I had crafted a story post on IG announcing that I was going to be posting photos mainly on Threads from now on. Then I realized nobody would care about my announcement. So you know what I did? I just stopped sharing photos on IG without having to make a big production out of it.


9. This week, we finally got the classic unpredictable weather New England is known for. We were expected to get some sort of snow, but it kept going back and forth as far as how much. In the days leading up to the storm, it went from an inch to as much as 6 inches. Having lived in New England basically my entire life, I was hedging my bets about as far as how much snow we’d get. Instead of bringing the snow brush inside and lifting my windshield wipers up the night before, I left everything as it was. Naturally, we ended up on the heavier end of the snow totals. It was a snow shoveling afternoon but some good calorie burn according to my Fitbit. It could be a sign of a snowy winter, or, knowing New England, it’ll be 55 degrees on Christmas Day. We’ll see.


10. It’s amazing how time can go so slowly and quickly at the same time. 8 years ago this week, one of my oldest and very first friends of my life died suddenly. He had a wife and a young daughter and hadn’t even reached his 40th birthday. His name was Matt, and we shaped each other's formative years by being there for each other. We played, we rode bikes, we had adventures, we slept and ate at each other's houses, and we fought like brothers. Later in high school and into adulthood we lost touch; life just happens that way. In our late 30s, we reconnected in real life. We would seemingly always bump into each other at the grocery store. That became our adult hangout where we’d share stories of how life was going. One night in December 2017, I was beat up and tired from work. I just wanted to grab a few things in the store and go home. I spotted Matt, but he didn’t see me. I knew there would be another time to chat so I watched him push his cart around the corner at the end of an aisle and quickly got my shopping done. I can still see him rounding that corner forever in my mind. A few days later, I was getting a text from my sister Kate asking ‘what happened to Matt?’ It was a gut punch that in many ways I’ve never come back from. I had experienced death before but we knew it was coming. My Nana, my Aunt Christine, there was a long road to their final sunset. Not with Matt. I saw him one day and a few days later he was gone. Just remember that you don’t always have the time you think you do. Rest in peace, Matt. Until we meet again. For those interested, here is the podcast that I recorded in his memory.