Keeping Things Interesting

Last week, I took inventory of what was coming up this year.

I have a golf trip to Mesquite, Nevada in April, a speech at the State Bar's Annual Meeting in June, my annual trip to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.  I am also committed to a trip to upstate New York sometime later this year to visit my aunts and uncle, as well as a trip to Colorado to visit my nephew and his very significant other, dates to be determined soon.

On a weekly basis, I work out with my trainer A, I take weekly guitar lessons with my mother, play basketball every Saturday morning, play poker every other Tuesday, and am in a supper club with friends from the poker game once a month (this month - Polish food!).  

Every morning, I share my Wordle result with three groups of friends, and I solve the NYT Crossword as I have every morning for 1,145 consecutive days.  I also do the NYT's Strands, Connections, and mini-crossword, the Slate.com daily trivia quiz, the Washington Post's Keyword and On the Record puzzle, a game called Oroboro, and a game called Waffle.  I am also in-season for the Learned League, an invitation-only trivia league with extremely difficult questions.

Professionally, I have some pending matters in East Texas and West Texas, I am committed to updating two books on ethics and legal conflicts respectively, and I am now on the board of directors for the Houston Forensic Science Center.  I am also in the process of mapping out a book about a weird abbey in New York City in which I am currently the central character.

I am, technically, retired.

___________________________

When I turned 50, one of the gifts I received was a collection of individual beer cans from Spec's Liquor in downtown Houston from my friends J and L.  Fifty cans of beer from various microbreweries across the country.

In a contemplative mood ten years after the death of my father, I decided to take advantage of this largesse by writing a blog reviewing each of the beers and telling stories about my life.  I called the blog Fifty Beers for Fifty Years, and made it through sixteen beers over ten months before setting the blog aside, feeling like I had mostly said what I wanted to say.

But I guess I had other things to say.

In 2019, I played in the World Series of Poker Seniors Tournament, collecting backers at $5 a throw for my $1000 entry fee.  A live blog ensued - Scott is Playing the 2019 WSOP Seniors Tournament - and I found it extremely useful for focusing my attention on the game and avoiding boredom.  Plus it was fun to report on the strange and wonderful things I was seeing in LV.

In the years that followed, more live poker blogs ensued, some better than others, some significantly shorter than others (you can safely skip 2024):

Scott is Playing the 2021 WSOP Seniors Tournament

Scott is Playing the Main Event of the 2022 WSOP

Scott is Playing the Main Event of the 2023 World Series of Poker

Scott is Playing the 2024 Seniors and Super-Seniors WSOP Tournament

Scott is Playing the 2025 WSOP Seniors and Super-Seniors Tournaments

I also started a blog in 2022 about training for the New York Marathon that my trainer particularly appreciated:

Scott is Training for the XXXXXXXX Houston Half-Marathon

(I did not get into the New York Marathon, but the blog morphed into a blog about training for the 2024 Houston Half-Marathon, which I did not run, but did "run" in 2025 and 2026, one slow step at a time.  I am 62 years old, after all.)

That's the inventory of my blogging life.  Want to know me?  Start with these blogs.  

I contain multitudes.

____________________________________________

So what is this blog about?

A couple of days ago, I was walking to my car with my son after a Rockets game and we were talking about Kobe Bryant and Bam Adobayo's epic 83 point game.  I told my son that I had seen Kobe play several times, including games when the Lakers didn't care much about winning and were just letting Kobe shoot the ball on nearly every possession.  (It might have been this game in 2016, where Kobe went 6 for 11 in two-pointers, 4 for 11 from 3, and went 11 for 11 from the free throw line, and his team still lost to the Rockets 130-110.  That season - Kobe's last - the Lakers went 17-65.)

The night before, I had told my son that he should start journaling his life because it goes by so fast and you can't remember everything you'd want to remember when you are 62 and thinking about how you got where you got.  

And now here I was, proving the point, trying to remember that game where Kobe was right in front of me, blowing it up, having fun, dueling a pretty good Rockets team with James Harden and Dwight Howard and Patrick Beverley, and all I had was a bland fuzzy memory of a game at Toyota Center, no detail at all.  I wished I had a journal of seeing Kobe or Michael Jordan or Hakeem or LeBron, all of whom I had seen and enjoyed watching but could not remember in any kind of detail.

It also occurred to me that I was going to be blogging about the WSOP again and also wanted to start blogging about some things I had wanted to blog about but never committed to - e.g., reading the books in my personal library, recapping my father's last years, capturing my Wordle literature (more on that later), plus just some normal day-to-day journaling about an interesting life.

So that's what this will be.  All of the above and more, an attempt to capture 2026 in all of its messy and chaotic glory, so that I have something to read when I am old and gray and nostalgic for the time when I was young and lithe and agile.

___________________________________

Rules of the road:

(1)    I will not include pictures of my beautiful grandson. If you are close enough to me, you will already have them.  If you are not, I don't want his images in the widening gyre of the Internet.

(2)    I have no desire for this to be a viral site, even if it has cool stuff.  If you get the invitation to read this, that invitation is for you.  I would prefer that you share only with people who would actually care about this content.

(3)    Don't expect daily dispatches.  I will try to be as forthcoming as possible, but blogging is hard work, especially content creation.  I'd rather take my time and get it right than meet some arbitrary deadline.  I will probably be writing this in the morning after I solve the Wordle and the NYT Crossword.

(4)    I will be kind.  This is not a tell-all, score-settling account of my interesting life - it is going to be mostly stuff that amuses me and hopefully amuses you.  As Randy Newman sang in Shame, "I myself am no longer an angry man," and my writing will so reflect that lovely state of mind.

More rules will come to mind as we progress, I am sure.

____________________________________

So here is my first substantive entry.  In 2002, my father and I started corresponding about his life.  I had always intended to turn this into a small book for my mother and my family to read and reminisce about, but never got it done.  There were nineteen entries in this correspondence, and I will memorialize them here.  He was a wonderful father and a great man who also lived in interesting times.

What's your earliest memory?

My earliest memory:  I wrote a little bit about this when I wrote about your grandfather.  There's not one memory but a collection of them around when I was 4 or 5.

Your grandfather worked for a bus factory during World War II.  He was a supervisor and whenever there was a parade, he got to drive one of the school buses in the parade.  Marsha and I got to ride on the bus.  I remember riding on the bus.

Also during the war, many things were rationed, butter, gasoline, etc.  I remember going with my father to a little diner and my father and a waitress doing some sort of bartering with ration stamps.  I don't remember what was bartered but as a child it was exciting.

Around that time your grandfather got paint poisoning from regularly walking through the bus paint shop without a mask.  He was hospitalized and nearly died.  I remember going to the hospital which no longer exists in Oneida.

Your grandmother was hospitalized around the same time in the same hospital for goiter surgery. I remember visiting her and seeing her in an oxygen tent.

For what is is worth, here's my earliest memory.  I was visiting one of the aunts and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon in 1969.  I would have been five at the time.  I remember watching the live broadcast on a television in the corner of the living room, an old black and white TV, the screen bulging out of the wood cabinet, the picture not sharp, but sharp enough, and me having an understanding even at that age of how remarkable it was that there was a man all the way up there on the surface of the moon.

____________________________________

Today was core day at the gym after I did a three-mile walk at Memorial Park.  We started with the Sorenson Hold, then did sit ups on the bench holding a weighted bar, roll-ups with a rolling bar, a rotating kettlebell, and some kind of zipper crunch with my feet in a TRX.

The things I do to maintain my six-pack (hidden under a one-pack).

See you soon!