Dad Chat - Checking In With All of You

Hey kids, it's been a while. I thought I'd take a moment to just check in with you to kind of give you the state of things, what I plan to do with this channel and what's been going on in my life because I think with social media a lot of times it can get lost that I'm actually a real person and I have things going on outside of this too. I don't have a team, it's just me basically trying to keep up and so that's why I've kind of been posting shorts because then I can post that on all my social media channels, on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram and on YouTube as a short. So that is why I've done that and you also know I do have a lot of content up there that's evergreen, so you can go back and look at some of the things that I've posted that are still relevant like unclogging a toilet, it's kind of the same thing but I do have some new content I just haven't got around to editing it because it's kind of a process if you've never done it before. There's a little bit involved and I am 62 now, you know I started this channel when I was 55 and I'm 62, so I'm kind of enjoying being semi-retired but I also have other things that are pulling for my time and I'll get into that here in just a little bit and we'll just talk about kind of the state of the channel, state of the union, state of the channel to get you up to speed just to so you know what I have going on in my life but before we do that I do have a dad joke for you. What do you call a factory that makes okay products? Sort of satisfactory. Sort of satisfactory. So anyway, so what I want to talk about today is just all the different things I got going on. You've seen me, if you've watched any of my shorts you know that I'm playing pickleball which is a whole journey so I'm going to kind of walk you through the journey of that and one of the nice things about it is I'm getting more healthy. I was a little bit stagnant where I wasn't doing a whole lot, I was walking my dog but now I've been getting out regularly and doing that and I've actually lost 20 pounds so I'm going to walk you through also what I've been doing to help with with the weight loss on my end besides exercise which has just been really good for me. So what I want to talk about, I want to talk about my pickleball journey and then also my weight loss that I've done and then I'm going to talk about some of the speaking engagements so that's another thing that takes some of my time. I'm going to be traveling. We like to travel, my wife and I have been traveling quite a bit just for fun, just to enjoy the creation and it's just amazing. We've been to several places, I'll talk about that and I have a lot of content from that so I've always wondered if I put that, start putting that up on my channel, would that confuse people or should I make a separate channel? I haven't really decided that yet and then you can make comments what you'd like to see from me. I have these speaking engagements coming up. I'm going to be speaking at a conference in Waco in October and then so I got a pretty full end of the year and then so let me just walk you through it in October. I've got that speaking engagement in Waco and then the end of the month I'm actually going to be going to do something fun. My sister and her husband have been married for 50 years in October and so we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go on a cruise and we're going to go to the and then end of November my son will come home and him and his wife, they got married last year, they've been married a year in October. They're going to come home and visit for Thanksgiving. Then in December my wife and I are going to go to Germany and we're going to go visit the Christmas markets. That's something we've always wanted to do. We're going to go on a tour where we're going to get bussed around to these different Christmas markets so we got that and then of course Christmas. I know Christmas is coming fast. The years just go by so fast. Every year just seems like it happens quicker and quicker and then in January this is kind of cool although with the state of the world I'm not sure. I'm a little hesitant to do it but I've been invited to Dubai to speak at a conference over there at the beginning of January so we'll see. If you know my journey at all when it comes to speaking in front of people that has been a learning curve for me. I've been doing the best that I can because I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and yet it's out of my comfort zone to be speaking in front of a large group and so I've forced myself to just do that as an example for you so if you hire me to come and speak just understand I'm not a professional speaker. I'm just a regular guy that's doing the best he can to share my gifts whatever my gifts are. I have gifts that you have you don't have but you have gifts that I don't have. There's things that I'm just not good at so I don't want you to ever think that I've mastered everything because I'm still learning in a lot of areas but anyway let's get into the different things that I mentioned. So the pickleball journey is actually fairly funny. I've been my old boss. I shouldn't call him old but he is. I talked to him several years ago about how he'd been playing pickleball and he just loved it and I saw that my local community center had pickleball and so I thought well I'll go down there and just check it out. I don't know what that looks like and I even made a quick recording of it that was in March of 2025 and I'm sitting in the parking lot and I just kind of talk about it. Well I just officially started my pickleball career. I had to get out and get some exercise today so ran for about almost two hours. It's pretty good. I just need to get some exercise and so it's pretty fun. Anyway we'll see how this goes. Hope you're having a great day. And I didn't know what I was doing and I saw an older person. I mean I'm an older person but this is a really older person walking in and I'm like oh oh no what have I gotten myself into. I don't know what to even think and I was even thinking do I need to bring a partner. I don't know. I know nothing and so I go in to play pickleball. I didn't even know how to play and so it's a little embarrassing but I have to just show you this. This is fairly funny. So this was my first pickleball battle. I had bought it at Marshalls and it's got like the paper on it. You know how they put paper on over wood so it's super slick. Anyway and it's actually fairly small compared to what my new pickleball paddle is. So this is the pickleball paddle I use now and you can see that you know it's quite a bit smaller so the surface area on it. But anyway so when I went in with this and when if you've ever played pickleball and when you go in they usually have a rack there that has that you put your paddle in to show that you want to play. And so I go in and I put mine in. I'm not thinking anything of it. That's how clueless I am. So I go in and I put that there and then you know when when a court becomes open they pull out the paddles and then they hold them up. Okay court court and then here's my paddle compared to what other people were using. All these fancy paddles. I bought this as a set of there was two paddles and I think a couple balls for $20 at Marshalls thinking I got a pickleball paddle. Anyway I went home that night and quickly bought one off of Amazon just so I wouldn't go back when I played in two days with with that paddle. There's one guy that still gives me a bad time about that paddle but I'm gonna hang on to it just because it's funny. You know I've now played in that charity tournament if you if you follow me on my other channels with shorts and that sort of thing or reels. I played in a tournament and it was pretty cool. I got to play with some former Seahawks and then also Sean Kemp if you're a basketball fan. He was amazing basketball player. Super nice guy too. Yeah really humble. He's a gentle giant. He made me look small and I'm I'm 6'2 if you don't know that. I'm 6'2 and you know I got a fairly large build so I standing next to Sean Kemp I he dwarfed me and so here's a picture of that that I'll share with you. Yeah so there's that and then I met Doug Baldwin and Cliff Averill and I didn't actually get to meet Michael Bennett. He was there and then Marshawn Lynch was actually there too. He was he was Marshawn Lynch so I was able to sneak this picture. My friend went across the court and took a picture of me standing behind him. So anyway yeah so it was just a great experience. It was really fun to just kind of walk around and and I actually played as a celebrity. You know I still feel uncomfortable with that but there was so the way they did it is you entered the the tournament and then you were paired with a celebrity and I just got paired with my son-in-law and then a friend of mine and so we played as a threesome that way and you just rotated in but other people got to play with different celebrities so it was a great experience. We didn't do very well so but we were there for the experience and it was for a good cause too. It was for Doug Baldwin's charity called Champions of Change so pretty cool. Anyway and then after that the following weekend last that was actually last weekend my friend and I Steve played in a tournament at the Washington State Senior Games and we actually did really well. You have to finish in the top three to advance to the National Senior Games and so we did that and we actually took gold. We won and so you play by age group and by your skill level and since I've never played in a real tournament before other than the charity one where you're ranked didn't really know what my skill level was was guessing I was pretty good. Steve's only been playing for just a few months. I got him into it and asked him if he wanted to play in this because we wanted my goal was to play in what has been called the Senior Olympics but it's actually the National Senior Games and they'll be in Tulsa so I'll be playing in Tulsa next June so you qualify this year to play next year in Tulsa so so that's pretty cool. I'll be traveling to Tulsa end of June because we won the gold. So let's talk about my weight loss journey which is very cool. I uh because I've been playing pickleball and getting more active and trying to eat healthier too. My wife's been on that too and she's lost some weight. She hasn't really been playing pickleball but she's been working out and I've been doing this pickleball thing just I love it. It's just really good exercise and one of the things I really like about it too I forgot to mention this when I was talking about pickleball one thing I one observation that I made is it's interesting because most of us are old of course I'm playing on certain days at the community center where it's 50 and over so it's set up for older people there's other days where younger people play but the cool thing about it the observation that I made was you know when you're in kindergarten and first grade and everybody plays with everybody and you just enjoy each other's company and you're innocent and then you you know you start getting into second third fourth grade and you start dividing in your clicks and why are you talking to that person why are you talking to that person what I can't I thought why can't I I thought they were that was okay and yeah you you divide into your clicks and then that lasts fairly long until in my experience it happened until college and then everybody kind of comes back around together there's still some people with uh that think they're better than you or what have you but for the most part people kind of grow out of it but now we're back as seniors we've kind of lived our lives so to speak had kids had our careers had everything and most of these people are retired I even play there's one gentleman that's 88 his name's Dick just a super nice guy and yeah I like to play with him because I like to try to encourage him plus I I'm able to run around a lot better than him and kind of cover for him so that he can enjoy not moving a whole lot but still getting some good shots and he gets some good spin on the ball so anyway yeah that that's been been pretty fun this video is sponsored by helix sleep my wife and I travel fairly frequently so we've slept on lots of different mattresses over the past several years especially sometimes we wake up really refreshed and other times we wake up feeling worse than when we went to sleep so recently after sleeping on a great mattress while traveling when we came home and slept on the mattress that we had we realized we needed to upgrade ours when we were looking for a better mattress I liked that helix doesn't expect everyone to sleep on the same thing they have a quick sleep quiz that matches you with a mattress based on how you actually sleep after taking the short quiz we were matched with the helix midnight lux we placed our order and our mattress arrived within a week since we've been sleeping on our new helix mattress one of the biggest things I've noticed is that I wake up feeling more rested I don't toss and turn nearly as much and the mattress gives me the support I was missing I also ordered the cooling cover which has been really nice during these warm summer nights so if you've been waking up sore sleeping hot or just aren't sleeping as well as you used to it might not be your pillow or your topper it could simply be time for a better mattress helix mattresses come with free shipping and 120 day sleep trial to make sure that you're completely satisfied if you'd like to check them out use this link here and I'll also leave it in my description to take the helix sleep quiz they're having their labor day sale where you can save up to 30 off select mattresses thanks again to helix sleep for sponsoring today's video yeah I thought that ad would fit in because you do need to get a good night's sleep if you're going to be healthy you want to be able to you know get get good rest so you can get back up and go back out and conquer the world right so to speak so even if you're not trying to lose weight if you're working and you have a lot of stress you want to get a good night's sleep so that's that's super important so so here's how I've lost the weight this is one of the things I've been doing so this is what I've been eating for breakfast and it really makes me feel full for quite a long time so I don't have to eat as much so I use this pumpkin flax seed that I get from Costco and then I these slivered almonds I use those I get those from Trader Joe's and then I use this chia seed and my wife actually prepares it so she pre-soaks it keeps it in the fridge and then I just add like a teaspoon I'm using a tablespoon here so it's about this that's about a teaspoon that I use and I just mix that in then I slice up some bananas or just one banana basically and I just slice it these thin slices like that then I add this Ceylon cinnamon which is actually real cinnamon a lot of what passes for cinnamon actually isn't cinnamon I don't know if you know that or not and then I just add this lactose-free low-fat milk I don't know if it needs to be lactose-free but we have that's what we have and that's what I use and that's what I have for yeah so I have lost 20 pounds and I hope to if I can lose another 15 this is embarrassing how big I'd let myself get and I was actually even bigger a few years prior to starting my channel I was even bigger than that but I so once I kind of level that a certain weight I'm not going to tell you my weight I've lost 20 pounds from there and if I lose another 15 I'll be back down to my college football playing weight so I'm hoping to get there certainly not as strong as I was when I was in college but anyway if I can get down to that weight I think I'll be satisfied I might look a little bit different but that's okay so here's another thing we've been doing a lot is traveling like I mentioned and this year we traveled to Egypt and that was amazing to see the ancient history that is Egypt to be able to walk in the footsteps of pharaohs pretty amazing we made sure to try to see as much of the things as we could we even bought extra excursions because we we did the the plan through Costco where we did we bought a where they a tour where they kind of you grouped with the people super nice people and we our group was supposed to have 35 people but there was only 10 people because of the state of the world some people had canceled so we only had 10 people in our group so it was really close-knit and we got to spend a lot of time with the tour director and we you know it was fairly intimate getting to ask lots of questions and pretty crazy getting to see the pyramids and the sphinx and just all that ancient history because in America we have our history only goes back 250 years right and so you don't have all that ancient history so it was really really cool and I really like that and we've done several trips like that in the past several years so if it makes sense to do more travel video and just kind of show you that I thought one of the things that would really fit is how to travel like how to pack your suitcase and certain etiquette I get I get a little frustrated when I'm on the airplane and there's certain people that just maybe they don't know or maybe they don't care I don't know but there's certain things it's like uh you know can you be aware that there's other people on this plane besides you so I've thought about doing some videos on that too so maybe that would be helpful I do plan to continue to post content um that I hope is helpful to you like I said I have a whole library of content that you can go back to I don't know how YouTube looks in the algorithm I'm not so caught up in that maybe somebody knows better than me but I could probably just repost some of the stuff I have or redo it and maybe I'll do that I don't know I just want stuff that's helpful to you I'm not chasing the algorithm I'm just trying to be a good steward of what the gifts I've been given I'm trying to share what I know to you to try to make your life easier I do have a lot of money Monday content for you I think if you pieced them all together or or watch the playlist of just the shorts you'd have a pretty good understanding of money it's my perspective on money other people are going to have other perspectives but I think you probably could just get a pretty good grasp of some of the conversations that I've had with my own kids about money like the rule of 72 and what that is how to invest and how to write a check there's just so much of that stuff that I already have out I could redo it but it's already there so again the algorithm you have to kind of do a little bit of work because you'll have to go back and actually look at my channel and see some of the content but that's uh that's there for you wisdom Wednesdays there's a lot of wisdom in my wisdom Wednesdays and a lot of times I've shared this before that they there's a lot of wisdom that uh I've learned the hard way or maybe it's something that I'm going through at the time that I'm just wanting to share with you so I hope that if you have time you could just you know go through the just bits of wisdom over and over again and there's a playlist that I have that just has a bunch of them so some of the stuff you might have to chew on so maybe just listen to one a day and then pretty soon again a lot of this stuff is things that I'm sharing because my daughter calls me pretty often and we talk all the time and a lot of that stuff uh this is it's kind of like having a conversation with me in a sense that this is how I would handle that situation and I think through those wisdom Wednesdays you can glean a lot of wisdom and maybe figure out okay this is maybe the decision he would make in this situation I've also been thinking about doing tool Tuesday again kind of getting that going uh and just have a short these would just be shorts though of and go through every tool that I have so that you would have a short understanding and maybe might go longer than a short I don't know maybe three minutes two or three minutes a short on YouTube is three minutes but other channels they kind of limit that but uh yeah so I my plan is to to do that and so it might be just as simple as a hammer how how do you use a hammer and there are certain tricks with a hammer you might be surprised of different little things that you can do with the hammer then also up the more complicated things like my pressure washer or my air compressor different things like that that I have familiarity with I'm not going to get into stuff that I don't have or you know maybe I will but I'd have to have a guest on like my brother chainsaws I don't have a chainsaw because I don't live on a farm I have no need for one and so I could bring in my brothers I guess to to kind of show how those work if that made sense to do that but we won't do that until until it's necessary just so you know just to wrap up I I will post as often as my uh my schedule allows but just understand I'm traveling I'm playing pickleball trying to get healthy I've got speaking engagements I also do interviews still too I've got one with the BBC coming up this week that I have to do and so those are also going on I'm just trying to do the best I can with the time that I've been given but also you know I want to spend time with my wife I want to spend time traveling want to do other things too and we are six years in I'm trying to keep from being burnt out some people I just wish you'd post more well I don't know what you want me to post about what what would you like to see I kind of know what you'd like to see but also you know I'm not just going to post just just to post I'm trying to post things that I think would be helpful for you as you navigate your life so that's the thinking in my own mind you know it's a little bit tough I have people you know hey can I talk to you I just don't have the bandwidth to do that I think that's a little bit uh I don't even want to open that can of worms because I just can't I don't have the bandwidth to do it as much as I'd like to I'd love to have conversations with all of you and maybe as we as I get older there's there'll be an opportunity to have meetups I don't know I don't know what that looks like uh but anyway just trying to protect my own sanity so anyway I just thought I'd just have this check-in with you so you can know what's going on with me what to expect I do have a lot of content that just isn't edited like I uh put up a lattice on my fence I put in some steps or I actually put slate over the steps uh what else have I done I've done I patched a hole in my wall that also patched then there's a hole on the outside of the wall too that I also patched because if you've ever had cable ran in your house and maybe the cable doesn't work anymore and it's just sitting there I needed to patch that up and get rid of it because it's really it wasn't I had one wire running into my garage and everything and it really wasn't relevant anymore I wasn't using that particular uh connection so I had to get rid of it lots of other little things that I've recorded that I just haven't posted because I just haven't had the time so anyway I hope this was uh helpful to you to just kind of help you understand where I'm coming from and what's going on thank you Helix for uh for sponsoring this video I very much appreciate that and we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching and God bless you