I am a cup-half-full kind of guy. I am a benefit-of-the-doubt, optimist type, which occasionally causes me to misjudge people, situations, and events. Recently on a (very flat) run, I started to wonder if I had massively misjudged the State of Ohio, my current home. I wondered (as I ran along a flat, cornfield-laced, straight-line bike path…

A thousand country songs attempt to depict what life is like growing up in rural America, but most are wildly unsuccessful. For the last 10-15 years, popular country music has become the genre of choice, not for actual country people, but for white, middle class suburbia. The reason that most country songs fail so miserably…

Yesterday, I slowly, carefully clicked through TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Photos of 2015 (http://time.com/4124895/top-100-photos-of-2015/).  Some of the photos were joyous and beautiful: the United States Women’s soccer team celebrating a big goal, a beluga whale spraying water at smiling Japanese children, and tulip fields blooming in the Netherlands. But many more of the photos were…

  My sweet Macie, It’s your first birthday today and I can’t help but fight back the tears.  I can’t believe you are already one; it just doesn’t feel real.  It feels like just a moment ago that I held you in my arms for the very first time.  Today, I can hardly contain you…

As most of you know, I attended law school at the University of Cincinnati.  It was a challenging, but fulfilling, three years.  Recently I’ve been reflecting on my experiences there, so this is the first of a series of posts about law school through my eyes.  I hope that even if you never attended law…

Lately, one of the most common questions posed to me is “What’s it like being a dad?”  I usually fumble around for an answer, trying to muster some token morsel that the inquisitor might find interesting.  “It’s fun,” I say, fully knowing that the word fun can’t even begin to describe what it’s like to hear my daughter…

Since Macie graced us with her presence on January 30th, everything in my life has changed for the better.  When my eyes first saw my sweet girl, and she was laid on my chest, my heart brimmed with joy and I knew that it would be impossible to love anyone more.  Little did I know…

Hey all, I thought it might be time to give you a Macie and Dearden update.  First of all, if you have seen Macie recently, you know that she is as healthy as can be!  As of this week, she will be completely weaned off of her seizure medicine.  According to her neurologist, the fluid…

Not all states are created equal. This is my completely unbiased ranking of the fifty states, from number one to number fifty. This will be a three part post. This first part will be numbers 1-15. The next post will be 16-30, and the final (and best) post will be 31-50. I will surely offend many of you…

My sweet baby girl, For the longest time, I kept putting off writing this letter to you.  Not because I didn’t want to, but because every time I tried to write, my emotions would well up and I couldn’t get a word out on paper.  So here it goes.  My thoughts may be disjointed, but…