My wife took that picture, when we were out on a date a few months ago.
Christmas 2025 is a week from now, and I have to go buy toys for my twins at some point in the next few days. Their mother got a full time job at a local daycare, aand I’m selling roofs and solar, so I still have some free time while the girls are in kindergarten.
They have 2 weeks off for Christmas, so it’s just me and 2 six year old maniacs as of next Monday.
I might take the twins to the zoo, Tampa aquarium, maybe go see a movie.
This is my first Christmas season in the roofing business, but it probably won’t be busy. I sell many jobs remote now; the client calls, I send over an online proposal, we have a few conversations over the phone, I send over a docusign contract and the deal closes. I don’t meet some of my clients in person. Weird, eh?
Mary Ann and the twins came here 13 months ago, and it certainly has been an adjustment. My life is different now, there are kids asking me for stuff, from 6AM to 9PM at night!
I have Google back-up for the pics on my phone, and the Google AI puts togther albums and send me a message; yesterday it sent me pictures for “three years ago on this day”…
In 2022 I had driven down to Ft. Myers (as a volunteer) to help clean up after hurricane Ian:
That video shows the storm surge when Ian made landfall at a Catagory FIVE storm on September 28, 2022. That storm cheated havoc, in a 50 mile radius above and below Ft. Myers.
Just the WIND from hurricane Ian caused lotsa damage:
I had reached out to a Methodist church just outside of Ft. Myers; they said there were a ton of trees down, so I loaded up my Chevy with extra gas tanks and my electric chainsaw…
Good times!
Gas stations were not operational as far as 30 miles north of Ft. Myers, but my hybrid Chevy Volt could go about 50 miles on a gallon of gas, so the extra gas that I carried with me kept me going.
The pastor of the Methodist church invited me to stay at his home, and I gladly took him up on that offer.
That pastor did not know me from Adam, but I guess he trusted me because I was coming there to volunteer. I found his info on Facebook, so he might have looked at my profile to check me out.
So many homes had been destroyed that the hotels were booked. There was also a National Guard presence all over the area, so they were booking out local hotels as well.
The power was down sporadically, so if a traffic signal was down a National Guard soldier would stand there and direct traffic. As I drove south to Ft. Myers I saw utility trucks from all over the Southeast headed in the same direction… some from as far North as Pennsylvania and New York.
Just driving down I could see billboards totally destroyed from the wind damage. Trees were leaning in the direction the wind had blown at 140+ mph. Most folks have no idea what 140mph wind feels like, I can tell you from riding motorcycles how powerful the wind becomes over 100mph. At 140mph or higher it feels like the wind was going to remove me from the motorcycle. My fastest run on my Kawasaki was 190mph, and I was holding on with most of my strength, with my chest touching the gas tank.
As you can see from the video link above the storm surge was up to the roofline in several places.
The church pastor sent me to several homes with downed trees, so for most of my time in that area I was running my electric chainsaw and cutting huge trees into smaller pieces, in the Florida heat. I burned through 3 chains, and stopped at Lowe’s to buy extra batteries. Got a nice tan, worked until I was bone-weary.
I’ve done some varied volunteer work; water filters in Honduras, donating blood, Habitat for Humanity in Dade City, my trip to Ukraine right after the Russian invasion in April 2022 (probably the wildest one so far). In my college years I was a volunteer firefighter at station 23-2 in Ewan, NJ.
(Getting on the flight to Warsaw, to get over the border to Ukraine, April 2022)
These were all adventures, unique memories. Of course, I’m married again, with 2 little girls in kindergarten who rely on me. No Ukraine trips now.
When I went to Ukraine my oldest daughter Claire thought I was being a selfish asshole because I could die over there. She was mad at me for awhile, even after I got back.
Part of this volunteering is my attampt to feel good about myself, maybe because at some level I think I’m NOT a good person and helping people out pulls me closer to that which is good and loving.
Part of it is sheer boredom along with that self destructive part of me that wants to get really close to DEATH without jumping over that wall.
I feel like I understand Evil, but I don’t want to BE evil, if that makes sense.
In the last few weeks I’ve been organizing the security team at our little local church. That’s another volunteer role as well, making sure a maniac doesn’t shoot up the place while everyone is singing hymns.
Technology was vastly different in my college years from 1992 to 1997.
I had no cell phone, there was no social media, no dating apps… if I saw a pretty girl on campus I would have to introduce myself, and get the the number to her landline! I had a little notebook with the phone numbers of my friends and the girls I wanted to date…
I used to call girls and ask them on a real date, typically a movie or we would grab a bite to eat at the local New Jersey diner. There were thousands of girls on my college campus, so I always had a date on any weekend night.
I always paid, and I kept my 10 year old used Toyota clean, because I knew girls liked a clean car, and a cleancut guy. I was overly fascinated by the opposite gender in my college years, and I always have a job or three to pay for dates and the constant repairs on my old car.
This is how I looked in my 20’s:
I was not ugly, and I always kept my image cleancut. I saw dating as a numbers game (this worked later in my sales career)… if I talked to 100 girls some would have boyfriends, some would have zero interest in me, and some would gladly give me their number.
Being cleancut as a young man was an advantage. Very few college kids in the 1990’s had body ink or visible tattoos, until college girls in the 1990’s started the Tramp Stamp tattoo trend. Ugh.
If I got fired from one of my part-time jobs I would get hired somewhere else by the end of the day.
Even now at age 51 I can get hired for any sales job in 20 seconds.
Back to the dating scene in the 1990’s….
There was zero texting because no one had cell phones in 1992, and there was no Instagram, no facebook where a guy could “slip into the DM’s”. Porn was only available in dirty magazines sold at “Triple XXX” places. There was no Only Fans, no Netflix and Chill, just real conversations, either on the phone or in person.
I didn’t actually buy a cell phone until I was married in 1997, and my wife was pregnant with our daughter. I got the phone so she could call me if she went into labor.
When I got my first cell phone in 1997 it did NOT have a camera, and at the time only 20% of American adults even owned a cell phone. My first phone had no text capability or internet, it could only make calls and save phone numbers. First camera phone in the USA came out in the summer of 2000.
I was still using the electric typewriter at the school library to write term papers, by 1997 I started to go to the “computer lab” to write my papers on the school computer, and I would save a copy on a little hard disk.
The first time I used email was after I got my degree!
My parents still had a paper newspaper delivered to our home, and I still got a paper newspaper delivered to my home until around 2004.
I want to a university in South Jersey, while Clinton was President, but I don’t remember any of my fellow students being political at all. I’m sure we had political groups on campus, but there was not an obvious Right vs. Left debate or conflict at the time.
I was NOT a Christian back then, I might have gone to Church on Christmas Eve with me parents… and I only remember one friend (Leah) who was openly Christian and telling folks about her Faith.
I was in the music department at my college, so there were openly gay students, but no trans or non-gender or binary or any of the other classifications that popped up in the last 10 years.
The gay guys were feminine, the lesbian girls had short hair and wore construction boots, that was the extent of it. I think my generation was the first generation in which folks were openly gay outside of the city centers. I do NOT remember any type of gay pride parades at my college, LGBT was more of a subtle thing.
There was no cure for HIV / AIDS in the early 1990’s, so sexually active college students were concerned about getting infected. Older gay men were dying from AIDS in the early 90’s, and then AZT became available and AIDS was no longer a death sentence. ALSO, more straight couples were worried about AIDS back in the 1990’s, it was later on that stats showed far higher tranmission rates in the gay community.
I sang in our university Chamber Choir and became friends with the gay and straight men in that choir, I asked them questions about their lifestyle, mainly because I didn’t understand how a man could be attracted to another man. I was so attracted to women that if there was a pretty lady in one of my classes I would only hear half of what the professor was teaching that day.
I think my campus experience was left leaning, I switched from a music major to economics, and there was more teaching about “the Chicago School” thinker Milton Friedman (left leaning) than thinkers like Ludwig Von Mises, a more right leaning economist.
In the 1990’s we were influenced by books, limited television, and conversations with our friends and family, there was no social media algorithm designed to divide and radicalize our viewpoints.
No “ragebait”, conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh were on the radio, but only if you dialed to his channel. Today your YouTube feed that will send you conservative commentators all day long if you fall down that rabbit hole. If you start watching Left Leaning YouTube videos you will get more content along those same lines.
The whole Charlie Kirk shooting is verification of some of the rage brewing out there, and social media magnifies that rage a thousandfold.
Of course, as Artificial Intelligence gets more advanced I’m afraid we will be influenced even MORE by very sophisticated video and media designed to influence our opinions. Kinda scary actually.
The AI won’t kill us, it will convince us to kill each other.
This is where we need to go back to real conversations, face to face, between people of different viewpoints.
I recorded this earlier today, on my morning walk:
I started reading scripture and earnestly praying on a daily basis over the last 3 years.
I married a Christian woman who stands firm in her beliefs. She’s unshakable.
Certain things in the Bible are crystal clear, like “Thou shalt not kill”.
“Go Forth and Multiply”
“the Body is a Temple.”
For this reason I don’t know how any Christian can support certain causes and beliefs.
Who wins in your heart?
The Bible or Modern Society?
Jesus Christ or Media Lies?
Faith or embracing the twisted beliefs of a Fallen world?
Satan is a LIAR, and the more I listen to (well-meaning) human beings twist things around they more I return back to the simple truths in scripture. Even the human beings in my FAMILY.
If you actually READ scripture it’s pretty hard to be pro-murder / pro-choice, etc.
Jesus was not “tolerant” of the money changers in the Temple, nor should Christians be “tolerant” of people who openly celebrate and promote their sins.
There is so much 9/11 content on YouTube now; found footage, extensive engineering analysis about why the buildings fell, computer generated animations about what took place, tragic audio tapes…
I was on a business trip, sitting in a hotel room in Ohio, on the phone with my Dad, who worked at the Salem II nuclear power plant in New Jersey. We were both watching the TV when the 2nd plane hit.
I had Dad’s work phone number, a landline… he didn’t have a cell phone yet!
Dad got off the phone right away, because when the 2nd plane hit he realized the power plant might also be a target… imagine a jetliner crashing into the radioactive core of a nuclear power plant.
When that 2nd plane hit we all realized that something diabolical was unfolding, in front of us, in real time. Something intentional, tragic and murderous.
The deaths of innocent people, just like us.
This clip above is especially upsetting, those civilians on that plane probably saved many lives by preventing a crash into a larger target, like the Capitol building.
One of the main fears and concerns of a homeowner looking at solar options is whether the solar will damage their roof long term. Many solar installers right here in Florida got started in the 2010’s, installed hundreds of systems, then went out of business. If a homeowner had a roof leak several years after their install they had no one to turn to, no company to call.
After hurricane Milton damaged tens of thousands of roofs in the Tampa Bay area in November of 2024 homeowners with solar panels on their damaged roofs had to pay a premium to get the panels taken down by a licences solar installer while paying a roofer to fix the roof.
For this reason we think that the BEST solar installers moving forward will be the companies that are licensed roofers in addition to being licensed solar and battery back-up installers. These roofing / solar companies will be more stable than companies that only install solar, mainly because the solar marketplace is highly volatile, while the market for residential roofing is more steady and predictable.
If you are shopping for solar right now, anywhere in the United States, consider companies that can install roofing and solar.
When the twins first came to the USA in late 2024 we enrolled them in kindergarten and they were NOT ready, especially Thania. Thania was born a preemie at only 1.6 lbs, so she’s 6 years old by the calender, but more similar in development to a 5 year old child.
Mary Ann and I decided to have both girls repeat kindergarten, and this summer Mary Ann worked hard to make sure the girls were farther along in terms of the the alphabet and basic reading. This past week they started kindergarten again, and they seem to be doing well.
The teachers and admin folks at the local elementary school have really been helpful with the girls, I don’t regret putting them in kindergarten 8 months ago, because it showed us what they both needed to work on in terms of their writing and ability to communicate in English.
At 6 years old both girls still need to learn more English, but after 8 months here in the USA they are getting better at communicating and expressing their needs. It also helps that they are older now, with better ability to manage their emotions.
They are happy girls, overall:
I just made that this morning, thought the music was cool.
A little background on the twins; their father died a year before I met Mary Ann. I knew when I met her that I was stepping back into a fatherhood role.
I asked God for a Christian wife and He blessed me with these precious girls ALSO.
I was NOT a perfect Dad to Claire and Grace, who are now in their 20’s. Perhaps this was my 2nd chance to do it better this time, walking in Faith, praying everyday with my daughters and being a far better example to Thania & Thalia.
God tends to over deliver, but He never gives us anything we can’t HANDLE.
In many ways I could have stayed single, with no responsibilities just living my life like many men after a divorce, maybe occasionally dating, or not. Not dating is always the simplest way to exist, really.
But God knew that I had ample room in my heart for these little girls, as well as their mother.
After our last breath we will be judged, probably by how much we LOVED others in this lifetime.
My wife came to the USA less than a year ago, and she has a friend up in Boise, so we decided to go up to that area and have a little vacation. We flew in and out of Spokane because I got a deal on plane tickets and car rentals, the daily car rental rates for the other airports in the Northwest were super high; Seattle was $400 a DAY for a small SUV!
On the first day I met a cool DOG in Cambridge Idaho, so I had to record this:
During the trip we spent time in Spokane, Boise, and the little mountain town of JOSEPH in northeastern Oregon near the Wallowa Lake recreation area. We saw lotsa cattle and wheat farms, drove up and down a bunch of twisty mountain roads.
This part of the USA has varied topography; from high flat plains to steep mountains covered in pine trees. We drove through beautiful farm valleys, carpeted in green fields. It seemed like every hour of driving we saw totally unique landscapes. The drive from the mountain town of Joseph, north back to Spokane was especially interesting. VERY cool place to take a roadtrip.
Mary Ann loved the mountains, waterfalls and scenic highways in Washington, Idaho and Oregon. Prior to this trip we had only traveled around the FLAT state of Florida.
After 2 days in Boise we drove 4 hours over the the town of Joseph and Wallowa Lake, this was recorded while hiking up the mountains just south of Lake Wallowa state park:
We were somewhat limited by the twins, they did a great job hiking up the mountain in the short above, at 7,000 feet above sea level. They longer car rides were a bit much for them at times. We let them run around and burn off their energy as much as possible.
So now Mary Ann has seen parts of FOUR states, with many more to go.
I had been out the the Northwest a few times before, when I ran a staffing agency 10 years ago, but Idaho was a new state for me. At this point I’ve been to more than 45 states, mostly for work.
The twins enjoyed the trip, I hope they have some great memories of it…
At the same time, the twins are perfectly happy to stay home and just run around the local McDonald’s playland, so there’s that. All they want to do is eat junk food, play and sleep, and they can do that anywhere. They both turned AGE 6 on this trip!
Next week the girls start kindergarten here in Florida, so we are excited about that.
In the last year I was a bit stressed about my career, so I hadn’t taken my family on many trips because of the money issue. This summer I left Tampa Bay Solar (after 8 years) and started selling for Elevate Roofing and Solar. This move gave me better financial security, and this trip was a way to turn the page on that last chapter in my life.
I also realized (while climbing the mountain) that I need to lose weight, in a drastic fashion!
Time to change some habits, going to the gym after I write this.
I understand why most of the 1,000+ Epstein island victims have NOT come forward.
Epstein himself was killed in a high security prison, victim Virginia Guiffre was killed… so I’m not blaming the victims for just staying quiet and not coming forward.
But what about Trump talking about his preference for young women on Howard Stern? Or all the pics and video of Trump hanging out with Epstein?
It’s all such a mess; and the Trump administration is pretty much cooked at this point.
2025 feels like The Year of Chaos; between the Trump sex scandals, rise of murderous Artificial Intelligence, bombing of Iran nuclear sites, genocide in Gaza, rumors of the Rapture, floods everywhere, etc.
We live in a Fallen World, and that becomes more obvious every single day.
I recorded this earlier today:
We battle PRINCIPALITIES, powers that rule in darkness…
One theory about the Rapture is that RIGHT NOW Christians everywhere prevent the rise of The AntiChrist, but if the Rapture happens, and all those Christians are gone?
Then there is NOTHING holding back the evil domination of the world by Satan’s proxies.
Don’t be Left Behind, get right with CHRIST today, right now, right here.
If you haven’t asked Christ to enter your heart, or you’ve hesitated to embrace Faith… you might want to reconsider that stance.
TRY THIS PRAYER :::::::::::::
“Jesus Christ, please enter my heart and forgive me of all my sins. I place my heart and soul in Your able hands, coming before you in humility, knowing that I’m a sinner and that Your Salvation is my only bulwark against evil. Please give me the strength and fortititude to bring more lost souls to You Lord, Amen.”
You can say this prayer yourself, and protect yourself from all the evil that is continuously attacking you and your family. Satan hates heartfelt prayer, he hates families that are close and LOVING, Satan hates strong marriages in which husband and wife pray together.
Satan hates it when folks read the Bible, pray for others, and turn away from sin.
Satan especially hates it when strong Christians reach out to others who are LOST and brings them closer to Jesus Christ.
I hope you have a blessed day, I’m cleaning up my front garden today.
10% commissions, average roof here in Florida is now $15,000 and up.
I tried other hourly jobs, but they SUCKED. If I can move a few roofs each week…
With the loss of the 30% tax credit I think the demand for solar will drop off, probably until panel prices go down. Of course, the prices charged by the utility companies are always increasing, so that makes the ROI on solar that much faster.
My first week in roofing I closed 2 deals, and made some decent $$.
I mean, at least until the Rapture, right?
Will it happen? Is it just clickbait?
If Jesus comes to take all the Christians home I hope I don’t get left behind.
That would be awful. Just imagine a world full of people like this:
Who knows if that guy is real or not. Oy.
Makes me wonder how many guys in prison will go with Christ (during the Rapture) while normal guys out in the world will be left behind. All the kids will go, that will be awful for parents who don’t have Christ in their heart.
I pray to Christ, on a regular basis;
“Jesus, please enter my heart, guide me with Your Love and Grace. Forgive my sins, I place my entire life in Your hands Lord, forever and ever, Amen.”
And is this is NOT the End Times? I’m closer to Christ, in alignment with His favor.
Ben Alexander writes. 