Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

1.  A lot of things we stress about are really not that important, and vice versa.

2.  Good pitching beats good hitting, and vice versa.

3.  Most of the trinkets we buy on vacation as souvenirs end up hiding in closets to be pulled out when you finally move.

4.  Don't forget to stretch as you get older before you exercise, or get out of bed even.

5.  Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.  Ogden Nash.

6.  A really cool, fast, slick expensive car is not worth it really.  You almost certainly will never drive it at its limits.  It will depreciate like a banshee.

7.  Never buy anything that eats or uses gasoline, unless you want to.

8.  The two happiest days in a man's life is the day he buys a boat/convertible, and the day he sells it.

9.  Good friends are valuable.  Treat them that way.

10.  Be as nice to people you meet as possible and have a plan to kill them if needed.

11.  There is a substitute for cubic inches.

12.  Weight is a LOT easier to put on than take off.  Don't think you'll exercise one day when you "get around to it" and get back into shape after you retire.  Ha.

13.  Owning a house seems like a really nice thing, but be prepared to spend most of your free time fixing stuff and maintaining it.

When moving, I ran across a box of old Sports Illustrateds.  Some of them had Dawgs on the cover, like #34.  I mulled about keeping some of them, but I realized they had been in that box in the basement for decades, so out they went.  If you have something in a box for decades, it's probably not something you "need" or even want.

I also accumulated a lot of photos, many of them slides, I used to shoot color positive film a lot, in those rotary slide racks.  They all went to trash, same reason.

Today of course a photo costs nothing to shoot with a camera.  Back then a print was fairly expensive unless you did it yourself.  I did B&W a fair bit at one time.  But, we have all these photos now on our computers and phones and rarely look at them.

Our wedding was going to be "small".  I suppose it was relatively.  I asked a friend who is a photographer to take some photos, so we invited him and his wife obviously.  The wife then thought we should have a real photographer, so we did.  Then she wanted a wedding planner, so we did.

We ended up with a dinner the night before hosted by friends with 29 people and then 29 at the wedding which was in the back yard as planned and then the next day a reception at friends' house for 60 people.  Small indeed.  I also hosted a dinner for participants the night of the wedding for the 29 folks, 10 of them had come across the ocean for the event, at a ritzy steak house.  That actually was very nice.  Her good friend from Brazil only drinks Roederer and I found the California equivalent to serve and got the wine at retail pricing for the dinner.  It helped to have a good friend in the business and the restaurant went along with it.  (My steak come out over cooked that night and I wasn't going to say anything but one of the servers saw it and insisted on replacing it.  I had that over done steak doggy bagged and made some serious beef stew two nights later.)

She also bought a wedding dress for however much and then paid to have it packaged and preserved somehow.  Wore it once of course. I wore a suit, new, I bought for $200.

Another good item of advice from an Old Man is "Let your wife have her way unless it really really really is important, and it generally is not.  If she wants a Mercedes and can swing it, let her buy a Mercedes.  You can happily drive your 12 year old Volvo and usually let her have your way.

Did I mention anything about buying boats?

My wife is totally against buying an RV (I don't especially want one either).  I kid her about getting one often though.  She tells me to have fun on my own and she'll visit me on occasion.  She's never been inside an RV.  In Europe, an RV has a very different social connotation than it does here.

I also find my wife to be more sensible about a lot of things than I am so I've learned to listen to her advice.

Avoid clutter in your life, physical and mental.

Compromise is often a lot better than winning, and winning often is Pyrrhic.

Be the person your dog thinks you are.

When in Boston we drove by Walden Pond, but didn't visit.  It did get me to pull up the wiki page on Thoreau though.

Wiki is a lot better than I would ever have expected for such a concept.