I’m 40 now. Almost dead.

So, as I approach my final years (RIP), I’ve been reflecting a lot on the past decade and what I want going forward.

On my 30th birthday, I moved to Chicago to kick off a new, stressful, and fruitful trajectory in my life and career.

In that decade, I took some risks, took advantage of some big opportunities, worked hard, had some big wins, lucked out, and burned out.

On paper, our net worth quickly went from negative to a couple milli. We got a new house. New cars. Traveled a lot. It felt like success. Not quite "made it" success, but definitely success..

After buying the house, we immediately started remodeling it, which turned into the biggest set of personal construction projects that I've undertaken. It was …

So, my friend Carol has this theory that you truly begin your middle aged life once you become thirty three and a third. She's based this on the idea that if we live to be ~100 years old (yea right), the first third of your life is from 0 to 33.3 years old, the second (middle) third is until you're 66.6 years old, and so on...

She totally buys into this thing too. Like she'll even make you a 33.3, middle aged narwhal birthday cake if you're lucky like my buddy, Nick.

So anyway, with that said, Carol tells me that today marks my 33.3 year old birthday... and by her standards, I'm now officially middle aged.

And to be honest, even without this incredibly important milestone, I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Over the past few …

About 4 years ago I met Harper's friend, Jon Ruth. Then, about 4 months ago, Jon tagged me in a "7 things" blog. See, there was this thing going around where you write 7 interesting things about yourself, tag 7 other bloggers - then they have to do the same. I kept meaning to fulfill my duty to write my "7 things" blog, but I just kept forgetting and putting it off. So hopefully everyone's forgotten about this trend and I can bring it back to life, haha.

I was pretty surprised to be tagged by Jon. Even though Jon has never really told me a story, Harper has told me lots of Jon's stories. He's a pretty amazing dude - with some pretty amazing stories. So it was cool that he tagged me.

That said, here it goes...

1. I do …

I've been meaning to write about this for quite some time. It's pretty funny to have had a hernia when you were only 16, and my experience was fairly awkward... so here's a story about my very first hernia.

So, like I said, I was 16 years old. One night I was laying in bed feeling my balls, which is nothing out of the ordinary - especially for a teenager. As I began to juggle them around I noticed 1... 2... 3... wait, 3!?! I double checked, then I triple checked, and yelled, "MOMMMM!" She came into my room and asked what was up, to which I replied, "um, I have 3 balls." "Derek! are you serious?! Let me see!" "NO, MOM! I need to go to the doctor."

So the next day I go to the doctor to find out that I had an inguinal hernia, which …