Remember my beard experiment? Well, it’s over now…

I thought that I would be very uncomfortable with facial hair, but I didn’t mind it at all. My level of comfort remained the same throughout the entire experiment and the goal of removing myself from my comfort zone never happened.

Here are some photos of me during different stages of my beard…
This was about seven days into the experiment with just a slight five o’clock shadow

A few days later, that shadow grew into this and I felt like I looked 10 years older.

Then this happened and I was debating on whether I wanted to keep it at this length, or go full Rick Ross/ Rick Rubin.

At this point, my facial hair was growing so quickly that it required regular maintenance and pruning. I used beard pomade, beard oil, trimmers, combs and other beard-scaping tools. All of this was consuming too much of my life, so I ended the experiment and went clean shaven again.

So now I’m back to no facial hair. When I learn how to have facial hair with minimal grooming, the beard might make a reappearance, but for now it’s gone. Too much maintenance required!

And that’s the story of my weird beard.

“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” This is a terrible quote! Don’t make the same mistake as I did and actually take it seriously. Here’s what happened…

I had a wonderful, two-month-old iPhone X that had a cool feature: Water resistance. So I figured that if I can splash it with water, then I can dunk it in water. And if I can dunk it in water, then I can throw it in water. So that’s what I did.

I was swimming in my parents’ pool when I decided to put my phone’s water resistance to the test. First I took it under water in the three foot deep part of the pool. All was fine. Then I took it underwater in the five foot deep part of the pool. All was fine. Then I threw the phone about 20 feet into the air and let it fall 15 feet under the surface of the water to the bottom of the pool. All seemed fine, so I repeated that process three times. All wasn’t fine!

After leaving the phone at the bottom of the pool for about five minutes, I went to get it. But that’s when the screen started to flicker like the stage lights at a rave concert. Immediately after, the phone made a weird buzzing/crunching sound like a bumble bee being zapped by a 2,000 watt bug zapper. Then the screen had the same grey static that I saw when I turned the TV on Channel 77 when my family didn’t have cable TV.

Then I put the phone in a plastic container filled with rice and I left it there overnight. The next morning…nothing. The following day, nothing. He was dead and on his way to see Tupac in thugs mansion. I didn’t know if the rice was there to help the phone or to bury its remains as it died a slow painful death. All because I overdid it!

Now it’s a few days later and I got another iPhone to take its place. With this new phone, one thing’s for sure…I’m not overdoing ANYTHING! In fact, I might not even use it for telephone calls because I don’t want to accidentally spit on it and destroy it with water damage.

Lesson learned: Don’t overdo it. Just do it. Nike.

Here’s the last picture that my phone took before it died. Rest in Pieces.

After 10 years of being a landlord and a homeowner, I’ve ended that chapter to move on to greater and more massive things. Although I’ve owned the house for ten years, everything started with a dream 20 years ago.

When I was 12, my family moved into the house across the street and I was constantly bored because wifi wasn’t invented yet. Each day after doing my homework, my entertainment was to look across the street and make up stories about the people entering or leaving the house. Eventually, I had fake names and personas for all the people who lived in the house. “Oh, Eduardo is going back to the mechanic because his Toyota Cressida’s exhaust has another hole in it.” I wasn’t old enough to truly know what the word “stalker” meant, but unbeknownst to me I became one. An innocent stalker with no negative intentions. I was just a bored pre-teen who couldn’t afford a Gameboy Color, so he looked outside instead. Stop judging me.

Within a few months, the house was listed for sale and Eduardo’s family moved out. The new owner of the house immediately started a total and complete renovation. Suddenly, with all of the action happening in the house, I finally had something interesting to stare at. Each day, I saw contractors tirelessly work on the house and transformed it from an eyesore to a beautiful house before my eyes. Suddenly, Eduardo’s former house became the nicest house on the block and at the age of 13, I decided that I NEEDED to have it!

Many years later, I moved out of the area, graduated from college, and started saving all of my money to buy my first investment property. When I saved enough money, I started looking at places within my price range, but they all looked like crackhouses and some of them were actual crackhouses. I spent weeks looking at houses and none of them made my heart jump with joy until I looked at a house on the street that I grew up on. The house I saw didn’t meet my requirements, but as I walked to my car I saw my dream house that I admired for years. I was in awe when I realized that the house still looked as amazing as it did when they first renovated it, and to my surprise it for sale. When I did some further research, I found out that after the big renovation, the former owners couldn’t afford to pay their mortgage and the bank took it. I had to have it.

It was months before the housing crash and I made an offer to buy the house at a price that was almost embarrassing. Somehow the bank accepted it and also agreed to pay $5,000 of my closing costs. Months later, the deal closed and I became a homeowner!

From that day, I owned the house and experienced some of the most exciting moments of my life there. It was at this house where I mowed my foot with a lawnmower, met one of the worst tenants in existence, met some interesting people, established my lab (where Peculiar PPL was born), had a sewer line back-up into my basement, and so many more interesting things.

A decade later, I felt that it was the right time to sell, so I quickly learned how to become a pseudo-real-estate-agent and I handled the entire process. I marketed the house, took every phone call, conducted house tours, and negotiated the offers every weekend for the past four months. Now, after signing several documents at the lawyer’s office, I have closed on a deal and have completed my era of being a landlord.

While it’s the end of a chapter, it’s also the beginning of one. Greater things are coming and my 2018 is off to a great start. Goodbye dream house…now it’s time to pursue and accomplish bigger, greater dreams—like my dream jet, or my dream zebra.