First Dispatch From The Man Loft

I am sitting in a lawn chair. Sweating… and typing on a 12-year old keyboard, attached to a 12 year old computer, perched on a 15-year old patio table. I’m upstairs, in my shop building.

In other words; I’m in the office of my man cave.

Man-cave. Actually, I am not crazy about that term. Aren't caves usually underground? Not mine. Mine is above the place where I store my tools and park my car when it’s hailing. And caves are supposed to be cool spots. My man cave is more of a sweat box.

Nonetheless. I love it. And shouldn’t I? I mean, come on.... I live in a home crawling with females. A wife, two daughters (AND one of those is a teen), and one more child, baby girl, on the way any day now. Even our horse is a female. Okay, I will admit our dog is a male, but you couldn’t tell it by the way we groom the little dandy.

So it’s really just me. I kill the bugs. I lift the heavy things. I truly wear the pants in the family. And, on Sunday afternoons like this one -- when its too hot to be outside -- I go upstairs, I hibernate, if only for an hour or two, in the "man loft" (yeah, lets go with that term instead).

But this is really not a piece on the trials and tribulations of daughter-dominated Daddyhood (not this time anyway). And it’s not a piece on the sanctity and necessity of the man space (that should go without saying, right?). This is really about me testing out this old computer, updating my blog and sweating off some of Sunday lunch in the process.

We learned this morning in Sunday School that the cell phones we all refuse to live without today have more than 100 times the computing power of the crafts that carried the Apollo astronauts into space.

Imagine that..... More than 100 TIMES. Way back when they went to the moon with less technology than most of us take into the toilet with us these days. Of course, I'm sure they would have preferred the technology of today, if available, but the fact that they orbited the earth without a sliding keyboard, MP3 player and a dedicated Facebook button is still pretty impressive in the 21st century.

What does that have to do with a sweaty Sunday afternoon, upstairs in the man loft? Honestly, I don't know. I guess it comes to mind because I am staring at a computer monitor that was out of date before George W. Bush went into office.

However, it's my computer monitor in my man loft. And since I can read what I'm typing (and hoping you will later too) I know it still works.

That's important in a man loft, where most things are surplused, hand-me-downs or categorized as too-worn-out-for-the-living-room. My grandmother's old couch, an old television that didn’t survive the digital conversion and a few other dusty items are right at home here. So am I.

But right now, I'm missing my girls a little bit (plus, no joke, it’s hot up here today).