"Dude, this tuna is fuckin' awesome."

My friend was right. I have a good recipe for rare tuna. I mix up a little teriyaki homebrew (light and dark soy sauces, sesame oil, honey and a touch of red wine vinegar), plunk the tuna steak in that stuff for an hour or so and then sear for one minute on each side--just enough to kill whatever germs the butcher might have left with his knife. The sauce is kept within the seared part, giving a nice salty-sweet first bite before you get to the creamy goodness inside.

Barb and I concur: It's nice to go to someone else's place for dinner and whatnot (we're really big into the whatnot), but there's no place like home. When you've got young kids, having people over just seems easier. Yeah, there are the dishes that need to be done. But that's fifteen minutes of work, which is a lot easier than dragging two young boys home. "Get your butts upstairs" is a simple command with obvious consequences. Best to obey without delay. "It's time to go home" is a phrase imbued with all sorts of dread: leaving your friends's toys, walking some distance down the road (oh, the horror), entering your house and then facing the down bedtime. Jammies. Pee. Brush teeth. Book. Songs.

Good night.

Good night is a good time of day. When kids are tired, they can be testy or sweet. Or, often enough, both. Kisses and complaining. Questions and, well, more questions.

"If the universe is expanding at the speed of light, what's on the other side?"

Good question. Let me call up Stephen Hawking and get back to you.

The tuna was fuckin' awesome. I've got a good recipe and a good cooking method, but I'm still at the mercy of the slab of fish I purchase. And I'm not good enough to look at a filet behind the counter and say, "Now that's good tuna!" I guess and hope. Most of the time, I buy the frozen (or, even better, the "previously frozen") filets at Costco or Target. Doesn't seem to matter much. Most of the time, the fish is good. Every once in a while, it's full of gristle or just doesn't taste right. Was the bad stuff spoiled? I dunno. I'm not dead yet. I don't have mercury poisoning. So I guess it must be alright.

The Whole Foods in Silver Spring sells Hatch green chiles. A buck eighty-nine for one of the small tins of the hot stuff. That's about a dollar more than Old El Paso--though Old El Paso doesn't sell hot green chiles, only mild ones. Not exactly an exact comparison. But I have a feeling that Old El Paso hot green chiles would still suck compared to Hatch. Hatch chiles are damn good. And I'm not saying that because I went to high school in New Mexico. Or maybe I am. Sometimes I forget.

I spend a lot of money on good beer. I drink a fair quantity of said good beer. For a time, I thought I was getting a bit large. So I did a bit of exercise now and again. That seemed to work.

Two weeks ago, my older son Max entered Kindergarten. His school is about a mile-and-a-quarter or mile-and-a-half from our house. We walk every morning. I carry Max's younger brother Sam on my shoulders all the way to school so that we can get there on time.

I'm not worried about getting large any more. I'm feeling pretty ripped, to tell you the truth. I guess the Army knows what it's doing when it sends guys out on long hikes with full backpacks. Not that I want sixty pounds on my back. Thirty is more than enough.

I'm still thinking of that tuna. It was fuckin' awesome. I bought it at Costco--fresh, not frozen, or so they say--and I picked the package because it weighed less than the others. Eighteen bucks for two steaks beats twenty-three bucks for two steaks, especially when I grill one at a time and slice it up for friends and family (Max loves teriyaki tuna steak). Do I really need twenty-three bucks worth of tuna or eighteen? The answer is usually eighteen.

It's time to stop. The simple fact is that most of the time the tuna is, in fact, fuckin' awesome. I don't have anything to do with that. It's all in the tuna. There's good tuna and bad tuna, and it's always better to have good tuna. Even if you don't have any clue how to tell the difference before it hits your mouth.

Jon Worley isn't that big a fan of "real" steak.