Things I’ve Learned after It Was Too Late

• Never touch a sensitive part of your body when you’ve been cutting jalapeños.
• Don’t smoke a pipe under a ceiling fan. The fire will get hot enough to roast marshmallows. The marshmallows will taste bad. OK, I never did that. The marshmallow part, I mean.
• Don’t forget to put a sling on your rifle and then shoot a deer half a mile from your pickup when there is no way to drive in. Carrying a rifle in one hand and dragging a deer with the other is a lot of work.
• Be careful what you say in front of your children.
• Swallowing a live grasshopper is stupid, even if your friends offer you two dollars to do it.
• If you’re given a month to do an assignment, and you think you can wait until the last week to do it, the assignment will take at least two weeks.
• If your wife asks you if you liked the new recipe, the answer is “Yes.”
• When you go camping, don’t let your five-year-old son drink all the pop he wants all day long, and then tuck him into his sleeping bag without first visiting the bathroom.
• Simply naming a tobacco “Presbyterian Mix” does not make it doctrinally sound.
• Men and women are more different then they appear.
• God may not help everyone who helps themselves, but if you don’t help yourself, your kids will eat all the cookies before you get any.
• That cake your wife baked that you snitched a piece from? That was for church.
• If you buy a rare book on eBay for sixty dollars, two identical copies will sell next week for twenty-five.
• Shipping from Australia is really expensive.
• All the really good old books are owned by an antiquarian bookseller in Australia.
• When your wife is nine months pregnant, don’t suggest naming the child Jonah.
• I’m not as funny as I think I am. See above.
• Your sins really will find you out.