Recently, my wife and I accomplished a task almost as daunting as giving our cat a pill or teaching our youngest daughter to drive without committing widespread curb trauma.

As I have mentioned in previous columns, I look forward to bathing-suit shopping with my daughters almost as much as major dental surgery without anesthesia.

Every year in late spring, parents of college students all over America travel to university campuses with stylish IKEA storage bags or (in our case) cardboard boxes that once held bulk orders of toilet paper and tortilla chips.

It’s that time of year again when dads of daughters all over the country are experiencing severe headaches, watery eyes, shortness of breath, and even hives. No, these symptoms are not from seasonal allergies, but from a traumatic phenomenon known as “prom season.”

When my three semi-grown daughters were young (and since I work in the lucrative world of public education), we’d spend our spring break holidays riding bikes to the park, making dad-sized pillow forts in the living room and raiding the gift shop at the zoo.

Along with identifying as “Swifties,” ignoring the reported Chinese threat of bad dancing posed by TikTok, and pretending that plant-based meat is actually edible, many young people in America are engaging in another fascinating trend — not driving.

In the 1980s, I repeatedly watched a recorded copy of the film “Escape from New York” on my family’s Panasonic VCR – complete with tuning knobs the size of hubcaps.

For years, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances take family trips during the holiday season to exciting locations like Disney World, Hawaii, Colorado and Cracker Barrel.

Imagine, if you will, a tranquil late-autumn evening.

The whole concept of a bed and breakfast is pretty ingenious, and fits almost perfectly with my lifestyle.

When I was growing up in 1970s East Texas, my experiences with international cuisine were pretty much limited to pizza, spaghetti and an occasional tamale.

For those of you who don’t know, my more respectable gig for the past quarter century, or so, has been teaching college English. (Scary, I know.)

In recent days, the hormonal distribution in my household has become slightly more balanced as two of my three teenage daughters and several lines of credit are now off attending college.

East Texas is hot, and not in the way you compliment your wife when she’s mad at you for performing an epic cannonball while she’s lounging by the pool with her laptop.

There have been countless jokes, comedy routines and humorous articles written about colonoscopies, but I’m a firm believer that, like Mexican food restaurants, there can never be too many.

A few days ago, my wife and I joined some friends for a gathering during a few rare hours when we weren’t busy hauling a teenager to some kind of expensive activity or hosting an entire herd of them at our home to ransack our pantry and abuse the plumbing.

Depending on when you’re reading this, my 52nd birthday is/was on April 20th, which, as my dad still loves to remind me, is the same day as Adolf Hitler’s.

Warning! The following column is clogged with gratuitous potty humor. If it’s a strain for you to read it, the CDC advises that you hold your nose, wear an N95 mask if necessary and then answer the call of curiosity. I think you’ll be relieved.

Recently, Texas passed the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act, which enforces humane guidelines for restraining pet canines outdoors. Unfortunately for me, the act fails to impose similar guidelines for the treatment of grouchy husbands and embarrassing dads.

I was recently invited to speak at a local women’s organization meeting in my hometown. Apparently, I was pretty much their last option, right behind the auto-warranty telemarketer and the tax auditor.

Yes, it’s that time again when I reminisce about the important events that have transpired over the past 12 months, like how in the world I grew so much ear hair in one year.

Children all over the United States are currently wringing their iPhone-calloused hands over the possibility that Santa Claus might not make it this year because he’s trapped in a delayed shipping container somewhere off the coast of California.

Over the past few weeks, media outlets have reported that holiday consumers should expect a shortage of Christmas trees this year due to the supply-chain crisis, climate change and the trees themselves refusing to re-enter the workforce after becoming addicted to Netflix and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These days, we’re all used to walking through retail stores in October and dodging Christmas displays of inflatable Baby Yoda yard art while we’re still trying to find the perfect Halloween pumpkins to decompose on our front porches.

If you ever want to test the limits of your patience, your sanity and your ability to avoid bursting your gizzard from laughing out loud at exactly the wrong moment – in church – try teaching a junior high boys’ Sunday school class sometime.

Now that we are elbow-deep in the pumpkin guts of October, I’m starting to feel the holiday season kick-off excitement.

Before a couple of weeks ago, it had been over 20 years since my wife and I attended a Texas A&M football game.

Many parents my age are currently experiencing empty nest syndrome/euphoria as they send their children off to college in hopes that, someday, their “babies” will graduate and come back home to pick up all of the junk they left crammed under their beds.

With blistering summer weather in full force and shiny new COVID-19 variants emerging like another season of “The Bachelor,” many Americans have taken to the great outdoors–despite recently reported attacks by grizzly bears, alligators, and President Joe Biden’s surviving German shepherd, Major (R.I.P. Champ).

Austin, Texas, is a city of paradoxes. It’s the capital of one of the most conservative states in the country — a state where you’ll probably feel out of place in some localities if you don’t conceal a firearm in your undergarments, yet Austin is a city widely known for its ultra-liberal social mores that allow some folks to feel comfortable strolling (or staggering) around downtown wearing nothing BUT their undergarments — if that much.

In recent years, kayaking has become a true craze, ranking right up there with TikTok dances, government stimulus checks and those glorified Lunchables on plywood I can’t pronounce called charcuterie boards.

You may have heard the proverb, “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime of crushing debt after he buys the boat, trailer, tackle, depth finder, trolling motor, etc.”

Well, the time has finally come for you to graduate from high school, spread your wings and discover exciting, new ways to spend my cash in college.

It’s time for another installment of “Places you should go before you can’t tell a presidential executive order document from one of your White House German Shepherd’s training pads!”

In the wake of recent mass shootings, President Joe Biden managed to avoid being blown over by a gentle breeze in the White House Rose Garden to announce several marginal executive actions on gun control that were met with tepid applause from the left and bulging forehead veins on the right.

While raising our three daughters, my wife and I have thoroughly enjoyed Halloween costumes, visits from the Easter Bunny, and Valentine’s Day parties — and we even let the kids join in most of the time.

With the stroke of several souvenir pens that will likely end up on eBay, President Joe Biden recently enacted sweeping executive orders related to climate change — specifically aimed at saving the arctic tufted titmouse and encouraging the transition of all fuel-burning vehicles to Flintstones cars.