I’m home alone tonight. Just me and my dog, a recliner, a bacon cheeseburger, and football on television. To be honest, if Halle Berry rang the doorbell right now, it would be a downgrade to my evening.

Did I mention, home alone, a dog, a recliner, and a burger?

It has been months since we have heard from the ethnographer we dispatched to live among teenagers. We had feared that he had become comatose while watching reruns of Gossip Girl. But this report has just reached us:

“15- and 16-year-olds spend an inordinate amount of time talking about how much they hate their cell phones and discussing ways they could break theirs and still have it covered by the warranty. Have to go now. We’re going online to look at pictures of Reggie Bush and imagine he is our boyfriend! His abs are heaven-sent.”

We just pray we will be able to bring our ethnographer safely back to civilization.

Me, doing my best hip-hop moves: Yo yo, playa, birdie.

My 15-year-old son: Dad, please stop. You’re not funny.

Me: Yes I am. I’m cracking myself up.

My 15-year-old son: Can you crack yourself quietly?

Today was 85 degrees. The sun was bright. It was humid. At mid-day I went outside to re-string my son’s lacrosse goal. It took over an hour. It was hot. The whole time I was working, my dog laid in the shade watching me. When I was done, I realized I could have pulled the goal into the shade and worked there. My dog is smarter than me.

Yesterday, I picked up a pair of work gloves from Home Depot for my 15-year-old son. He’s going to help me with a good bit of outdoor work over the spring and summer so I figured he needed a pair. They are just like my work gloves — they are like football receiver gloves adapted for the farm (well, my suburban back yard).

I came home and, in a manly father kind of way, just tossed them to him. “Here you go,” I said. “You’ll be needing these.”

Let’s just say he doesn’t yet appreciate a pair of really nice work gloves the way I do.

This afternoon, I am going with my parents to the hospital for an appointment with my mother’s oncologist. Man, if I knew parents would be this difficult, I wouldn’t have had any.

I believe I have identified my most annoying quality. Given that my teenage daughter tells me I am extremely annoying, isolating this one quality was as scientifically challenging — and important — as, say, isolating the gene that causes heart disease.

The most annoying quality among many annoying Blogenberg qualities is my habit of telling people how early I arrive at the office. It’s not that I have a martyr complex — such foolish psychodrama would be disrespecting the degree to which I suffer for the people I care about. It’s that working long hours at my business is such a major part of my self-concept that I have to make sure that anybody — and that’s anybody, from the guy who works at the coffee shop to important clients — who knows I may be leaving before 5 or 6 pm is made aware that I started my day at 6:30 in the morning (5:50 this morning, actually).

It’s an annoying habit, without a doubt. But think of it this way: when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, I’m already at work being annoying.

I stopped at a diner with my 15-year-old daughter the other day. As we sat and ate, she said, “Your employees must hate you.”

“Why?” I asked, incredulously.

“Because you complain all the time.”

“I do not.”

“Yes you do,” she insisted.

“Well, my employees love me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they know how hard my life is.”

I am an adventurer-blogger, reporting from a hotel room, in the midst of a road trip with three fifteen-year-old boys. We survived last night’s drive from Washington, DC to just outside New York City, where will be attending a college lacrosse triple-header at Giants’ Stadium today. We did not make good time, however, as we got a late start. Our driver (me) had to go find the boys after their high school lacrosse game — rather than head right to the car from the locker room as our safari leader (me) had requested, they were finally located, talking to girls.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that keep me going. I was sitting in a Starbucks, doing some work on my laptop, waiting for my son to finish lacrosse practice. After two hours, I needed to get up and use the restroom.

There was a Washington, DC cop sipping his coffee, minding his business. I got up and walked over to him. “Can you shoot anybody who touches my computer while I’m in the men’s room?” I asked him, straight-faced. “But please, just be sure to miss the laptop.” Then I walked away.

He looked at me odd.

Sometimes, living is just performance art.

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Overheard at the gym: A forty-something woman asking a friend, “Do you text? I do. I’m really good at it.”