Philippe Lazaro
OCTOBER 2016

Summer 2025

6/21 – Proper summer feels have arrived, capped off with a good boat ride the kiddos loved over the weekend.

7/6 - I love how much San Diego has proven itself to be a great soccer city. Finally went to an SDFC match with Kai last night.

We ultimately lost to Houston 3-4 during the 17(!!) added minutes, but since we left around the 70” mark, we kinda saw a customized Director’s Cut in which we won 3-2.

7/13 - My friend’s memorial orchard on her Alma Mater campus was relocated and rededicated this summer, so some of us were able to gather and remember her four years after losing her so suddenly and unexpectedly.

We grieve together, up front. But more often, the long haul is felt individually and in waves. So I appreciated the chance to remember her four years later as a team and family.

She would’ve loved these past four years. All the new teammates. New babies. Adventures in her 30s.

Love loudly.

7/18 – Movies in the Park with the kiddos are quickly becoming one of my favorite summertime rites.

SD Parks & Rec does a pretty good job of making a whole thing out of it, with shave ice trucks, inflatable playgrounds, etc.

7/21 – BREAKING: The Blue Oysters have sprouted.

7/28 – Quick little meet-and-greet with Melissa Villaseñor after her set the other week.

Gotta love a true feel-good stand-up act. And voices!

7/30 – I took a chance on signing up for a Dinner-With-Strangers platform. Figured it’d make for a good story, however it went down.

I do wonder if these things are gonna end up being singles mixers in disguise, but thankfully my group just ended up being a quirky bunch of people in search of make-ya-think questions to mull over. Also surprised to run into an old HS classmate, but he ended up being the other dad at the table.

Would try again in another part of town, or maybe another town. Or country.

8/8 – Looking forward to a bit of improv this weekend! Finest City tonight with my Quichemates, then freestylin’ tomorrow at The Brooks Theatre in Oceanside with Optimus Rhyme. Never played that venue before but I’ve heard good things. Hoping the new Clipse & Tyler albums keep my rhymes sharp.

HAPPIER CAFE
Los Angeles, CA

Place to Know: This spot almost feels hidden, but the location right along the LA River Bike Path is actually a gem. The coffee hub uses its courtyard well, hosting a lot of community events. With an actual sandbox that has plenty of toys, it's a good spot to bring kids while hanging out. In terms of coffee... they've got a pretty good ube game.

8/11 – First time having five days a week of school for all three kids. New achievement unlocked.

8/20 – Completed another summer list item: making mango horchata from scratch.

Fair Food: 2025

I’m not the biggest County Fair-goer, but the kids and I were all off yesterday and it had been years… so here’s all the weird stuff we ate!

Boy That’s Nasty Award | Mac & Cheese Stuffed Turkey Leg

I don’t mean nasty in terms of taste… a single bite of this was actually quite good. But in terms of concept and the pile of calories that ends up staring back at you halfway? Eish. I bought this as a frugal Asian dad move so I could harvest its Mac & Cheese to feed three preschoolers, tbh.

Best in Show Award | Tres Leches Cinnamon Roll

The easiest way to screw up a cinnamon roll is to make it too dry and dense, and that problem is solved by the liquid delight of tres leches. People are calling this their fave of the whole fair and I might agree. Concept is a 10/10. Execution? It’s up there but I could have gone for a little more leches. Maybe even a fourth leche. Could that be rum? That might be real good.

It’s the Simple Things Award | Potato Chips

There’s something really underappreciated about a freshly made, homemade potato chip. A little softness in the middle of the chip is a feature, not a bug. Here’s a good fair snack option that goes for under ten bucks and won’t make you need a nap afterwards.

Weird Kid in School Award | Pickle Lemonade

Every year has an item that is an unabashed pick-me to go viral, and pickle lemonade is the 2025 edition. I just so happen to have a five year old whose favorite food is pickle and drink is lemonade. So when I poured him a taster? He told me it was disgusting! Instant DNF. But to my more mature palate? Not bad. It’s weird but it works more than it probably should. The first few sips were actually pretty refreshing.

Those Expensive Surprises

About a year ago, I went through a little streak of unexpected and unpleasant surprise expenses.

One travel booking made in error, one last-minute dogsitter… even that time when FinnAir misdelivered our luggage in the winter and I had to splurge on a whole new snow-wardrobe for a four year old. No major mishaps, but just a bunch of things here and there that cost extra. I remember sharing with some friends, things are good, but man, it’s been a pretty expensive stretch of life.

If I thought this time a year ago was expensive, they’ve paled in comparison to things the past couple weeks. I’ve had some pretty serious home repairs I’ve had to take care of. Those repairs, more often than not, are the things that seem the most likely to turn into sudden pocket holes. They’re really expensive, and unlike spending on a new car you get to ride around in or on a vacation you get to enjoy, the big fancy treat is not having drops of water leak through your roof. Having a house is a privilege in the first place, but oof.

These things happen. Like untimely celebrity deaths, they often seem to happen in clusters. And they range in disruptiveness from ugh, fine, I’ll pay it to where the hell am I gonna get the money for that?!

Even though these aren’t especially fond memories, I’m actually glad I have them as memories. The reason why is that while these things were pretty bad financial gut-punches at the moment, looking back, they seem like pretty minor blips. Once the dust settles, I’ve walked away realizing that I still have enough to meet the needs ahead, and in life, money comes and goes like that. Much like how cuts and bruises heal, financial gaps tend to close one way or the other.

Things always feel a lot worse in the moment than they seem in retrospect, which is really important to remember the next time you’re in the moment.

The first house we bought as a couple was the two bedroom condo we brought our first kid home to.

We only lived in it for two years before having more kids and needing more bedrooms, but it was an experience. It was honestly a pretty good place, but not necessarily in the best part of town. We’d have people rifling through our dumpster almost nightly.

We had to deal with a roof leak, and although insurance took care of it, it meant there was a chunk of time when we all had to move into the nursery.

We had mice in the walls, which we could only do so much about since the unit was attached to others. This is how we learned our dog’s animal instincts were practically nonexistent after years of suburban living.

We were there for the pandemic lockdowns.

So even though we were only there for two years, we picked some memorable years.

The exterior of the place was managed by an HOA… a pretty awful one that I could never get ahold of to get me the right documents when making that roof repair. Within a few months of us moving in, they determined that the roof seal on the upper units had worn down and that they needed to replace it. Since our reserves were drained, they had to pass an assessment for a rather large figure. I love that you think I have all that just sitting around waiting for you, I thought. Since we just bought the place, it felt like I had just made the financial stretch to get in there.

It was a rough blow at the moment, but these days, I don’t think about it very often. Wouldn’t be thinking about it if I weren’t writing about the exact topic. You bounce back from that sort of thing.

When it comes to managing money, I’ve learned that there are at least two big pieces of the equation.

There’s the actual math of what’s going in and what’s going out. In theory, this should be simple. Have the former number be larger than the latter, make sure it can keep that pace for the future, and things should be okay.

The other half of the equation is one that’s a lot more complicated, and therefore more interesting… at least to me. It’s people’s relationship with money.

This is one of those things that comes up a lot in couples counseling, and for good reason. Two people who might have very similar backgrounds, interests, education levels, lifestyles, and values can still have wildly different relationships with money. One person may have been raised with a sense of scarcity and a tendency to hoard. The other might have found it normal to spend-it-if-you’ve-got-it.

Seeing someone with a vastly different relationship with money than my own strikes up so much curiosity. I know somebody who psychologically struggles to not spend all their income as it comes. How? I have no idea, that would cause me so much anxiety. To them, though, it’s almost as if it relieves anxiety. I’m glad I have running, instead. But I know these things are deep rooted, and are baked into us as muscle memory.

One thing I’m working really hard to avoid in my relationship with money is a scarcity mentality. I’m extra motivated to avoid this mindset as my relationship with money kind of sets the groundwork for my kids’. I typically save and manage carefully, and I’m on the frugal side. I like that about myself. I just never want it to get to the point of excess where I start living out of a sense of scarcity.

So how does one walk that line of having an abundance mindset while still exercising careful stewardship?

I have one practice I suggest.

Whenever I get hit with a sudden, big, unexpected expense… or perhaps a series of them, I try to look for an opportunity to also do something generous.

If you get hit with a sudden medical expense in the thousands, perhaps there’s someone out there for whom $50 of support would go a really long way? It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 ratio. It doesn’t even need to be financial support, necessary, if that’s totally not possible. But I do think being generous in a way that runs parallel to the unpleasant surprise you were dealt is pretty key to this practice.

The idea is that if your instinct to a financial gut punch is to immediately start looking for someone else you can help, you’re really helping to protect yourself from a scarcity mindset around money.

You’re also doing something else really cool. You’re shifting your own focus off of yourself and onto somebody else. You’re creating a worthwhile safeguard against ego, which tends to be fed by a sense of scarcity or threat.

If instead you’re asking, hmm, who can I help? You’re back in a position of agency, and back in a position to remember how much you really have been given and where that sits in relation to much of the world.

Doing a lot of work internationally has also provided a lot of helpful perspective. What might seem like very modest support coming from me can be a real game-changer for somebody else. And that’s true in a lot of areas domestically, as well. Whenever I look at stats around median income by state, and so on, it’s my reminder that a lot of people really are mid-struggle. In spite of whatever setbacks come my way, I’m still in an advantaged situation in a rather unequal world.

I don’t know if this practice will work as well for everybody, but based on how I’ve seen it benefit my relationship around money, I’ve found it worthwhile to share.

There’s nothing within it to support the first half of the financial equation: making sure you’ve got more coming in than going out. But it can work wonders with the second, elusive, psychological part.

I’ve usually been on the more frugal side, at least in a strategic way where I’ve realized being cheap in areas of life I don’t care about so much allows me to splurge.

When I was younger, this went to such extremes as couch surfing my way through a semester of school or living in my car… since skipping a few months of housing would save me thousands. That money could go much further when spent on enriching travel experiences abroad.

These days, those instincts might look more like realizing that the differences between a $20,000 car and a $60,000 car are rarely worth $40,000 to me, especially as long as the cheaper option goes between point A and B just as reliably. Cars never were a big priority to me. Traveling with my kids? I’ll be much more likely to splurge in that area.

Frugality for the sake of frugality, efficiency for the sake of efficiency, is not a virtue. It only makes sense if its in service of allowing you to pour more of your resources into something that matters. And that’s why I think it’ll always be a matter of importance to avoid seeing things through the lens of scarcity.

One of the best ways to go beyond that is to tap back in to the fun of being able to help someone else who needs it.

Seattle Eats!

Everything I ate in a weekend in Seattle:

🇦🇺 Australian Pie Co. (Burien)

☕️ Burien Press (Burien)

🫚 Rachel’s Ginger Beer (Capitol Hill)

🇲🇾 Kedai Makan (Capitol Hill)

☕️ Narrative Coffee (Everett)

🇵🇭 Fil Up! Food Truck (Everett)

🇻🇳 Lotus Pond Pho (N. Seattle)

🇸🇳 Heritage African Restaurant (Burien)

May to June

May 2025 could’ve counted as three months! Birthdays, concerts, little weekend trips, freestylin’, and wrapping up a school year.With a new month and the end of the school year, summer is functionally here, even if it has a couple weeks left to technically arrive. Now that my kids are older, summer is becoming more of a *thing* again, and it’s kinda nice. I made a list:

⚽️ Go watch games for all three of our local pro-sports teams.

⛺️ Go camping with the kids… first of our camping adventures kicks off this weekend!

🥛 Make horchata. I’ve got a mango horchata recipe I’ve been wanting to do.

🎙️ Go catch a stand-up act that I’ve been wanting to see. Some interesting names coming through town here in the next few months.

🍽️ Jump in on a Dinner with Strangers event.

🪃 Participate in my first longform improv festival.

🗺️ Take our first trip sans kids to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary!

Heung Min Son

Ten years in Tottenham and finally, a trophy to show for it.

There were a lot of points throughout the year where it seemed the years, the injuries, and the burden of having two teams on his shoulder (incl. the Korean Nat’l Squad) had taken their toll.

But he toughed it out and captained that squad through some choppy waters. Glad he’s got some hardware to lift.

Gulliver's Playground

Who knew I’d be so knowledgeable about play structures, but this is one of the most unique playgrounds I’ve seen… this to-scale Gulliver’s Travels themed play structure in Valencia, Spain.


I don’t know how many of today’s youth get excited about Jonathan Swift’s giant tale… even the Jack Black movie was long enough ago that playground kids wouldn’t care. But hey, it’s always fun to climb around and slide down a giant’s face.

Gulliver's Playground

Who knew I’d be so knowledgeable about play structures, but this is one of the most unique playgrounds I’ve seen… this to-scale Gulliver’s Travels themed play structure in Valencia, Spain.

I don’t know how many of today’s youth get excited about Jonathan Swift’s giant tale… even the Jack Black movie was long enough ago that playground kids wouldn’t care. But hey, it’s always fun to climb around and slide down a giant’s face.

Bill Walton

I’m a tad too young to have seen Bill Walton as an active player, but he’s on the short list of guys I know I would’ve been a big fan of if that weren’t the case. The rare triple threat of being a true baller, a total goofball, and a really charitable voice for important causes. Not to mention, a bit of a local legend. Drew this a bit after he passed, but just getting to post it now.

How Creativity Happens

It’s easy to think of time in the studio, in front of the blank page, or at your work station as your creative time and other things as a distraction. But those “distractions” are actually the world that feeds your creative work. Don’t be so committed to the output that you miss this whole other side to creativity.