Lifestyle Archives

My baby is sooooo handsome

My baby is sooooo handsome.

He’s the kind of handsome that doesn’t try too hard. Just a tri-color face turned slightly toward the window, ears caught between perked and relaxed, like he’s listening to the house breathe. The tag on his collar taps softly when he shifts, a tiny chime in a quiet room.

I took this photo and realized how much of loving a dog is learning their still moments. Not the sprinting, not the chaos—just the pause. The look that says he knows his name, he knows his people, and he’s deciding whether to be brave or be cuddled.

Some days the world feels loud and over-lit. Then a dog settles into the blanket like it was always meant to be there, and the room becomes its own small weather system—warm, steady, and familiar. If you’ve ever looked at your pup and felt your chest soften for no logical reason, you’ll understand this picture.

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Happy Pride from our Family to Yours

Some days arrive like a familiar coat you pull on without thinking—soft, worn-in, and somehow new again. Pride feels a little like that in our house: not a single day on the calendar, but a season of remembering what we’ve built, who we love, and how we keep choosing each other.

This photo catches that mood perfectly: our dog, calm and watchful, wrapped in a rainbow bandana like a small flag of belonging. The colors are bright, but the feeling is quiet—steady eyes, a settled posture, the kind of presence that says, “I’m here.” It’s a simple image, but it holds a lot.

Family isn’t only the big moments. It’s the everyday rituals: the familiar creak of the floor, the way light lands on the couch, the sound of tags jingling when someone gets up to follow you into the next room. Love lives in those ordinary corners, and it grows there.

So from our family to yours: Happy Pride. If your home is loud or peaceful, crowded or still, if you’re celebrating openly or finding your way in private—may you feel safe, seen, and held. May you find your people. May you keep making a life that fits.

The Spa is Mine

The Spa is Mine.

It’s a small claim, but it feels true in that quiet way—when the water is glassy, the sky is a clean, wide blue, and the whole yard looks like it’s holding its breath. The pool sits there like a bright square of calm, bordered by sun-warmed concrete and a strip of green that looks too orderly to be accidental.

From this chair, with my legs stretched out and a book open in my lap, the day becomes simple. There’s no rush to get in, no need to prove anything. Just the soft sound of water shifting against tile, and the steady light that makes everything look a little newer than it is.

I like how places can feel lived alongside you. Not loud, not demanding—just present. A backyard can be a kind of home for your thoughts, the way an old house can hold seasons in its walls. Out here, summer doesn’t announce itself; it settles in.

Maybe that’s all “mine” means today: a brief pocket of stillness, claimed without conflict. A moment where nothing is being remodeled, improved, optimized, or explained. Just a body in the sun, a page turning, and water waiting patiently nearby.

Rain Dance for Arizona on Bell Rock Trail

The sky over Sedona looked heavy, the kind of gray that can’t decide if it’s going to give you shade or finally give you rain.

On Bell Rock Trail, the red earth felt wide and open, stretched out like a stage. I stood there with my arms thrown up, half-joking, half-hopeful, doing my best rain dance for Arizona. The rocks held their rust color under the clouds, and the whole desert seemed to pause and listen.

Hiking out here has a way of making you pay attention to small shifts: wind changing direction, a cooler breath of air, the way distant buttes fade when mist drifts through. It’s not the same as a summer storm back home, where rain arrives loud and certain. This was more like a question hanging in the sky.

I don’t know if the dance worked. Maybe it’s enough that it made me stop and look around, to feel how big the landscape is and how quiet you can get inside it. Even when the ground is dry, you can still sense what it’s waiting for.

If you’ve ever walked Bell Rock Trail under a brooding sky, you know the feeling: that the desert isn’t empty at all. It’s just patient.

The two most beautiful thing this weekend in one photo

There are weekends that feel too big to hold in your hands, so you try to press them flat into something simple—one frame, one breath, one small proof that you were there.

In this photo, the red rocks sit under a heavy sky, muted by cloud and distance, the way landmarks do when you’re not trying to conquer them—only notice them. Below, rows of clay-colored roofs and soft green trees make their own quiet pattern, a lived-in grid at the edge of the wild.

And then there’s the other beautiful thing: the small human moment in front of all that ancient stone. Someone leaning in with a phone, framing the same view, saving it the way we all do now. Not to replace the memory, but to give it a place to live when the weekend is over.

I like how the scene holds two kinds of scale at once—the patient, unmoving rock and the quick, fleeting act of photographing it. The world pushes up against itself: wilderness and neighborhood, weather and weekend, permanence and a thumb tapping a screen.

Maybe that’s what makes the best trips feel settled instead of crowded. You don’t take the landscape home. You just let it follow you a little, like color on your sleeves.

Family bonding time

The photo catches a quiet kind of closeness—two dads stretched out together, the world narrowed to a couch, a soft black-and-white filter, and a puppy tucked in like a warm punctuation mark at the bottom of the frame.

There’s something about moments like this that feels bigger than it looks. No big plans, no perfect lighting, no reason to perform. Just the small weight of an animal settling in, the familiar angles of someone you love beside you, the unspoken agreement to stay still for a while.

Bonding can sound like an activity, like something you schedule or work at, but more often it’s these ordinary minutes that do the stitching. A shared look at the camera. An arm draped where it always ends up. A dog’s sleepy eyes, half-trusting and half-curious, as if it’s learning the shape of this home in real time.

Family bonding time doesn’t need much space. It just needs a little quiet, and the willingness to be there—together—until the day feels settled.

Two dads cuddling with puppy, framed in a simple snapshot, says what a lot of words can’t: this is what “home” looks like when it’s alive.

The Morning face I love

Mornings have a particular kind of hush—the kind that makes even an ordinary room feel a little larger, a little softer around the edges. And then there’s that face.

The Morning face I love is equal parts brave and tender: ears still undecided, eyes half-open like they’re negotiating with the day, and a stripe of sunlight landing right where the world wants your attention. It’s funny how a small creature can hold a whole atmosphere. The bed is still warm, the house is still waking up, and for a minute everything is simple.

“Sleepy morning puppy close-up” doesn’t just describe a photo; it names a small ritual. The pause before the first footsteps. The quiet check-in that says, without language, “We’re here. We made it to another morning.”

That’s why I come back to moments like this. Love is often unremarkable in the best way—found in routine, in warm blankets, in a look that asks for nothing except that you stay close.

Some days move too fast. But this one starts slow, with a face that belongs to the morning, and to the home we’re making together.

Great Dinner in PA with my cutie

Dinner in Pennsylvania always seems to arrive the way weather does—quietly at first, then all at once. We stepped out into the evening with that small, earned kind of happiness: full plates behind us, a little warmth in our cheeks, and the sense that the night didn’t need to be anything more than what it already was.

I keep thinking about the way places hold you. A restaurant table, a familiar street, the soft clink of silverware and glass—ordinary things that still feel like a marker in time. It’s the same comfort I find in old houses: not perfect, not staged, just lived-in. You can almost hear the room breathing around you.

After dinner we paused for a photo, standing close like we always do when we’re not trying to make a moment out of it. Two patterned shirts, an easy smile, the dark shutters framing us like a memory you can step back into. The window behind us caught a little glow, as if the inside of the building was still holding onto the evening.

I don’t remember every bite, but I remember the steadiness of it—how good it feels to share a meal with someone who makes the world feel a bit brighter and a bit bigger.

Great Dinner in PA with my cutie, tucked away like a small keepsake.

Introducing our new baby Dyson

There’s a certain quiet that settles into a home when something small finally feels safe enough to fall asleep.

Dyson has only just arrived, and already he’s learning the soft geography of our days: the dip of the couch cushion, the familiar pull of a blanket, the way afternoon light fades into the same corners every evening. In the photo he’s sprawled out in that fearless, upside-down way puppies do—like he’s been here forever, like the world has always been this gentle.

We keep calling him our “new baby,” half joking, half telling the truth. Because the house changes when a puppy comes in. It’s not cluttered or chaotic so much as newly alive. You start listening differently—less for the creak of the floorboards and more for the tiny sounds: paws padding down the hall, a collar tag ticking, a sigh as he finally settles.

He’s still figuring us out, and we’re still figuring him out. But there’s something steady already taking root. Not a big, dramatic shift—more like a quiet brightness, the kind that makes ordinary moments feel a little wider.

Welcome home, Dyson.

Weekend Art Culture

Weekend Art Culture is the small miracle where the city loosens its grip for an hour and lets you breathe differently. You step off the sidewalk and into a room that feels tuned—quieter, brighter, like the air has been edited.

In front of Roy Lichtenstein bedroom pop art, I watched a bedroom turn into a kind of diagram: crisp outlines, punchy color, dots that pretend to be texture but also refuse it. A lamp becomes a statement. A bed becomes a rectangle of intention. Even the shadows look like they agreed to behave.

The funny thing is how familiar it all is. You recognize the furniture the way you recognize a dream after waking—almost yours, but not quite. The tidy scene feels domestic and distant at the same time, like home remembered through a window.

Museums always return you to yourself in little ways. The soft scuff of shoes on wood floors. The pause of a stranger who stops beside you, both of you measuring the same image, both of you briefly quiet. And then you leave, back into the city’s noise, carrying a cleaner line of thought—something bright and flat that makes the real world look newly textured.

ZAMartz Best of 2017

| #2017bestnine #nye #boyfriendswhobestof
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| Wow, What a year it has been. There have certainly been many highs and lows, but I’m going to focus on the positive, ZAMartz best of 2017, information to recap. I will be covering some of the best content and pageviews on the ZAMartz website as well as the best social media post of 2017 on instagram.

Top 10 ZAMartz Pageviews of 2017

WordPress Extension Details

1698 Total downloads of two extensions launched mid-year 2017
Overall Rating 4 out of 5 stars

Resting at Home Plate

Come eventide, with loaded bases, he framed the box to bat;
points into distant, setting sun, and slowly adjusts his cap.

Oh soaring mighty arc, over plate and chain-link fence,
delivered to heaven’s gates, come angelic presence whence.

Arrive amidst an all-star game, loved ones, long on deck;
hopes and praises reach you, to our MVP, we’ll never soon forget.</p

By Zachary A. Martz – In loving Memory of my little brother Jared Martz – 1990 to 2017

Presidential Photobomb

There’s a certain kind of quiet inside the Lincoln Memorial—stone and echo, like a room built to hold its breath. And then, of course, there’s us: bundled up, leaning in close, trying to fit a whole day into one small frame.

We snapped this photo and only later really noticed how perfect the timing was. Lincoln sits behind us in his permanent, patient stillness, looking like he’s tolerating the modern ritual of the selfie with the same calm he gives everything else. It feels like a photobomb, but the slow, presidential kind—less “gotcha,” more “remember where you are.”

Washington, D.C. has a way of doing that. You walk around with coffee in your hand, chatting about where to go next, and suddenly you’re standing in front of something you’ve seen your whole life in textbooks. The scale of it doesn’t hit you all at once; it comes in pieces: the cold air, the marble, the softness of light on white stone.

We came for a photo, but left with that lingering feeling that some places are bigger than their monuments. They’re built out of memory, and the quiet pressure of history, and the strange comfort of being very small for a moment—together—while something enormous sits watching from the background.

Lifestyle