Sometimes the kids come home when they're sick and it's just like the old days

It should be noted that my sick daughter looked far better than this virtual woman cooked up by the AI Blog Post Image Generator.

Last month my daughter Melanie woke up with a 103-degree fever, chills and a generally rotten sick feeling. She texted Terry, who went and picked her up and took her to the urgent care.

After being diagnosed with an unknown virus, Mel came to our house and spent the rest of the day (and night, and much of the next two days) on our couch.

Terry waited on her and made her feel as comfortable as possible. I felt so bad for Mel, but I'll admit it was nice having her around.

I was working from home, and at one point in the afternoon I came downstairs from my office to find both Melanie and Terry fast asleep on the couch. The last time that happened was probably 2001 when Mel was a baby and an exhausted Terry would nurse her there.

It was a very sweet and nostalgic scene.

You want your kids to grow up and move out and be independent, but you inevitably miss them when they do.

So these little visits – even if they result from less-than-ideal circumstances – are kind of nice.

And the best part? Mel got better, and the only person who caught whatever she had was me. (Well, Terry eventually got sick and blamed me, so maybe this wasn't "the best part" for her.)

A win-win for Jack, at least.

When the only thing separating you from a fun hobby is motivation and effort

Until recently when I sold them, I owned three saxophones: an alto, a baritone, and a 100-year-old C melody. I kept them in my office/computer/music room upstairs.

I loved playing them, but I never actually did.

I also have a telescope in our basement storage room that I've used to observe the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. I'm always amazed at what I see through the viewfinder, but I haven't brought it out in probably two years.

This is not to mention the shelves full of books I don't read or the running gear that sits unused in my closet because all I do these days exercise-wise is lift weights and walk.

What unites all of these activities is the fact that (a) I enjoy them, and (b) I never seem to do them.

And the only reason I don't do them is because I can never seem to drum up the motivation.

Not that any of them requires extraordinary motivation and effort. The worst thing with the saxophones, for example, was getting them out of the case, putting them together, and warming them up so I could play music.

This isn't difficult, but it was apparently a barrier to entry for me because whenever I thought about playing, I would instead decide that another game of solitaire on my phone was preferable to, you know, actually walking up the stairs and pulling out one of my horns.

The telescope is even easier to use. Just bring it up from the storage room, go out in the driveway and point it at the sky. I know how to find stuff from there, but...well, I'm on the couch petting the cat, you see, and that's a whole lot easier.

I'm realizing that life would be more fun if I could force myself to give the slightest effort whenever I'm not working or engaged in some household chore.

Is this because I'm 55 years old? Am I stuck in some sort of rut? Or has my iPhone turned me into a slug?

The answer is probably yes to all three.

Here's the good news, though: I'm very close to buying myself a nice, intermediate-level alto sax from my instrument repair and sales guy, Jon-O. And when I do, I plan to play it regularly. At least once a week.

Really, I will.

Of course, the saxophone requires a lot of air and mental energy, neither of which my phone's Yahtzee app requires of me, so...you know...maybe it's still kind of a toss-up.

In the bleak Ohio midwinter

It has been mentioned here (more than once) that my wife and I have lived in one city our whole lives.

We've traveled to many places, but we've never really wanted to live anywhere else.

Still, no place is perfect, and Northeast Ohio has its flaws. Like the weather, for instance.

More to the point, the weather in November through March (and some years October through April).

We live a few miles away from Lake Erie and are often recipients of the dreaded "lake-effect snow." Our town is right on the edge of the Snow Belt, meaning that if Downtown Cleveland gets 2 inches of snow, we are likely to 6 or more.

And even when the snow isn't piling up, it's still unfailingly gray, dreary and cold this time of year.

Indeed, January is not Wickliffe, Ohio's best moment, and we're entering the heart of it. These coming few weeks are historically some of the worst our area has to offer, weather-wise.

So we collectively grit our teeth and get through it.,

The reward is a beautiful late spring and summer that, to me anyway, is unlike anything you'll experience elsewhere. It's more than enough of a payoff for the unchanging bleakness of the winter months.

But we have a long way to go before that comes, so onward we push.

Not that it's all misery around here in January, February and March, mind you. Our basketball team is pretty good right now, as is our minor league hockey team.

And if you're into skiing or other outdoor winter sports, you could do worse than Northeast Ohio.

I just...well, the older I get, the less patience I have with Old Man Winter.

He needs to get his butt in gear and shuffle on out of here so that this "sunshine" we hear about from our friends to the south is once again less myth and more reality.

My brother-in-law's birthday reminds me of a time when slow-pitch softball was all the rage

You can't really see it, I know, but when I was with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1991, I wrote this feature story about my brother-in-law Jess and some of his longtime softball buddies. Jess is the guy standing in the very middle of that group of seven players.

Today is my brother-in-law Jess' birthday. He was married to my oldest sister Judi from 1972 until she died very unexpectedly in 2009. I was only 2 at the time of their wedding, so Jess has always seemed a part of my life.

Jess was an accomplished athlete at Benedictine High School, and he kept his sports career going through the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s as a slow-pitch softball player in the Cleveland area.

You wouldn't know it nowadays, given the relatively low participation numbers, but when I was growing up, softball was a thing. Every city had a league, and many people played on multiple teams.

When I started my career as a newspaper sports writer in the early 90s, my colleague Scott Kendrick and I were put in charge of The News-Herald's weekly slow-pitch softball coverage. This section took up several pages in the Saturday paper, and I was once told it accounted for hundreds – maybe 1,000 or more – in extra copies of the newspaper sold.

People loved seeing their names and their friends' names in the statistics we would publish. We also printed league standings, a weekly ranking of the top area teams (the "Sweet 16"), and a notes column that Scott and I co-wrote.

We in the newsroom also played the game ourselves. Because we worked weird night shifts, though, we weren't available to play in the regular city leagues, which scheduled most of their games on weekday evenings.

Instead, we played in the Ohio Day Men's League, which as I recall had its games on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As you might imagine, the teams were made up of guys who did night work...policemen, fire fighters, third-shift factory workers, etc.

And us.

I always looked forward to those weekday morning games, which were relatively early (9:30 and 10:30am) for those of us who had stayed in the newsroom until the first papers came off the press some 8-9 hours earlier. But they were always so much fun that it was worth losing a little sleep.

Anyway, Jess played softball at a very high level for some of the best teams in Northeast Ohio. He was primarily a pitcher and first basemen.

He let me serve as bat boy for a few of those teams, and man, I felt like king of the world walking out onto the field several times a game to retrieve the team's bats and take them back to the dugout.

When you're 8 or 10 years old or whatever I was, getting to sit on the bench with a bunch of great athletes (all of whom were very nice to me) was a real treat.

Like I said, though, softball has waned in popularity over the years. And, now in his early 70s with the battle scars of decades of competition to prove it, Jess isn't playing these days anyway.

But like me, he still has his memories. And I hope they're good ones as he celebrates another trip around the sun today.

Happy birthday, Jess, and thanks for sharing some of those glory days with your little brother-in-law.

I just remembered something my dad used to do for me that I loved

Earlier this week I had a post here describing how I used to play board games by myself as a kid whenever my friends weren't around.

It reminded me of another gaming activity I used to do solo that was a lot of fun, and it was thanks to my dad that I ever did it in the first place.

Like a lot of sports-minded kids in the late-70s, I owned the Mattel "Classic Football" electronic game pictured above. It was extremely primitive compared with the Madden football video games of today, but to us it was great and I never tired of playing it.

One time my dad drew up a bracket involving all 28 NFL teams (at the time) in a single-elimination tournament. He did it by hand on a sheet of paper. I can still picture his distinctive left-handed writing in which the various first-round match-ups were laid out (Dallas vs. New England, Minnesota vs. Houston, Cleveland vs. San Diego, etc.)

My job was to play each game of the tournament on the Mattel device and write down the result on the tournament bracket. Over the course of a few days I could play all of the games and determine a "champion."

Being a budding Cleveland sports fan, I wanted desperately for the Browns to win the tournament, so I would admittedly play a little harder whenever I was representing them.

But just like real life, no matter how much I tried, some other team always won out in the end. It was never my guys.

Dad created similar tournament brackets for me on several occasions, and it infuriated me once when, despite my best efforts, the hated Pittsburgh Steelers won my little electronic simulation.

To my credit, though, no matter how much I didn't like it, I always accepted the result of each game however it turned out. No do-overs or anything like that.

Now, from a distance of 45 years, I realize not only how much fun I had playing out these tournaments, but also how enjoyable it probably was for Dad to set up the brackets for me whenever I asked. 

It was a time-consuming task, I'm sure, and he would have been perfectly justified to say he simply couldn't do it. But he never said no.

What a great dad he was to me. I miss him.

My wife thought it was sad when I told her I used to play board games by myself as a kid

I received the Happy Days board game one Christmas in the late 70s. More often than not when I played it, I was by myself.

Growing up, I had a core group of friends with whom I used to spend a lot of time. In the summers, especially, we did a lot of stuff together.

But even when you're 9 years old and your options are somewhat limited, there are still times when you're not with your friends and you have to figure out how to amuse yourself.

The child psychologists call this "independent play," my oldest daughter informs me, and it's a skill I developed pretty early as the youngest (by far) of four siblings. I was rarely bored.

One of the things I used to do was to take one of the several board games I owned down from the shelf in my room and play it by myself.

Even if the game was designed for four players, I would put four pieces on the board, roll the dice, and take each piece's turn individually.

Amazingly, I never told Terry about this until recently. I say "amazingly" because I've known the woman for nearly 39 years and figured I had absolutely exhausted my childhood stories (and adulthood stories, for that matter) with her.

But apparently this had never come up before. When I mentioned it, she at first laughed, then she got a pitying look on her face, which was worse than the laughing.

She even took to our family text group chat to let the kids know their father had been a sad, lonely little boy who was forced to engage in multiplayer board games by himself for lack of friends.

But as I explained to the kids, it wasn't like that at all. It was just one of the things I did to amuse myself whenever Matt, Kevin, Jason, Todd, Mike or any of my other Harding Drive/Mapledale Road compatriots were unavailable.

The sad thing is, I now appear to have lost this ability. I'm typing this blog post on a Saturday night in our living room, only because I have completely finished today's (and most of tomorrow's) to-do list and wasn't sure what to do with myself.

Maybe it's time for a little solo Monopoly!

Someone needs to be in charge of restocking paper products in your house. In our family, it's me.

Every house has a variety of jobs, big and small, that over time fall on the shoulders of one occupant or another. As comedian Paul Reiser once observed, these are often jobs that nobody especially likes, but one of you happens to hate it a little less than the other, so the job goes to that person.

Among my many assigned duties at 30025 Miller Avenue are two tasks I take seriously. They are in no way onerous, and I actually enjoy them both.

One is changing the clocks twice a year whenever Daylight Savings Time begins or ends. With so many of our time-keeping devices now fully digital, this isn't nearly the job it used to be, but there are still clocks that need to be manually adjusted (the stove, the microwave, the coffeemaker, Terry and Jack's cars, etc.)

The other is making sure we have paper towels in the kitchen and plenty of toilet paper in each of our bathrooms.

Ideally, you should never get to the empty cardboard tube inside the paper towels or a roll of toilet paper without a replacement readily at hand.

Thus, I'm always glancing into the kitchen and various bathrooms to gauge current supply levels and the precise moment when I will need to go to our basement storage room to procure fresh stocks.

Running out of paper towels isn't a national emergency or anything, just inconvenient.

But running out of toilet paper when it's urgently needed? That simply cannot happen.

And it rarely does, though I will admit there have been times when I haven't been quick enough with reinforcements and someone will yell for help from the bathroom.

I would submit that, if you're planning to do something in the bathroom that will require toilet paper, you should first determine if there is sufficient paper on hand before you begin. But I know that sometimes you're simply in a hurry.

Overall, though, I am probably the best choice in our family for this job, as I am detail-oriented and generally very conscientious, even when it comes to things about which you probably don't need to be especially conscientious.

No one appreciates the toilet paper guy until they're in desperate need. Then, and only then, he becomes the most important person in the house.