I know I'm old because I willingly eat lawn clippings now

You know what my favorite thing for lunch is these days? I call it a Green Leafy Salad. Others consider it to be Rabbit Food. And my dad would have called it Weeds in a Bowl.

I combine a cup or so of kale, a cup of Swiss chard, and a cup of spinach. Then over top of it all I pour a teaspoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. Mix well. Enjoy. And rest easy in the perhaps-false notion that this Grass Souffle will prevent you from ever having a heart attack.

Because that's why I eat it, of course. Not because it seems attractive to me (though it does taste really good...honest), but because I'm supposed to eat it. Leafy greens and olive oil are apparently good for you.

That's how I know I'm firmly in the grips of middle age: When food becomes less about pleasure and more about disease prevention.

Mind you, not all of the good-for-you stuff is repellent. I eat a lot of fruit, for example. And I also try and eat a square of dark chocolate every day. Something about flavonoids and heart health. I just really like dark chocolate, though.

Still, the point is that my menu choices now are driven less by flavor than by grams of saturated fat.

My goal is not necessarily to live as long as I can, but to live well as long as I can. I'll take 80 years of active life over 95 years of total life with 15 spent in a nursing home any day.

Of course, none of this will prevent me from getting hit by a bus or dying in a plane crash. There's an old Yiddish proverb that says "man plans, God laughs," and I firmly believe that.

So when I'm killed by a lion that has escaped from the zoo, I at least want the guys at the morgue to look at my mangled body and say, "You know, he really does look good, doesn't he? Like someone who used to eat mulch."

My poor mom

I should start by saying that my mother is a wonderful woman. A real saint. Salt of the earth. All of that stuff.

But I reserve the right to make fun of her, and will do so now.

I can do this safely, you see, because my mother doesn't own a computer and therefore there is no chance she will ever see this post. Unless one of you snitches shows it to her or tells her about it, in which case we'll need to meet on the playground after school and settle our differences through old-fashioned, bare-knuckle fisticuffs. You're totally going down.

Anyway, my mom is not what you would call technologically savvy. The last semi-electronic appliance she learned to operate was the microwave, and that was back in the early 80s when (true story) she was afraid she would somehow incinerate the planet and therefore didn't use it for the first several weeks it was in her kitchen.

NOTE TO MOM: It's not a thermonuclear device. It's a microwave. It's deadly only to the Stouffer's frozen pizzas you stick in there.

It's not that Mom is anti-technology or anything. She just isn't interested in having a computer or a smart phone. Many of her friends and relatives are on Facebook and the like, but it's not something she particularly wants. Which is fine.

The problem is that when she does interact with modern technology and finds herself stuck – which I will say here happens on a fairly regular basis – my sister, brother or I are the ones called upon to bail her out.

And given all that Mom has done for us throughout our lives, this is in no way a problem or an inconvenience.

But you would think that once we show her how to solve a particular technological dilemma, she would write down the solution or otherwise memorize it so that it doesn't become a problem again.

And again. And again. And again.

This happens most often with her TV. It's a simple flat screen for which she has digital cable service. Time-Warner, in their infinite wisdom, has given her a remote that only a trained fighter pilot could confidently operate. It has (and I'm estimating here because I haven't actually counted) 4,718 buttons, all but three of which do things for which she has no use.

So what often happens is that Mom wants to watch TV, but she can't figure out how to turn the darn thing on. Or, if she does manage to turn it on, how to get to the channel she wants.

Or – and let me assure you, this has happened – how to make sure the TV is operating in English and not in Spanish. This is my absolute favorite Mom TV Conundrum, because listening to her try to pronounce the onscreen Spanish words as they appear makes me laugh so hard I cry.

I know I'm a terrible person. You don't have to tell me.

So every couple of weeks, I am summoned to her house to get her TV back in working order so she can watch Oprah or the Indians game or whatever (and in English). And every time I forget to write down what I did so that she can fix the problem herself next time.

In the meantime, I think I've figured out what we need to do to the remote control to help her:

So I'm back...

Hi, it's me again.

Well, "it's me again" depending on who you are. If you were formerly a reader of the blog known as "They Still Call Me Daddy," then yes, it's me again.

If you're not someone who ever had the fortune/misfortune (I leave that determination to the reader) to stumble across my cyber-missives, then welcome, I suppose.

In any case, I'm going to try blogging again. This is, I believe, my third attempt. Or maybe fourth. It has been at least three.

Whatever the number, each time I've tried blogging, it has always ended with me whimpering about having to stop because I have no time to blog. And by all accounts, that's true.

But it's true only because I used to insist on blogging every single day. And even if you're only writing a few sentences, coming up with blog material every day is a drag. Both for you and for me.

So my wife (her name is Terry...she's very smart and pretty) made the sensible suggestion that maybe I could just blog occasionally. At first I resisted because I have a mental defect known as "All or Nothing Syndrome." Either I do something all-out, full-force, gonads-to-the-wall, so to speak...or I don't do it at all.

For reasons that escape even me, since October 2013 I've opted for "don't do it at all."

Which is silly, of course. In the 14 months since I shut down They Still Call Me Daddy, I've often had the itch to get back online and write. But my life is such that I can't do it every day, so I didn't do it at all.

Yet somehow I've finally managed to convince myself of two things: I don't have to write every day, and when I do write, it doesn't have to be 5,000 words.

This, you understand, is a revelation for me.

So the blog is back. If you were with us in The Old Days, you'll notice three important differences in this latest incarnation:

1. The name of the blog. I want to say that I've dropped TheyStillCallMeDaddy.com for philosophical and emotional reasons. Making a clean break and all. But the reality is that some Japanese person snatched up the original domain name after I abandoned it, and I can't seem to get it back. And while TheyStillCallMeDaddy.net or TheyStillCallMeDaddy.us may be viable alternatives, I like the .com thing and decided to switch to something else.
   
2. As you may have gathered, I'm not going to write every 24 hours liked I used to. Days will likely go by between posts. Maybe even weeks. I can't say for sure, but I'll write when I can and, to be honest, when I feel like it. If you're crazy enough to want to know when a new post is up, I think you'll find somewhere on this screen a place where you can enter your email address and ask to be notified. But be warned: Given my obsessive personality, there will be times when I post 14 times in 48 hours or something crazy like that. It's just how I am. I make no apologies.
   
3. This may be as long a post as you're going to see around here. I no longer feel the need to hit some magical word mark with every post. Sometimes it's just going to be a few sentences. Or maybe a photo. Or maybe a photo with a few sentences. That's so much more enjoyable for you and obviously easier for me. And at this point, I'm not sure whose convenience I'm more worried about. Probably my own.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and/or coming back. I really do appreciate it. Let's see if we can make it last this time around...