Not that you asked, but here's an update on graduate school

I am to the point in my master's degree program that I marvel at those who have made it through this. Here's what I'm finding, as I enter the final two weeks of class #2 (of 11 classes in a program that will take me two more full years to complete at a minimum):

• There are certain problems raised by opting into a master's program that you simply cannot solve. For example, I am chronically sleep deprived, and I see no way whatsoever of getting around this. I work, I come home, I briefly see my family, I do homework. Then I go to bed and do it again. And again. And again. There is no wiggle room there simply to go to bed earlier. There IS no "earlier."

• Related to that, I am not running nearly as much as I used to nor nearly as much as I should. Again, I see no way around this. It just is.

• I am eating terribly, and my weight is creeping up. I could improve this with some self-discipline, but I'll be honest: I am tapped out when it comes to self-discipline. What self-discipline I have serves merely to get me out of bed in the morning and doing everything I have to do.

• Weekends are spent either studying/writing or worrying whether I'm studying/writing enough. There is probably a better mental approach to this, but I haven't yet found my groove there.

I hate how whiny this all sounds. It's my decision to do this, no one else's. And it is a first-world problem of the absolute highest order.

But it's the dominant reality in my life these days, and I now have even greater respect for those who have earned graduate (or post-graduate) degrees, or who are currently in the midst of doing so. You amaze and inspire me.

Every day I think about hanging it up after I get through this particular class. I did that once before, about two years ago when I started a master's program in public relations through Kent State University (this current program is in integrated marketing communications through West Virginia University...go Mountaineers!) I learned a lot at Kent, but I came to a realization that, given my life circumstances, it was insane to try and push through, so I quit.

I think about doing that now, too. I have good reasons for pursuing a master's degree, but it would be SO much easier to just chalk this up to bad judgment and move on. There are two reasons why I don't:

(1) I hate the example it sets for my kids and for anyone else in my life. I feel like I used to do/accomplish big things in my life ("big" by my standards, anyway), and now all I do is shy away from them. I enjoy this material and many things about the academic experience, and I want to keep going, so I do.

(2) My support system. And by "support system," I mean my wife.

Terry has stepped up to the plate with this far better than I have. She does an amazing job trying to arrange things at home so that I can study and do what I have to do every day. And more importantly, she will hear no suggestion of quitting. There is no "let's talk about it" or "oh, honey, I understand." There is simply, "no, that's not happening."

Which frankly is what I need to hear.

She is, as always, the most impressive person I know and the saving grace in my life.

Of course, the decision to walk away yet again from master's-level work (I actually did it in 1997, as well, when I VERY briefly tried an English program at Cleveland State University and realized I was too busy...and that was with only two kids!) is ultimately all mine. She can push and goad all she wants, but in the end, it's my call. She just helps keep me on track.

Here's the thing: I'm pretty certain I'm going to see this through to the end..."The End" being December 2020. I just don't know how, exactly. When you're not taking care of yourself properly, and you're sitting at your computer struggling to understand Chi-squared tests and non-probability samples and statistical significance formulas, you see no clear path to the end.

Do you know what I mean? With most things in life, you can pretty well chart out how it's going to go. God, of course, throws things at you that force you to change course, but for the most part, you can actually see the ultimate goal of whatever it is you're doing. You can envision how you're going to get there.

I cannot do that. I'm about to have the luxury of a six-week break from class that I desperately need and that will easily be one of the top five greatest things that has happened in the history of the universe. So in the short term I'll be fine. And I'm even taking the late spring term off so that Terry and I can indulge ourselves with a once-in-a-lifetime Australian cruise in late March/early April. That means, after Nov. 28, only one class to worry about in the space of 5 1/2 months. Easy enough.

But what happens when I dive back in this coming May? From there the breaks will be fewer and further between. It will mostly be go, go, go, go through the nine remaining classes and 18 months, the last of which is a capstone experience that, I'm finding online, regularly makes people cry and curse their decision to build on their bachelor's degrees.

How do you get through the day-to-day of THAT? I have no idea. There will likely be coffee and an ever-pressing Terry involved. I just can't envision what that daily reality looks like.

Yet I'm going to keep on keeping on. Not sure I have a choice. And occasionally I'll write a melodramatic blog post like this one to make myself feel better.

I appreciate you reading. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write a discussion board post on a topic I vaguely remember reading about. It could have been last night. Or was it last week? I have no clue...

The middle-aged man with the graying hair and the wonderful life

I get sentimental in October.

I have no idea why this is. It's not like October should be any more likely than another month to make me intensely grateful for the things in my life. And there seems little reason for me to become more appreciative of friends and family now vs. other times, though I suppose next week is the 19th anniversary of my father's passing, and later this month is my daughter Chloe's birthday.

It probably has something to do with the coming of fall, the closing of another summer, the change in the weather, and the way all of that makes you take stock of where you stand.

A month from tomorrow I turn 49. Nothing really special about that, other than the fact that it officially begins the countdown to 50. Turning 40 didn't really bother me. We'll see if 50 is another story.

Fifty is a half-century. That's a milestone by any measure, and it's also the point when they start insisting you undergo various invasive and potentially unpleasant medical tests. The underlying message is, "Hey buddy, the bloom is off the rose now. We're going to have to start performing more routine maintenance on you so that we can delay the inevitable as you start to fall apart."

Which is cool. I can deal with that.

I'm also probably more in big-picture mode these days because of my mom. She is 86 years old, and she is enduring all of the physical and mental challenges we associate with that age. She recently spent a few weeks in a long-term care facility after surgery and a hospital stay led to some health complications.

She is back home now, but she isn't alone for long periods of time. My sister Debbie, saint that she is, arranges a schedule for someone to visit her every morning and every evening. Debbie herself pops in more often and calls Mom throughout the day. Meals on Wheels visits, as well.

Mom is almost always cheerful and happy when we visit her, but the reason we all have to visit in the first place is to make sure Mom is OK. Just like she always made sure each of us was OK. She gets confused over which pills to take. She has lapses in memory of which she is aware, and which frustrate her at times. She shows early signs of dementia.

Mom has another surgery scheduled in two weeks to address a cancer-related issue, and none of us knows what the outcome of that will be.

I love her, I love what she has meant to me, and I love her attitude toward just about everything. I want her to be around for a long, long time, and so does she.

We just don't know how long that will be.

So it goes.

There is also my wife, who – if you have visited here with any frequency over the past seven years – you will recognize as the central theme of my writing. It always comes back to Terry, and that is only fitting, because my life always comes back to her.

Terry recently quit her job at the library after nearly two years of working there. She enjoyed it, but too often it got in the way of the things that are most important to her. She missed too many track and cross country meets, too many soccer games, too much of everything for her taste. So she decided it was time to hang it up at the library and go back to being Full Time Mom.

She is awesome at this job, you understand. My goal is always to make sure I have my own life in order so that she can focus on the kids and the house and the day-to-day craziness of our family instead of me.

Yet she still worries about me sometimes, God bless her.

It's what she does. It's what all truly selfless people do. She remains the most generous, most honest, most beautiful, most giving person I know. It's impressive to watch her work.

Part of her caregiving efforts in the near term will focus on Jack, our 12-year-old youngest/fifth child who, I've said many times, has essentially been raising himself.

Jack, like his brother Jared before him, is tall for his age. He's pushing 5-9, which is tall-ish but certainly not freakish for an eighth grader. Except he's not supposed to be an eighth grader yet. He accelerated midway through his second-grade year, so technically he should be in seventh grade right now.

Combine that with the fact that he's a 12-year-old boy and beginning what is likely to be the most hormonal, most chaotic, most confusing time of his life, and you can understand why he might need a little guidance these days.

But he'll be fine. I know that. Terry will see to it.

And I'll be fine, too, though I whine a lot about the fact that my days are so busy. My job is part of that, of course, but there's also the self-imposed burden of school.

I started a master's degree program seven weeks ago. If all goes well, it will take me until the end of 2020 to complete it.

Graduate school – even when it's just online – is tough, as it should be. I'm working toward a Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications through West Virginia University, the ancestral home of my people. Go Mountaineers!

It takes a lot of time, and I knew that going in. But I reserve the right to complain about it, even if I have no one to blame but myself.

In the meantime, the other kids are thriving. Elissa, my whirlwind of a 24-year-old oldest daughter, works for a marketing/branding agency and maintains the kind of schedule that makes me tired just looking at it. She's smart, she's organized, and as my mom likes to say repeatedly, is "just so different from what she was when she was little!" I love her.

Chloe, who will turn 22 in a few weeks, is engaged to be married in a couple of years. She is working toward a double major in biomedical engineering and chemistry at the University of Akron, and is back interning at a medical device company. She has a lot going on. She is all-around impressive. I love her.

Jared, my 20-year-old firstborn son, is a sports management major at Cleveland State University. He lives downtown in a nice apartment with a friend, works when he can at the Cleveland Indians Team Shop, and has a sweet internship with the Mentor Ice Breakers, a new professional hockey team not far from our home. He works hard and I don't see much of him these days, but I'm so proud of him. I love him.

And then there's Melanie, my recently-turned-18 high school senior. She drives out to Mentor High School every day for a marketing course that is preparing her for a career in business. Maybe HR. Good choice. She's also an intern like Chloe, working for a metal products company. Melanie is finishing up a 12-year soccer career over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to miss watching her play. She always goes hard. Always. I love her.

I already told you about Jack, but I should have added that I love him.

I love almost everything about my life. I am insanely, wonderfully, absolutely undeservedly blessed.

And as the leaves start to turn and the air gets a little colder, I'm reminded of that again and again.

OK, Dad, now I see what you meant

I moved away from home in March 1992 at the age of 22. Terry and I had just bought our first house, and I went off to live in it by myself for three months before we got married (the full extent of my bachelorhood, I guess).

Sometime later that year, after I had been gone for several months, I was at my parents' house when my dad said something I thought was a little sad at the time, but that I never fully understood until recently.

He and I were talking about something or other to do with Cleveland sports. We did that all the time. He was giving one of his long and convoluted opinions on why this coach wasn't the right fit for the team or what that franchise had to do to stop losing so much. I don't even remember specifically what he was talking about.

But I do remember what he said when he finished. He said, "At least that's what I think. I don't have anyone to talk about sports with anymore."

He said it with a little smile on his face, but it was the very definition of a sad smile. And I remember feeling a little pang of guilt in the pit of my stomach at his words.

Which, by the way, wasn't at all his intention, I'm sure. He missed having me around the house, and I think it was just his way of letting me know that.

Now fast forward about 25 years.

My son Jared is a freshman in college. He takes a full slate of classes and works a lot of hours at Dick's Sporting Goods. In between, he tries to find time to spend with his girlfriend, Lyndsey, who for the record is pretty awesome and definitely someone worth spending time with.

Jared is my sports kid. From a very young age, he and I have connected over sports. It's my fault he's an ardent Cleveland sports fan. I raised him to live and die with the Browns, Indians and Cavs, and those teams are often our main topics of conversation.

I also raised him to be a diehard hockey fan. He played the sport a little bit, and he knew more about it by the time he was 10 years old than most adults. So we talk hockey, too.

Except we don't talk about hockey or anything else as much as we used to. There just isn't time anymore. He comes home from school or work at 10 in the evening, just as I'm getting ready to go to bed. And I'm out the door the next morning long before he wakes up.

When we do have a few minutes to talk about our favorite subject, we both talk fast, as if we have to cram in everything we've been thinking before it slips our minds. They're fun conversations, punctuated with sarcasm over Cleveland teams' perennial (mis)fortunes and hope that the Cavs' 2016 NBA title won't be the sole championship for us to celebrate in our lifetimes.

Only recently did I gain a full appreciation for what my dad meant when he said he missed having his sports talk buddy around. Jared is my sports talk buddy. I have another son, Jack, but he's not so much of a sports guy, which is fine. He and I connect over other things, and we talk just as much.

It's just that the thing that bonds Jared and me is the same thing that bonded my dad and me. And there's a certain sentimentality and profound sense of legacy in that.

So I get sadder than I probably should be when Jared and I go a few days without talking Browns, Indians, Cavs, Monsters, NHL hockey or whatever. It's no one's fault that it happens, it's just the way it goes when you have a busy college kid and a busy middle-aged dad running in separate directions.

The obvious moral of the story is to take every opportunity to talk with your kids or your parents about whatever it is you have in common, whatever it is you celebrate and fret over together. That could be sports, or it could be a million other things.

What's important is that you never take it for granted.

My dad has been gone for more than 17 years now. In retrospect, I should have stopped over there more often or just called him every once in a while to talk sports. We still had our conversations after I was married, but they weren't as frequent as I would have liked. Certainly not as frequent as they had been when I lived at home.

I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen with me and Jared, especially while he and I still technically live under the same roof.

We'll see how it goes.

Go Tribe. Go Browns. Go Cavs. And go Monsters. My dad would have agreed wholeheartedly.

I'm trying to decide whether Terry and I should move after the kids all leave the nest

It is only in the last five years or so that my wife and I have even mentioned the possibility of eventually living someplace that is not Wickliffe, Ohio.

Neither of us has ever had a mailing address that didn't end with 44092, the zip code for my hometown and the only place I've called home for 48+ years. Born and bred, and well on our way to being lifers.

Except...maybe not.

We've tossed around the idea of living somewhere in the Carolinas, most likely North Carolina. Seems like a nice place.

We've talked about a far less radical move to Willoughby Hills, which is the next town over and a place that bills itself as being "where the city meets the country."

And just recently, Terry wondered whether we should move to one of the Olmsteds (Olmsted Falls, Olmsted Township or North Olmsted), which would cut my 45-minute daily commute by 75+%. An appealing thought, that.

None of this would likely happen until Jack, our youngest, at least graduates high school, and probably not until he graduates college. The boy just turned 12, so we have some time to think about it.

Moving south would mean not having to face the ordeal that is winter in Northeast Ohio. And it's not just the occasional snow shoveling and slippery roads I mind. It's the seemingly endless, depressing, gray slog that gets you (in painfully slow fashion) from November to March.

I know people say they like to watch the seasons change, but if we could arrange it so that it goes from summer to fall and immediately to spring, I think I would be fine with that.

Even a move to the southwest side of Cleveland – which is where the Olmsteds are located – would have its challenges.

You spend your whole life going to the same stores, seeing the same people at the same events, knowing instinctively where everything is. And suddenly, that all changes. You have to reorient yourself to a new existence, even though you're only 35 miles away from the place you grew up.

Most people our age have already had to do this in their lives, and they've done it without a problem. I just wonder how we would react.

Here's the thing: I would not consider it a disaster if in my obituary I'm described as "a lifelong resident of Wickliffe." I like this place. I really do. And I always will. But as time goes by, and as the place we grew up undergoes its own sort of changes, we start to wonder whether it's time to do something most of our friends did decades ago and fly the coop.

Jack is in seventh grade. In five years, he'll be off to college. He's the kind of kid who would likely adapt well if we moved tomorrow and he suddenly found himself a student in the excellent Olmsted Falls school district.

Him I don't worry about. But us? Change definitely gets a lot more difficult the older you get.

We'll see.