I have Chapsticks and reading glasses stashed everywhere

It feels like a very middle-aged person thing to say, but no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I'm never very far from a pair of reading glasses or a tube of Chapstick.

I make sure of this by keeping glasses and Chapsticks everywhere I'm likely to be, from my nightstand and PA announcing bag to the glove compartment in my car and the top desk drawer in my office.

Reading glasses are a relatively recent must-have, but my dependence on Chapstick is longstanding. My lips chap easily, or at least I've always thought they chap easily, which is really the same thing.

I use the word "dependence" intentionally, by the way, since a quick Google search suggests there's no such thing as lip balm "addiction." Yet I wouldn't have been surprised to find it's a real thing.

If I go, say, 3-4 hours without applying Chapstick, my lips always start to feel a little raw and irritated. Chapstick solves this problem almost immediately, so I stock up and carry it around as if my life depended on it.

Which, again, it doesn't. It's more a habit than an absolute physical need.

As for reading glasses, well, I've covered this topic before, and there's no denying the need is there. Until my early 50s, I could read just about anything unaided. Now, however, you'll constantly find me holding books, menus and other printed material at arm's length to get the words to come into focus.

So pretty much everywhere I keep a Chapstick I also keep a pair of cheap reading glasses. The magnification I require is pretty low, as these things go, but I know my current 1.5x prescription will creep higher and higher as the years go on.

As far as I know, there's simply no avoiding it.

So I'm trying to embrace it. Chapped lips I've never embraced, but blurry words on a page? That I can (mostly) live with.

It's the silly stuff your children and grandchildren will remember about you

I'm typing this just hours after we held my father-in-law Tom's Celebration of Life service at our church. It was a wonderfully fun and emotional time as we remembered a man who played such an important role in each of our lives.

As we heard stories about Tom from his children and grandchildren, what struck me was the kinds of memories they chose to share.

Some were about the important life lessons Tom taught, but more often than not, it was the silly stuff that stuck in their minds.

Like how, when the kids rode in a car with him and things got too quiet, Tom would suddenly yell. Out of nowhere he would let out a scream, causing everyone in the car to jump and then laugh.

Or the way, when my sister-in-law Chris and brother-in-law Dave were little, they would hide from their dad under the kitchen table when it was time to go upstairs for bed. He would playfully try (and intentionally fail) to reach down and grab them as they slithered away from him under the table, all while giggling, of course. Finally he would "catch" them, tickle them, and put them up on his shoulders to head for their bedrooms.

Or how funny he thought he was when he would greet my youngest son with a hearty "Hi Jack!", followed by a sly grin and a hastily added, "You shouldn't ever say that on an airplane."

No one thought Tom was funnier than Tom did.

The point is, your kids and grandkids may or may not remember the serious, weighty stuff you tell them – though I hope they do – but they'll almost always retain the stuff you said and did when you were just being Mom, Dad, Grandma or Grandpa.

If you're still blessed to have young ones in your house, or to be their grandparent, that's not a bad thing to keep in mind as the years roll by.

Holy cow, I'm the oldest person in this meeting

I don't know exactly when it started, but these days I regularly experience work meetings in which I am the oldest person in the room.

I find myself surrounded by young professionals – smart, talented professionals, mind you, but undeniably young – who never worked in an office without email. Who never had to fax press releases to journalists. Who never typed something on a green monochrome computer screen and sent it to a gigantic dot matrix printer shared by 60 people.

I really like my co-workers, but yikes, some are younger than the pair of gray sweatpants I have kept in my closet through six presidential administrations.

I knew this would eventually happen, of course, but I thought it would be more of a gradual thing. And maybe it has been gradual and I've simply not been paying close attention since 2003.

I remember being the young guy in the office back in the 90s. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was the one explaining technology to the old folks, and I was the one experiencing all the young guy milestones (marriage, first house, first baby, etc.)

There's no reason I still can't be the one supplying fresh ideas and teaching technology to anyone who needs to learn it, but the young guy milestone days are without question well behind me.

Apart from the specter of ageism, there's nothing wrong with being among the most seasoned people in the office, either. You bring a perspective others lack. You have "been there, done that" experience that can help others avoid nasty pitfalls. And you apply lessons of history your team members simply haven't had the opportunity to learn quite yet.

Still, the first time you realize most people sitting at the desks around you are half your age, it's disconcerting. No one can explain why your company is suddenly hiring 12-year-olds. You lack common cultural touch points with them. You have kids who are almost as old as (and in some cases decidedly older than) them.

That's when you have to step back and say those inspiring words to yourself:

"I may be older, but I am just as creative, just as innovative, and just as valuable as anyone at this company. And man, my back hurts..."

Remembering those who won't be around the Thanksgiving table tomorrow

This isn't that long ago (Thanksgiving 2007, I think), but it seems forever since I've seen my Mom and my sister Judi. That's little Jack on the left.

I am, by almost any measure, someone whose cup overflows with blessings.

I have everything I could possibly need and then some. While I've done nothing to deserve it, God has seen fit to grant me love, health and a ridiculous abundance of material wealth compared with much of the rest of the world.

I am, in short, spoiled.

I am so covered in blessings, in fact, that I seldom think about the rain that has fallen in my life. Granted, there hasn't been much of it, but there have been moments of sorrow along the way. Most have centered on the loss of loved ones: my parents, my oldest sister, my in-laws, etc.

Many people have suffered far worse loss than me, which is why I don't tend to complain about any of it. Death is the final destination for us all. There's no reason to expect it will somehow spare my family.

Still, it's hard not to feel a bit empty the day before Thanksgiving when I consider the unoccupied chairs around our dinner table tomorrow.

There was a time when Terry and I split our Thanksgiving days between my family and hers. We would do our best not to gorge ourselves in the early afternoon at my mom and dad's house so that we would have room for more turkey, stuffing and fixings at her parents' later in the day.

It was exhausting, especially the years we lugged around babies and little kids, but there's not much I wouldn't give to experience just one more of those loud, hectic, food coma-inducing Thanksgivings of years past.

For whatever reason, we humans are hard-wired not to fully appreciate what we have until the time comes when it inevitably goes away. Which is a shame, really.

On the other hand, it makes me that much more grateful for the people who are still around and who will be joining us tomorrow afternoon for food, fellowship and fun. The sadness of those we miss is made somewhat more bearable by the presence of those we love here and now.

If nothing else, that's what each of us should probably take away from the holiday we call Thanksgiving.

I hope yours is filled with blessings, with light, and with love.

Having your cake and eating it, too: The hard-to-control mental aspect of weight gain and loss

My relationship with the bathroom scale isn't especially complicated, nor is it especially healthy.

I pay lots of attention to the scale when my weight is down. I step on it nearly every day to bask in the glow of the number I apparently believe to be some reflection of my own worth.

But during those times when I know the number is going to be above what I want it to be, I actively avoid the scale.

Right now I am in one of those phases where the scale and I are not friends. This is unfair to the scale in that the number it reports is entirely a product of my own negligence and lack of discipline, rather than anything the scale itself has done.

A few weeks ago I weighed myself and discovered I had gained quite a bit of weight over the previous nine months. And it's not the first time this has happened.

I reported a similar significant gain in June 2015. In fact, if you search for the word "weight" here, you will find I've written a lot about the subject over the years.

I never thought much about my weight until I graduated from high school, when I gained far more than the standard "Freshman 15" (try the "Freshman 40"). I ballooned up in a hurry in my early 20s once my metabolism and genetics caught up with my admittedly sub-par eating habits.

Over the years I have gained and lost different amounts of weight. In fact, I associate certain years with particularly memorable weight fluctuations.

There was The Great Gain of 2012, The Big Loss of 2013, The Sneaky Blow-Up of 2015, The Even Bigger Loss of 2016, The "How Did That Happen?" Gain of 2018-19, The "This Is The Last Time I'll Go Through This" Loss of 2022, and now I guess The "I'm Not Very Good at This Weight Maintenance Thing" Pound-Packing of 2023.

Here's what I don't get: Once I make up my mind to lose weight, it's never particularly hard. And the initial phase of maintaining a healthy weight doesn't feel that difficult, either.

But then, without even noticing it, I lose interest. Other things attract my attention and, before I know it, the weight I lost becomes the weight I found.

I have already begun losing weight (again) since that disappointing trip to the bathroom scale in October, and I don't doubt I'll get back to where I should be, health-wise.

But then what? There's a mental/emotional aspect to food that repeatedly trips me up. I'm not even sure what it is, which makes overcoming it that much more difficult. How do you master something you can't even identify?

When I'm eating healthy, I love eating healthy. When I'm not eating healthy, I love not eating healthy.

Much of it goes back to my all-or-nothing personality. If I can't be perfect, then I revert to being perfectly imperfect. I slip up a few times and decide I might as well eat whatever I want, because I'm clearly incapable of maintaining a sound diet and a reasonable weight.

I can do the physical part of weight loss. It's my brain – prone to extremes as it is – I need to get under control.

With the pounds already dropping off (again), the scale and I will very likely rekindle our friendship by this spring. But I need to start working on my mental approach now because the time is coming when I'm going to be confronted by the same old challenges.

I have yet to conquer them, but I keep trying.

I know very well that striving for perfection inevitably leads to failure, but I do it anyway.

I know something has to change in my head if I'm going to keep the rest of my body in good working condition, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

What's that old saying about being your own worst enemy?

The smell of dinner cooking in the late afternoon takes me back 40 years

Several weeks ago, my beloved Wickliffe Swing Band performed in the front yard of one of its drum majors. The drum major's mom had bought the winning ticket for Band on Demand, an annual fundraiser in which the winner gets to have the band play outside their home.

The kids did their usual bang-up job, after which I walked down Wickliffe's Maple Street and Elm Avenue on the way back to my car. Just as I took the left turn from Maple onto Elm, it hit me.

It was the unmistakable smell of someone cooking dinner. I don't know exactly what they were making, but it was that combination of savory aromas familiar to anyone who has ever walked a suburban American street at 5:30 in the afternoon.

I hadn't experienced that smell in years, and it immediately took me back to Harding Drive in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Most of the kids with whom I grew up ate dinner with their families. You would play together all afternoon, and at some point you each had to go home for dinner with parents and siblings. Then you could meet up again afterward to continue doing whatever you were doing before soup was on.

Those dinners were almost invariably prepared by moms. More than once I remember heading home for my own dinner and along the way smelling the entrees and side dishes the mothers of Harding were preparing that particular day.

It was a different time. I don't know that it was ultimately any better or worse than now, but it was most certainly its own unique time.

People still cook dinner, but they don't eat together as often as they used to. And far more frequently than was once the case, it's often a dad doing the cooking.

Like most people, I infuse my childhood with a degree of romanticism it probably doesn't deserve. But smelling that dinner cooking somewhere near Maple and Elm reminded me how blessed I was to grow up when and where I did.

The perils of doing the household laundry

On the surface, doing the laundry seems like a harmless enough task. When you live with other people, however, and particularly when you're married, there are pitfalls you would never have anticipated.

I do our laundry – and by "our" laundry, I mean Terry's and mine – once and sometimes twice a week. I always do it first thing in the morning on Mondays when I work from home. Then on Fridays, when I'm also working from home, I'll wash anything Terry wasn't able to get to the previous day.

It used to be that I folded all of the clothes I washed. Then Terry requested I just leave hers unfolded because, honestly, I couldn't figure out which of her clothes went where in the closet, and therefore she was constantly searching for things I had misplaced.

I'm sure she also didn't like the way I folded a lot of it, as I'm not exactly an expert in that department.

That's all fair enough. I would love to be more helpful, but her system of clothes storage baffles me. And seeing as how Terry has put some of my clothes away in the wrong place over time, I get it.

Recently, though, I stepped on another laundry land mine.

Terry often deposits clothes she has worn on the bathroom floor. In another attempt to be helpful, I was scooping up those clothes on Monday and Friday mornings and taking them down to be washed.

But, as it turns out, Terry often wants to re-wear these discarded garments. A few times she walked into the bathroom to fetch one only to find it had been taken away for undesired laundering.

So now I leave the clothes on the floor. I had to learn the hard way.

All of this is on top of the times I haul a basket full of clothes to the laundry room and quickly discover that Jack is doing his laundry, and thus both the washer and dryer are unavailable for use.

Laundry is a chore I actually enjoy doing, but even with the best of intentions, there have been times when it would have been better for Terry had I simply not done it in the first place.

You live and learn.

My wife is a puzzle person. I am not.

Terry recently completed a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and I can only assume she used some sort of voodoo magic to do it.

Never, not in a million years or for a million dollars, could I do a 2,000-piece puzzle. While we're at it, I should mention that 1,000, 500, 250, 200 and even 100 pieces are also out of the question for me.

One time, as a test, Terry gave me a 25-piece puzzle to complete, just to determine exactly how inept I am. Let the record show I did eventually get those 25 pieces to fit together, but I'm embarrassed to say how long I needed to complete the task.

It should take a reasonably intelligent adult 2 minutes – maybe – to do a 25-piece puzzle. It took me longer than 2 minutes. One might say "considerably" longer.

My complete lack of spatial sense and awareness prevents me from ever being a puzzle guy. Which is too bad, really, given how much fun puzzle people seem to have.

I know you're supposed to pull out the border pieces and put those together first, but...well, even with a straightforward, time-consuming, trial-and-error approach, I just can't visualize how connecting pieces are supposed to join up. I can't look at the knob on one piece and easily see how it fits into the slot on another.

It's just not how my brain works, which is one of many reasons I didn't choose carpenter or engineer as my profession.

As you might suspect, this mental shortcoming also makes it difficult to put together even the simplest home furniture or children's toys. Don't get me wrong, I get the job done. But you wouldn't believe the time and effort it takes for me to understand exactly how Tab A fits into Slot B.

On the other hand, I am masterful in my use of semicolons. They're about as practical these days as jigsaw puzzles, though, so maybe I shouldn't go around bragging.

The lawn guy is going to clean up our leaves this year, and now I'm having a crisis of identity

The AI Blog Post Image Generator did a better job with this fake photo than it did on Wednesday's post, but I still question this AI-generated landscaper's facial features.

Many years ago when I worked at the Cleveland Clinic, I had frequent opportunity to interact with Dr. Roger Mee, a world-renowned pediatric heart surgeon. In addition to being very good at his job and a nice man, he was also quite wealthy.

Or at least wealthy enough to own one of the finer homes in our area, located in what is often referred to as the "tony" Cleveland suburb of Gates Mills. The house happens to be situated along the route we take to and from church each Sunday, so we pass it constantly.

Quite often when I drove by during my Clinic years, I would see Dr. Mee on a small riding mower cutting the grass. You have to understand, this stately home is located on a very large lot. There are acres of grass there, and from what I could tell, Dr. Mee would cut all of it himself.

One of the best pediatric heart surgeons in the world, who commanded a commensurately high salary, was out there for hours at a time mowing his lawn.

This always amazed me, and one time I asked him about.

"Dr. Mee," I said, "I see you on your riding mower all the time. Do you always cut the grass yourself?"

He said he did.

"How long does it take you?"

"About 5 or 6 hours."

"Wow, is it a stress reliever?"

"The first 3 hours are. The rest of it is just a pain in the ass."

Yet there he was, week in and week out, keeping that grass trimmed even though I'm sure he could easily have afforded a landscaper to do it for him.

That has always impressed me, particularly since I now pay someone to mow my much-smaller lawn.

Nick, our landscaper, does an excellent job. Like Dr. Mee, he's very good at what he does. If I was going to hire someone, I'm not sure I could have made a better choice.

But as I mentioned in a post here a few months ago, having a lawn guy (not to mention a snow plow guy) takes some getting used to.

I spent 30 years cutting my own grass. Even when I really didn't feel up to it, I always took some pride in doing the job myself.

Then I started earning extra income as a PA announcer, and suddenly the luxury of having someone else out there in the yard sweating instead of me became a real possibility.

Hiring Nick has turned out to be a good move, at least when I'm not questioning my own masculinity for turning the job over to him. I can never quite shake the feeling that I'm shirking one of my key responsibilities as husband/dad.

Now, with the advent of fall, it gets even better...or worse, depending on how you look at it.

Over the next couple of weeks, Nick is going to collect the leaves in our half-acre lot and deposit them near the street for the city to pick up. None of us will have to touch a rake or pull a tarp laden with leaves. He will handle the whole thing, and being Nick, he will handle it well.

It will be more than worth the cost to have him do it.

Still...I can't help but look at those as my leaves piling up in my yard. Part of me still believes it's my job to gather them up and haul them out of there.

I'm sure I'll get over this feeling in time, but honestly, how do rich people who weren't born rich adjust to having gardeners and nannies and such? I can't imagine.

Not that I'm aching to go outside and fire up the lawn mower or the leaf blower, mind you. But I'll admit, I'm still adjusting to the concept.

Here's how we're adjusting to having no kids in school

It has very little to do with the topic of today's post, but I wanted to show you this photo, the result of me prompting an online artificial intelligence blog image generator to create a graphic depicting "parents of older kids." This is what the AI image generator returned. None of these are actual people, but I do feel bad for #4 and #5 and whatever led to their, um, unique facial features. Clearly some online AI tools are better than others. Let's move on...

Our youngest, Jack, graduated from high school nearly six months ago. This is the point at which we're supposed to be missing it all and figuring out what our new normal looks like.

Which I suppose is what we're doing, but it's somewhat different for Terry and me.

For one thing, I'm at Wickliffe High School (sorry, the Wickliffe Upper School...or the Campus of Wickliffe, if you prefer) just as often now as I ever was. My PA announcing hobby/side business has me showing up at the school dozens of times a year for football, soccer, volleyball and basketball games, along with Wickliffe Swing Band performances.

So it's not like I don't still see the place with some frequency.

As for Terry, she maintains close ties to the Swing Band. If she's not at the school itself, she's texting or visiting with her friends from the Wickliffe Band Boosters.

On one hand, none of our kids are Wickliffe students anymore, so we've been getting used to that part of it.

But Wickliffe being Mayberry and all, we couldn't entirely extricate ourselves from the school system if we tried.

I can't speak for my wife, but I will say I feel a little pang of nostalgia nowadays when I see other people's pictures from homecoming, band concerts, sports awards and the like. That used to be our life and now it isn't. We're not the first to transition away from it, nor will we be the last.

On the plus side, our family calendar is much more open than it used to be, and there are undeniable benefits there. I don't entirely miss the days of rushing around to get the kids wherever they need to be.

There's also a "been there, done that, no need to go back" aspect to it. We put in our time and now there are new adventures ahead, which is exciting. I've never been one to want to return to the "good old days," as I've always felt I'm living the good old days now, at every moment of my life.

In sum, while our case may be a little different from others, we're still getting used to not having kids in the local school system. Like anything else, there's some good, some bad, and a whole lot of in-between.

Half a year into this phase of life, we're doing OK.

I have no idea how the book business works, so I can't explain why my book is being sold in these strange places

Does anyone here speak Danish??

As I've mentioned more than once (I apologize if it's getting annoying), I recently wrote a book. Like this blog it's called "5 Kids, 1 Wife," and it's a compilation of some of my favorite posts since 2011.

I published the book through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which means it is available for purchase through Amazon. Between that and any copies I sell directly to people I know, I figured that was the extent of my potential sales channels.

But then, within days of the book coming out, it mysteriously showed up on BarnesandNoble.com. I couldn't explain how that happened, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Then I found the book popping up online in a dozen or so other places, many of which I wasn't even aware existed.

That's when I remembered I had agreed to take part in KDP's Expanded Distribution program, which they promise will "make your book available to distributors so booksellers and libraries can find your book and order it."

Here's what a simple Google search turns up:

• My book is more expensive on "Thrift" Books ($18.06) than it is on Amazon ($16).
  
  
• On the other hand, it's significantly discounted ($12.88) at Alibris.com.
  
  
• While we're on the subject of pricing, please please PLEASE do not buy it from this eBay seller for $30.82. If you find yourself tempted to do this, call me and I will give you a copy in order to save you from yourself.
  
  
• On the fun side, while the book is only available in English, you can buy it on websites on which the primary language is Danish, Swedish and German.
  
  
• There's a classical guitarist named Scott Tennant of whom I've been aware for several years. Authorship of my book is credited to him in a few places, including this site.

A question worth asking – at least as far as I'm concerned – is whether and how I get paid if someone buys my book from any of these people. Other than the eBay merchant, I'm assuming the other sites have some sort of arrangement through which they buy the book from Amazon/KDP and I still get my standard royalty, which is an admittedly small but symbolically important $3.42 per book.

I have no way of tracking this or confirming it's truly how the whole thing works, but I'm going to trust Andy Jassy (the president and CEO of Amazon) and his team to treat us small-time authors fairly.

Of course, as I describe in the book, I also once trusted a local panhandler named Maurice to pay back $80 I gave him, so this could be another case in which my enduring faith in humanity proves to be foolish.

Those mundane home movies of yours are immensely valuable

Like most families, we have gigs and gigs of digital videos of our kids as they were growing up.

While home movie cameras have been around for more than half a century, the digital era has made it exponentially easier to chronicle your family history and share it with everyone (whether they're interested or not).

Lately, having watched some of our videos from the chaotic mid- and late 90s, I've come to realize the importance of these personal archives.

I had forgotten, for instance, just how crazy those days were for us. Logic suggests having four (and later five) little kids in the same house is inevitably going to generate some degree of mayhem, but it had slipped my mind just how fun and crazy it all was.

The short clip above is a scene from our family Christmas 1998, and a quieter account a week later of little Jared eating baby cereal for the first time.

Nothing earth-shattering, yet there is so much to enjoy in those two minutes:

• The tumult of voices that punctuated every family Christmas
• A shot of my mother-in-law and father-in-law, now both gone, as their granddaughters Courtney and Elissa present Grandpa with a gift (a weather rock, as it turns out)
• Hairstyles I had forgotten about, and a long-since-faded hair color (dark brown) for me
• Jared's little Cleveland Lumberjacks hockey bib
• Jared's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to his first taste of something that wasn't breast milk (I believe the cereal was mixed with breast milk, but after a few spoonfuls, it didn't seem to help)
• Scenes from our old house on East 300th Street

As I said, none of this is life-changing or especially significant to anyone but us. Yet I can't get over how wonderful it all is.

As time goes on and your children inevitably grow up and move on, you forget the small moments that made up the fabric of life. The big events are great, of course, but your existence is mostly the everyday stuff, the memory of which brings back feelings you forgot you ever had.

Thank God for digital video.

My TV viewing is mostly snippets of whatever my wife is watching

This is a common scene in our house:

Terry will be taking a break from one of the million tasks, large and small, that comprise her day. She often does this by plopping down on the couch with a cup of coffee to watch television.

She will be happily watching something when I come wandering into the living room. The screen catches my eye. I stand there for a few minutes watching with her.

I become sufficiently interested that I will ask her a few questions about the characters and the plot. Then I either stand and watch some more, or else I head off to do whatever it was I had intended to do in the first place.

Then it happens again in a day or two. Sometimes I will actually sit down and watch for 10 or 15 minutes. More often than not, though, I stand. Dads often do this and I don't know why. Maybe we simply don't want to commit.

Anyway, over time, I become familiar enough with the show that I can pop in six episodes later and quickly catch up on the action.

Sometimes it's a Netflix series, other times it's a competition show like "Dancing with the Stars." Either way, I never watch the whole thing with her, but rather just enough to establish a baseline level of knowledge that allows me to ask educated questions like, "Are those kids on 'The Fosters' still making bad choices?"

I don't think of myself as a TV guy, and it's not because I have any objections to TV. Nowadays, there's far more good writing and acting on TV than there is in movies.

It's just that, for the most part, I don't have time for it. I choose to fill my non-working hours with other things that aren't any better or worse than TV. They're just other choices.

But Terry has good taste in onscreen entertainment, so quite often when I shuffle through the living room, I see something interesting. I know I should be tackling a particular chore or getting ready to leave for a PA announcing gig or something, but I can't seem to look away.

So I end up watching maybe 15% of a multi-season series through a string of 10-minute (or smaller) chunks of viewing.

If there are important bits I know I've missed, YouTube will more often than not have those scenes and I can use that to fill in my knowledge gaps.

It's not the recommended way to enjoy high- (or low-) quality television, but I can tell you it works.