I simply cannot call my former teachers by their first names

I had forgotten the fact that virtually all of my male teachers in the 70s and 80s used to wear coats and ties to school every day.

Over the last couple of years, I've enjoyed writing a series of "Where Are They Now?" articles for my high school alumni association newsletter.

These pieces, as you might imagine, spotlight a retired teacher, administrator and/or coach who spent a significant number of years working within our school district.

I love connecting with these folks. Their stories are uniformly interesting to me, from the reasons they originally got into education to their favorite memories at Wickliffe to the things they've been doing since retirement.

I relish forming new and deeper connections with people who had such an impact on my life many years ago. I end up feeling much closer to them now than I ever could have as a student back in the 1980s.

That familiarity, however, only goes so far. More than once when I've gotten on the phone to interview them and said "Hello, Mrs. ______________!" I have been admonished to call them by their first names.

"You've been out of school for a long time now. Call me ___________________," is the type of thing they will say.

Each time, though, I politely refuse. I realize these former authority figures don't hold the same place in my life now as they did way back when, but I still admire each of them deeply. And to me, it will always be Mr./Mrs. Last Name and never, ever "Pat" or "Dan" or "Barbara" or "Bill" or whatever the case may be.

I just can't do it. I could no sooner be on a first-name basis with them as I could with the Pope.

I'll bet most people my age can identify with this feeling. I'm one to tell my kids' friends to call me by my first name, especially once they graduate, but there's a part of me that resists doing the same for my old teachers and coaches.

Call it deep respect, even reverence. I will always consider myself to be one or two notches lower than them in the hierarchy of adult relationships.

Which I think says something about the high esteem to which we should hold educators in our society.

What I didn't tell the kids I spoke to at football camp

Photo credit: Kathy Rypinski

Last month, I had the privilege of briefly addressing a group of young boys getting ready to participate in the Wickliffe Football Camp.

When I say "briefly addressing," I mean it. This was a collection of nearly 40 kids from kindergarten through 6th grade who just wanted to run around, learn a thing or two about football, and generally have fun. They couldn't have been especially interested in what some middle-aged guy who hadn't played the sport in nearly four decades had to say.

So I kept my remarks very brief, as you might imagine.

I talked about my own experiences playing in Wickliffe. I talked about the city's great football tradition. I talked about my role as an announcer for Blue Devil football games and how I couldn't wait to announce their names on Friday nights in just a few years.

That kind of thing.

I was looking to motivate them a little and get them even more excited for what they would be doing at camp.

What I didn't want to tell them was that they had chosen a fiercely difficult sport...one that could be frustrating and even dangerous at times.

I didn't tell them how, in the middle of my sophomore season, seeing no clear path to ever becoming a starter at the varsity level, I wanted to quit football.

I didn't tell them how my forearms, every year from August through October, were bruised various shades of purple and yellow from all of the blocking and hitting we did in practices and games.

I didn't tell them there were times I got hit so hard I saw stars.

Or about the practice when I took a handoff, got tackled low by one of my teammates, and found both knees swollen and full of fluid just an hour later.

I didn't mention the fact that I opted not to lift weights in the offseason as so many guys did, and that this hurt my chances of getting more playing time (though I always thought this was fair...it was my decision, and there were rightful consequences for it).

I didn't bring up the time in a junior varsity game when I got speared in the groin and went down in intense pain, having to reveal to my coach that I stupidly wasn't wearing a cup because I thought it slowed me down.

I didn't talk about the sweat and pain of endless summer double session practices.

Yet maybe I should have brought up some or all of that. Because collectively, those experiences made playing football one of the best decisions of my life. I learned all of the cliched lessons about toughness, determination, persistence, teamwork, etc.

They were probably too young to realize how anything worth doing is probably going to come with some discomfort, and how there would be times they would question their decision to engage in it in the first place.

That will all come later. For now, they just needed to know that running, catching and throwing a football around is a heck of a lot of fun.

They'll learn the deeper lessons in time.

Home renovations: Hemorrhaging money and loving every minute of it

This is our new 23-foot Trex deck when it was completed and before we started putting stuff on it.

We are the midst of a series of home renovation projects, all of which involve us hiring various contractors to complete projects around our property that, had I been born with the Handy Gene, I might have done myself.

Alas, though, I was not, and therefore we have a choice either to shell out thousands of dollars to these professionals or watch our house fall down around us.

Like many other homeowners before us, we have chosen to deplete our savings account.

It all started last fall when a basement flood forced us to replace all of the trim and various doors in our basement. We hired a contractor to perform the repairs, and he turned out to be...less than satisfactory. His replacement, recommended by our daughter Elissa, was the complete opposite: Fast, competent, skilled, and a great communicator.

He completed the job in a matter of a couple of weeks.

So we hired him to replace our battered old wooden deck. It's beautiful.

We would love for him to do even more work for us, because I've discovered that a good contractor is worth his weight in gold.

We're still looking to remodel our nearly-30-year-old kitchen this year, and we need a lot of interior painting done.

With each job and each batch of building materials and supplies, our bank account gets lighter. Sometimes by frightening leaps and bounds.

Yet we grin and bear it, because the end result of each job is so nice.

Nice enough to justify huge depletions of our rainy fund?

Well...I don't know. I can tell you the Trex deck is amazing, though, for what that's worth.

My daughter wants to be a double doctor (I don't know what else to call it)

 

That's my kid on the left, performing surgery on a pig.

Until a few weeks ago, my master's in Integrated Marketing Communications made me the most educated person in our family.

I proudly held this title the moment West Virginia University conferred on me that M.S. degree back in the summer of 2020, the culmination of a two years of very hard work.

Four of our children have college degrees, but prior to August 2, 2024, they were all at the Bachelor's level. I reigned supreme for four glorious years as the most-schooled person in our family of seven.

That ended three weeks ago when my daughter Chloe successfully defended her thesis and became known as Dr. Chloe Edmonds, having earned a very well-deserved PhD in neuroscience. I was more than happy to yield my crown to her as Most Schooled Tennant.

But get this: Now she wants to go to medical school. I have heard of M.D./PhDs before, and I have even met a couple. I just never imagined that any of our offspring would be so ambitious as to become a doctor twice over.

If all goes according to plan, Chloe will enter med school in the fall of 2026. Her goal now is to be a pediatric neurology physician researcher.

If my assumptions and math are correct – four years of medical school, four years of residency, a two-year fellowship – Chloe will be about 40 years old by the time she is fully in practice.

The world needs people like her, of course. People are who willing to undertake complex medical research. People who work tirelessly to address a particular disease or condition.

People who are OK taking on a massive amount of student loan debt.

Today's post is an unashamedly sorry-not-sorry form of bragging about my daughter. It also represents a heartfelt thanks to Chloe, on behalf of the rest of society, for her commitment to advancing medical science.

And it's my non-check-writing way of wishing her the heartiest good luck in paying down that debt.

We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is

We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.

In some cases I think these folks simply found their perfect houses and have stayed ever since. In other cases, I think it's reverse inertia at work: It's such a hassle to move that many simply choose never to do it again.

For us, it was a matter of finding a big enough home to hold our young family while staying within the comfortable confines of Wickliffe, Ohio, the city where my wife and I have lived our whole lives.

I was thinking back recently to when we were looking to move out of our first home on East 300th Street.  I remembered that Terry found our current house not on the Internet (though she could have), but rather through a classified ad in The News-Herald, our local daily newspaper.

An ad in a print newspaper. Talk about a different era.

This memory is timely because it was 36 years ago tomorrow (August 22, 1988) that I started working at The News-Herald as an 18-year-old sports agate clerk. I took game scores and stats over the phone and soon began writing articles with my byline on them, which was always a thrill.

More importantly, it was a time when The News-Herald and community newspapers in general played a much more prominent role in society than they do now. Most households had a subscription to at least one paper in the late 1980s, so I could always be sure that whatever I wrote would attract plenty of eyeballs.

Newspapers retained their position of influence for several years after that, at least as long as 2003 when the previous owners of our house, John & Lisa, saw fit to advertise in the classified ads.

Nowadays, of course, that simply wouldn't happen. Classified ads aren't really much of a thing anymore, and even if they were, no one would think to look there for a house anyway.

The comedian John Mulaney said, "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old sentence."

I feel you, John. I can say in all honesty, "One time I bought a house that was advertised in a newspaper, which is a very, VERY old sentence."

In an increasingly dark world, high school sports remain a source of light

This week begins my 11th year as a high school public address announcer, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Between now and mid-October, I'll probably announce more than 50 different events, from volleyball and soccer matches to football games and marching band performances.

I even get to do several Division I college soccer matches for Cleveland State University, something to which I'm really looking forward.

My enthusiasm for PA announcing stems partly from the fact that it's fun, and partly from the way in which sports provide a wonderful-yet-temporary escape from everything that's wrong with the world.

These days, there is no shortage of things that seem to be going haywire. In the U.S., we're divided now as badly as we were in the late 1960s, and perhaps nearly as much as were during the Civil War.

I take great comfort in the undeniably wholesome nature of high school athletics. In my experience, the kids who participate tend to be smart, friendly, motivated and brimming with potential. They are fun to watch and even more fun to interact with.

Even if you don't really like sports, it's easy to admire the sustained effort and dedication of these athletes. The things they learn and apply are highly cliched (teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, etc.) yet still very real.

They give me hope.

I've been around prep sports for more than 40 years as an athlete, coach, journalist, league administrator and now as an announcer. I get just as excited for the opening kickoff of a football game now as I did back in the Stone Age when I was playing.

For those next few hours, I don't give the presidential election or any divisive social issues even a single thought. I am absorbed in the game.

Is this naive? Pollyanna-ish? Unrealistic? A case of the privileged white man sticking his head in the sand because he can?

The answer is probably "yes" on all counts. But I don't care.

I would rather watch a well-played high school volleyball match than two candidates yelling at each other on a stage any day.

The Mystery of the Holy Tupperware Lid

 

We recently got a new back deck. The old one was well past its prime and overdue for replacement. The new one, made from Trex decking material, is bigger and better in every way.

In the process of tearing down the old deck, our contractor Evan found the faded, beat-up Tupperware lid pictured above. Terry had been looking for that lid for years and never would have guessed it had somehow ended up underneath our deck.

What was most intriguing, though, was the small rectangular hole cut into the middle of the lid. When Terry sent a picture of it to our family group text chat, there was speculation that perhaps some critter or other had chewed through the lid during its long years of dark isolation under the deck.

But upon closer inspection, the hole seems too rectangular and clean to be the work of a raccoon or possum. Plus, there appear to be slice marks around the hole, which would suggest that someone had taken a knife and intentionally cut out a small square of the plastic.

When you live for many years in a house of seven people, five of whom are children, you usually assume the "someone" in situations like this is one of your offspring. You don't try to make sense of it, because there is no making sense of it. There is no logical answer to why someone would cut a hole in a Tupperware lid and then hide it outside beyond, "Well, we have kids, you see..."

Terry and I are at a stage of life where our older children feel comfortable confessing various illegal and otherwise inadvisable things they did while growing up. At least one of these stories comes out at every family gathering, and as I've said before, I am simultaneously amused, fascinated and horrified when it does.

No one fully owned up to cutting the hole in the lid and hiding it, but Jack thinks it's fairly likely that he was the culprit. He doesn't specifically remember doing it, but in his own words, "It seems like the kind of dumb thing I would have done when I was little."

So mystery solved, I suppose. The lid is no longer usable, but at least Terry can finally rest easy knowing what happened to it.

And she and I together can say a prayer of thanks that our children have all grown up safely despite occasional and egregious lapses in judgment along the way.

One thing I learned at the Olympics: We should let the Dutch run the world

Last week I was in Paris with my wife Terry, my daughter Elissa, and Elissa's boyfriend Mark. We were there for the Olympics, and other than coming home with a case of Covid to a house without electricity thanks to a powerful storm a few days earlier, it was incredible.

We didn't get to any of the truly high-profile events. Or at least I didn't. I was already coming a day later than Terry, Elissa and Mark, but a delayed connecting flight forced me to miss my plane to Paris and to arrive on Sunday morning, rather than Saturday afternoon as planned.

The result was that my three travel companions got to watch the U.S. women's soccer team defeat Japan 1-0 on Saturday while I was still hanging around the airport in Atlanta.

Even though I wasn't there, my favorite thing about that match was that a number of people apparently asked to take pictures with my family, especially Elissa and Mark, who were dressed like this:

Elissa is on the left and Mark on the right, The woman in the middle was one their adoring fans at the U.S.-Japan women's soccer match who asked to take photos with them.

I just loved that. Elissa says cowboy hats, in particular, are a novelty for Europeans, who quite naturally don't get to see them very often.

Anyway, I didn't make women's soccer, but I did get to attend women's field hockey and a session of track and field. For all the hassle it was to get to the some of the venues – and make no mistake, the endless subway rides and countless steps we took to reach these sites were a hassle by any definition – the atmosphere, energy and fan camaraderie at Olympic events almost can't be described.

As Ferris Bueller would say, I highly recommend it.

Among the people we encountered during our week in Paris, my favorite were the fans from the Netherlands. They come from a relatively small country, but when their nation is represented on the international athletic stage, they show up loudly and proudly in large numbers.

I quickly realized that all of us who don't happen to come from the Netherlands/Holland have quite a bit to learn from the Dutch. To the point that I think we would be better off if we formed some sort of world government and allowed the Netherlanders to oversee it.

Three reasons why:

(1) They're smart: Mark and I were standing in line between field hockey matches outside Stade Yves-du-Manoir waiting to refill our water bottles. The line was long and the sun was hot. At one point the two Dutch guys in front of us persuaded almost everyone to move the line about 10 feet to the left so we could all be in the shade. It was a simple idea, but it hadn't occurred to anyone else. They convinced several people with whom they do not share a common language the mutual benefit of shifting the line over. That takes impressive communication skills. And brains.

(2) They're very comfortably bilingual: We talked briefly with the two smart Dutch men, and their wonderful grasp of English reminded me how effortlessly people in that part of Europe switch among languages. I worked with many people at Goodyear who were fluent in at least three languages and it always impressed me. In my experience, people who can speak in multiple tongues are generally people worth listening to.

(3) They proudly wear orange in mass numbers: While the flag of the Netherlands is red, white and blue, the national color is orange. Their fans deck themselves out in orange shirts, orange pants, orange hats, orange socks, etc. When we saw them take on Great Britain in field hockey, the stands were a sea of orange and orange variants. The only people not wearing orange were the relatively reserved British fans and us. Everyone else was cheering in unison for a Netherlands team that would go on to win the gold medal in the event. Want results? Get everyone on the same page, no matter their role in the process. The Dutch have known that for years.

BLOG RERUN: Things I miss and don't miss about growing up in the 70s and 80s

NOTE: This post originally ran here on the blog 11 years ago today (August 12, 2013, for the calendar-challenged). I bring it back now because I still miss and don't miss these things.

Things I Miss

Fantasy Island

There have been some good shows on TV in the past 50 years, but none have matched the awesomeness that was Fantasy Island. Saturday nights at 10, as I recall. ABC aired it right after The Love Boat, and I have to believe they dominated the ratings. Mr. Rourke ruled the island with an iron fist ("Smiles, everyone, smiles...NOW."), but it was Tattoo who got the girls. Something about that little guy was apparently irresistible. 

The Sony Walkman

I could walk around and listen to music outside. OUTSIDE. Without carrying a 14-pound boom box. I could go running and listen to music. Or cycling. Or whatever it was we did back then (I can't quite remember how we filled our days, to be honest.) Of course, the music was on cassette. And you had to fast-forward and rewind to get to different songs. And that fast-forwarding and rewinding drained the life from your double-A batteries. But it was revolutionary, don't you understand?

This version of Michael Jackson

I miss that guy.

Things I Don't Miss

People smoking...everywhere

Good Lord, it was terrible. You kids have no idea how good you have it in this department. People just lit up all over the place...in their homes, in their cars, in their offices, in church, etc. OK, maybe not in church. As far as I know. I mean, I didn't go to church in the 70s. The point is, the world smelled like cigarettes. Which is to say the world was disgusting and it stank. The fact that there are still people who smoke amazes me. I just assumed we all collectively came to our senses round about 1997 and that everyone was going to quit. What did I miss?

Four channels of TV

After the iPod and the Keurig coffee maker, I say cable/streaming television is Western Civilization's greatest contribution to the universe over the past several decades. When I was growing up in Cleveland, you had channels 3 (NBC), 5 (ABC), 8 (CBS), and 43 (independent). And at some point there was channel 61, too. And that was it. The reception was bad during storms AND YOU HAD TO GET UP TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL. Who does that? Not us now. Which is why we're all fat. But still...

Rubik's Cube

There wasn't anything intrinsically wrong with Rubik's Cube, other than the fact that I could never solve it. Ever. Even bought a book explaining how to solve it and couldn't understand it. Yet there were people appearing on "That's Incredible" who, given a randomly configured Rubik's Cube, could solve the thing in, like, 12 seconds. Maybe less, I don't remember. All I know is that I was bitter about it then and I'm bitter about it now. DARN YOU AND YOUR DEMONIC INVENTION, ERNO RUBIK!

As personal tech devices become more sophisticated, don't forget the value of shared entertainment experiences

This was the scene from our pavilion seats for a recent screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the Cleveland Orchestra performing the film score live.

One of my favorite things about having a smartphone is that it allows me, with just a pair of earphones, to listen to music, watch a movie, and even check out a televised sporting event through our DirectTV streaming service.

Things that used to require large pieces of equipment when I was growing up (a theatre screen, a TV, a VCR, a stereo, etc.) are now available for personal consumption thanks to the miracle of the iPhone/Android. No one else needs to see or hear what I'm seeing or hearing.

Which has its advantages, of course, especially when you're traveling.

But along with all of this miniaturization and personalization also comes increased isolation.

As technology advances, so too does the ability for people to live – almost literally – in their own little worlds. Opportunities for social interaction decrease, which many of the introverts among us will celebrate but which can also have real (and negative) long-term effects on our collective emotional and psychological wellbeing.

This was brought home to me last month when Terry, Jack, our family friend Josie and I all spent a Saturday evening at Blossom Music Center watching the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" while the Cleveland Orchestra played the background music in sync with the film.

I would guess I've seen Raiders in its entirety 10-15 times, but this most recent experience was the first time I had seen it with a crowd of people since I originally watched it in the theatre in 1981.

And it was wonderful. Far more enjoyable than watching it alone in my living room.

Part of the reason was that Sarah Hicks, the orchestra's guest conductor, encouraged the several thousand of us in attendance to interact with the movie. She pushed us to clap for the heroes, boo the villains and generally enjoy the movie viscerally as I would say Steven Spielberg originally intended us to.

It made the whole thing so much more fun. We would clap whenever Indiana Jones got himself out of a particularly tight situation. We would boo and hiss whenever one of the Nazis came onto the screen. And we would laugh wholeheartedly whenever Indy would make one of his understated jokes or amusing observations.

It made me realize how seldom I watch movies in the theatre now. There is something about the shared experience of a concert or a film that adds to my enjoyment of it. As I've increasingly relied on my phone to serve as a primary source of entertainment, I have somehow managed to forget that.

Art, in whatever form you consume it, is meant to have a social component. Every once in a while, put down the phone and get to your local cinema or concert hall for some shared fun.

I don't think you'll regret it.

The fundamental question when taking your vacation time: Long breaks or extended weekends?

I question the AI Blog Post Image Generator's choice of hat for this man sitting on the beach, but otherwise it's well done.

One of my favorite feelings in the world is getting near the end of the weekend and realizing, late on a Sunday afternoon, that I'm off work the next day and free to do whatever I like.

But its close cousin is the Friday afternoon "Hey, I'm on vacation all next week and won't be back in the office for the next 10 days!"

When it comes time to plan out my vacation for the year, I find both of these dynamics playing out in my head.

Do I take a few full weeks off and sprinkle in a few personal days here and there as needed?

Or do I take a series of four-day weekends throughout the course of the year?

The answer for me is usually "all of the above."

I'll take a week or more off when we're going somewhere, as we're doing right now for our trip to Paris. But I also like pinpointing a Friday and a Monday per month (preferably bracketing the same weekend) and taking those days off as well for no particular reason.

It's a good blend of planned/purposeful/destination-oriented breaks mixed with "hey, why not?" mini-vacations.

Your philosophy may differ.

Either way, as I've mentioned before, take those vacation days!

As if we needed more proof that evil exists in this world, along come Bulgarian split squats

(NOTE: I'm in France right now, but I'm not chronicling that trip here. Terry is mostly doing that for us on Facebook, if for whatever reason you want to look her up and see some vacation photos. I think they're viewable by anyone. I will say this, though: Whenever I get to speak French to a French person, I inevitably sounds like Pepe Le Pew because I'm trying so hard to sound French. I need to back off a little...)

Let me say two quick things about my newly formed strength training habit:

1. I have given much of the credit for me taking up the gym life to my daughter Elissa, and rightly so, but my son Jared also had a hand in this. He has been lifting for years, which not only provided inspiration but also led him to piece together a pretty formidable home gym in the back room of our basement (on his own time and using his own money). I now benefit from having that gym. Also, today is Jared's 26th birthday, and he's a good guy, so please wish him a happy happy.
   
   
2. This is the third or fourth time I've written about lifting in the past month, but please rest assured that this is not going to turn into a gym bro blog or anything. It's just that I write 150 or so new posts a year, and they're generally based on what's new in my life as a husband, a dad, and a middle-aged guy. Lifting is still new to me, so it's probably not surprising that I've been writing about it. I'll dial it back, I promise.

I'm writing this post the morning of July 4th. Yesterday I was at the gym with my trainer Kirk for leg day. I've already learned that leg days always lead to soreness 24 hours later, and that is certainly the case now. My quadriceps are killing me.

The primary reason for that is the exercise demonstrated in the video above: the Bulgarian split squat. I hadn't done this exercise before, and I wasn't particularly thrilled to do it when Kirk's explanation of it began with, "This is pretty much everyone's least favorite exercise."

Great!

In the video it appears to be innocuous enough, but man, it's a killer. Kirk had me do two sets on each leg. Each set consisted of 10 repetitions holding a dumbbell, then 10 additional reps with just body weight.

You would think the body weight reps are a welcome reprieve after getting rid of the dumbbell, but no. They are somehow even worse, probably because your legs are already awash in burning lactic acid after the dumbbell reps.

You know what was even worse? Kirk – a seemingly nice guy who has a hidden masochistic streak a mile wide – gave me a heavier dumbbell to use for the second set.

I walked away from Bulgarian split squats with a decidedly wobbly gait. My legs were the kind of rubbery I had only seen before when Mike Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick to win the heavyweight title in 1986.

I will admit, though, that Bulgarian split squats taught me something important. Going to the gym five times a week and activating muscles I haven't used in years has obvious physical benefits when it comes to strength, flexibility, mobility, etc.

But just as important, I've found, is the way in which weight lifting is making me mentally stronger. As Kirk says, it's all about your willingness to approach and break through the threshold.

That threshold is one of physical discomfort, sure, but it plays out just as much in your head as it does in your biceps or your hamstrings.

When we get to the final set of an exercise and Kirk tells me the goal is "8 to 10 reps," I naturally want to hit 10. When it starts getting tough only 5 reps in, though, it becomes a mental game. Do I struggle my way to the minimum of 8 and stop there? Or do I willingly embrace the pain (and potential failure) of those 9th and 10th reps?

So far it has gone both ways for me. Sometimes I'll get to that minimum and simply say, "That's it, I'm done." Other times I've sucked it up and gutted out those 9th and 10th reps.

I feel much more satisfied when I take the tougher road, and I'm working on the best mental approach to ensuring that happens consistently.

In the meantime, the key lesson to take away here is perhaps obvious: Bulgarian split squats are, at their core, the work of demons.

The sleeping (or lack of sleeping) is my least favorite part about flying to other parts of the world

I've had both good and bad experiences flying to Europe.

The worst was probably the time I spent 8+ hours from Chicago to Frankfurt in a middle seat next to a guy with a very active cold who was apparently gunning for the Guinness record for World's Loudest Cough. I somehow managed to avoid getting sick, but needless to say, I didn't get much sleep on that flight.

The best was undoubtedly the time I went from Newark to Brussels in business class. I slept like a baby in my little pod with the lie-flat seat and the comfy pillow and blankets. The only trouble was, they woke us up for landing way before I was ready to leave Dreamland. It was the one time I could have done with a 10-hour flight.

I fondly remember the first time I flew to Europe in 1999 because it was a daytime run from Toronto to London. We left early in the morning and got to the UK that evening. I may have dozed a bit, but the important thing was that, unlike overnight flights, I didn't feel I had to sleep.

It's that pressure to get significant shuteye that makes me dislike late-night flights of the sort I'll be taking this evening. Tonight I'm scheduled to fly from Cleveland to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Paris to spend a week in the French capital to watch Les Olympiques.

(That's the Olympics, for those who don't know a baguette from a hole in the ground.)

The overseas flight from Atlanta doesn't take off until 11:30pm Eastern, which is 5:30am tomorrow in Paris. Basically I'll be trying to sleep on the plane at a point when it's already morning at my destination, thus ensuring that my internal clock will never, ever adjust to the local time zone while I'm there.

Now on one hand, hey, I get to go to the Olympics in Paris. I should quit my whining.

On the other hand, why can't I find flights that arrive in Europe the same day? Why do these seem so scarce anymore?

First-world problems, I'm aware, but they're the only problems I know.

Allons-y!