The family text chat group: Misplaced mail, memories of years past, and endless cat photos

We have a family text group that includes all seven of us plus two significant others (Mark and Lyndsey). It is active almost every day and is used for a variety of purposes.

One recent conversation, for example, centered on Chloe's ongoing attempts to convince the post office that a former resident of her house is, in fact, a former resident and no longer lives there. Several times she has taken items intended for this person and written "Return to Sender" and "Not at This Address" on them, but mail for the previous occupant keeps on coming.

This was followed up by texts from other family members with suggestions on how to handle the situation, and one threat from Jared to alert the authorities that Chloe is committing mail fraud if she starts simply throwing these misaddressed cards and letters away.

He was kidding (I think).

Almost every day it's something different in the chat group, but there are at least three common types of activity you'll find there:

(1) Cat content: We are a cat family and my kids like to share photos of their current cats as well as the cats with which they grew up. I enjoy all of this because it's sometimes the only way I can keep tabs on my grand-kitties. (As you can see above, the official photo of the text group is an old image of Fred, George and Charlie, three of our former cats who have each moved on to their greater good, as my friend Kate Tonti would say.)

(2) Random memories: These conversations will often begin with one kid texting something like, "Thinking about the times Lissy and I used to sit at the computer at the old house and play Harry Potter." Then they will all go back and forth about the details of the game that have stuck with them. We also sometimes get memories of stuff we wouldn't let them do when they were little that their friends were allowed to do. There's always some bitterness there.

(3) Big announcements: Suddenly one child or another will text, "Attention everyone, I have a new job," or some such off-the-cuff piece of important news. Everyone then celebrates through congratulatory messages, "heart" and "exclamation point" reactions, and the occasional funny GIF. Twenty years ago, conveying this news would have involved separate phone calls to parents and siblings. Now it's just a single 7-second text. I'm not sure which is better.

Gotta go, Melanie just sent a great picture of two of her cats standing on their hind legs looking out the front door. <heart emoji>

I am still the family copy editor

I want to ask the AI Blog Post Image Generator why it thinks the woman (it's presumably a woman) holding the red pen in this image only painted half her thumbnail. Still, as you'll see if you scroll to the bottom of this post, it could have been a lot worse.

Every family has at least one person to whom everyone else goes when they have written something they want proofread.

"It's a 200-word statement for a scholarship. Can you look it over and fix the mistakes, and maybe jazz it up a little?"

I used to regularly receive requests of this sort from my kids when they were in school. Now these assignments are less frequent, but they still occur. Recently, for example, Chloe asked me to spruce up a few paragraphs she wrote as part of an application for an academic prize related to her PhD program.

Actually she asked both me and her older sister Elissa. Elissa is a professional marketer and has always been a great writer and editor. Jared also makes his living with words and can be counted on to clean up your copy in a pinch.

We don't have any bad writers in the family, but there's a tendency, when one of your siblings is in the trade, to doubt your own ability and ask a professional to help.

I will admit I may have rewritten a couple of the kids' scholarship essays over the years in an attempt to take them from "good" to "very good." Or even "money-worthy."

NOTE: As I recall, both of the essays I rewrote resulted in the child receiving a scholarship. I should have asked for a cut.

If you aren't the person who handles proofreading chores in your household, you should write a thank-you note to whomever fills that role.

Make sure you read it over very closely before you give it to them, though.

EXTRA NOTE: Every time I ask the AI Blog Post Image Generator to come up with an illustration for one of my posts, I have it create a few possibilities from which I can choose. Following is the second image it spit out in response to the one-word prompt "Proofreader." I...I don't know what to say. The tiny red pen is somewhat amusing, but the outsized thumb is borderline terrifying. This is what I get for using a free and unproven AI image tool.

Don't be a hero: If you have vacation time, use it

Of all the things that confuse me about Americans (and I say this as an American), the most perplexing is probably the concept of unused vacation time.

I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but I'm willing to bet that nowhere else in the world do people leave 25% or more of their paid time off (PTO) on the table. That's about the average percentage of unused PTO in the U.S. each year, according to figures reported by Forbes.

I happen to really enjoy what I do for a living, but the idea of someone offering to pay you the same amount of money to go off and do something fun and relaxing as they do when you're at work, and you responding "No thanks, I'm good!" does not compute in my brain.

I use every last hour of PTO every year, without exception. It's silly not to.

Now, I realize some people are in job situations where they simply can't take time off, for whatever reason. Or at least they think they can't take time off without something bad happening at work.

If that describes you, please know that I love you. Truly I do. But understand, you're not indispensable. Life at the office/plant/hospital/store goes on without you.

Actually, that's one reason some people give for not taking their vacation time. They're afraid that if they leave for a week or two and everything goes well, their boss will think they're not important to the success of the organization.

I am a boss, and I have worked for many bosses. I can say with confidence that no boss I've ever encountered would think that way.

Admittedly, this all assumes you have paid time off available to you in the first place. The folks at Forbes say 28 million Americans don't get any PTO at all, making the U.S. "the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation and paid holidays."

This is not a point of pride, my fellow Yankees.

Of course, there are also those who have started their own businesses and simply don't have the financial wiggle room to take off for the beach and go unpaid for any length of time. That I get.

To you hearty entrepreneurs I say, "Good luck and Godspeed."

But as for everyone else, we need to understand that taking vacation time is good for us and it's good for our employers. We can't be "on" 24/7/365, nor can anyone reasonably expect us to be. Human beings are more productive and more engaged when they're intentional about scheduling downtime to rest and recharge.

I'm not the best relaxer in the world, but even I realize the truth of this.

Take those PTO hours, folks, please. For your own sake.

Talking to yourself is either a sign of intelligence or mental instability

A few minutes ago I walked past a co-worker who was mumbling under his breath. I asked, "Are you talking to yourself?" And he replied, "Well, I'm the only one who will listen!"

On the spectrum of Corny Office Small Talk, this ranks right up there with "Working hard? Hardly working!" and "Thank God it's Friday, huh?"

But there is also some truth to it.

I talk to myself a lot.

A. Lot.

To the point that I'm fairly certain I say more words out loud to myself each day than I do to Terry or anyone else in the world.

People will walk past my closed office door, peek in and see my mouth moving, and assume I'm in a Teams meeting or on a call. They will make that thumb-and-pinky-extended-near-the-ear gesture, which is of course the universal request to "Call me!"

This will momentarily confuse me until I realize what's going on, and usually I wave for them to come into my office. When they do, I explain, "Sorry, I was just telling myself I need to remember to write that organizational announcement email today!"

They will then look at me uneasily with an expression that suggests, "Wow, I had no idea Scott was insane."

I talk through virtually everything with myself. And rarely are these conversations silent and internal. They are almost always broadcast loudly to anyone who happens to be nearby.

This is OK when I'm driving and loudly saying to myself, "I think I need to turn left up here, right? Or do I keep going straight? Maybe I should have used Google Maps!" No one hears my crazed rantings then.

But when it happens in the grocery store, I notice other shoppers give me a wide berth. I'll be standing near the canned fish products and saying (in a voice that can clearly be heard two aisles over) "WHY DO THEY ONLY HAVE THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? I DON'T WANT THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE, I WANT THE SARDINES IN WATER. WHO BUYS THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? NO ONE, THAT'S WHO."

I take consolation in the fact that, the older you get, the more acceptable this behavior seems to become. It goes from "scary" and "potentially threatening" to "cute" and "eccentric."

Right now I'm somewhere in between.

Over and over I tell myself – loudly and proudly, even when no one else is in the room – that it's OK and I'm not at all crazy.

Which of course is exactly what a crazy person would say to himself.

I never anticipated being at the top of my game in my mid-50s

Three times I asked the AI Blog Post Image Generator for a photo of a "happy 50-year-old white man." This is what I got.

If you would have asked me when I was 18 at what age I would "peak," I probably would have said 30 or 35.

And sure enough, life really was good in my 30s.

But it's even better now at age 54, and I didn't see that coming.

None of us knows what's around the next corner of our lives, but at this moment, I can say things are humming along way better than I would have anticipated.

I have no chronic pain, I get to exercise regularly, I have a job I enjoy at a company that appreciates me, my family continues to be awesome despite my influence, and I engage in hobbies that are a heck of a lot of fun.

Like I said, any or all of that can change on a moment's notice. I have no idea what God has in store for me (read the book of Job for a case study in "whoa, didn't see that coming").

But right now, in 2024, my cup pretty well runneth over.

I have as much energy now as I did 25 years ago, though that's partly because we had a house full of little kids 25 years ago that made me chronically tired.

Still, I remain able to go hard from dawn to dusk and generally accomplish a lot of things in the course of a day that I find satisfying, both personally and professionally.

I have earned none of this privilege, by the way. I am entitled to zero of these blessings. And again, bad news could come tomorrow that puts a damper on all of it.

But right now, at this point in my life's journey, I am happy, relatively care-free, vibrant, and maybe a tad less dumb than I used to be.

(Still relatively dumb, of course, but getting smarter in slow, painful increments.)

And that's enough.

Whatever is coming down the road, my experience is that life begins at 50.

Who knew?

A small phone that fits in my pocket vs. a larger phone that I can actually, you know, see

Unless you're a woman who regularly wears pants and keeps your phone in your pocket (and I'm sure there are many), this may be an issue only for men of a certain age.

My age, to be specific.

I have an iPhone SE. It was provided by my employer, who also pays the monthly bill for it. Free phone, free data. That's a deal I can get behind.

This phone fits easily into my pants pockets, whether I'm wearing dress pants or jeans. Its relative portability is one of its strong points, as far as I'm concerned.

But there is a price to pay for a smaller phone.

If, like me, you have reached a point in life where reading glasses are a key element of your daily existence, a small phone screen can be a problem. You can't always tell what you're looking at when watching a video or looking at a photo. Text defaults to an impossibly tiny point size unless you're proactive in doing something about it.

It is, in short, quite often a pain.

I have thought about upgrading to a larger phone and footing the bill myself, but the issues there are patently obvious:

1. The whole "footing the bill myself" thing
2. The inability to stuff said phone conveniently into a pants pocket

The solution is likely a foldable phone. The trouble there? I'm an Apple/iPhone guy, and currently available foldable phones are all Android/Google-based. Apple is planning to release a foldable phone, but last I checked, this little piece of technology is at least two years away from hitting the market.

I could be legally blind by that point.

On balance, I guess I'll keep my free SE and squint every morning as I watch NHL hockey highlights on its tiny screen.

It's better than carrying around a much larger device, at least for me.

You know you're first-world spoiled when something like this is among the toughest issues you're wrestling with in life.

I should be more motivated to brush up on my French before we head to the Olympics

Nice job with a "stereotypical French guy" photo, AI Blog Post Image Generator!

One of my favorite things about traveling to French-speaking areas of the world is getting the chance to put my 14 years of French language education to use.

As I've chronicled here before, I grew up in a school district where everybody took French in 1st through 6th grades. I continued taking it throughout middle and high schools, and nearly pulled off a minor in the subject with three years of additional French classes at John Carroll University.

The result has been that, on my eight or nine combined trips to Montreal and Paris over the years, I've been able to hold my own when it came to ordering in a restaurant, asking directions, getting answers to simple questions on the street, etc.

Actually, I've held my own in Paris much more than in Montreal. The Quebecois accent is such that my Parisian French education, combined with my Northeast Ohio inflection, renders me as unintelligible to some Montrealers as they are to me.

The point is, I know some French. Having not used it much, I read it much better than I speak it.

My daughter Elissa had almost as much French education as me and has taken actual French classes in recent years as an adult. She and I (along with Terry and Elissa's boyfriend Mark) are scheduled to arrive in Paris 16 weeks from today to take in some Summer Olympics events and generally see the sites as we're able.

I figure that, with our collective French proficiency and past experience in Paris, we should navigate just fine in the City of Light.

But I'm not going out of my way to review French vocabulary and syntax before we jet off to the continent. I should, but I'm not.

There are any number of excuses I can give for this, but the reality is that I'm simply a lazy American.

Language-wise (and many other wises), we are among the most spoiled people on earth. There are few places we can go where people won't either willingly speak English to us, or else roll their eyes and switch to English because we're obviously not going to make the effort to learn their language.

This is even worse because I mostly know their language. It wouldn't take much for me to get back into Francophone shape, but especially with a multi-cultural event like the Olympics, it will be easy to get around using only English.

I'm hoping to get more motivated between now and early August, but don't bet on it.

C'est la vie.