The temptation, when you're trying to be healthy, is to eat the same things over and over, day after day

When I started working with my personal trainer Kirk a month or two ago, he mentioned that I should be eating roughly half my body weight in grams of protein every day.

I weighed a little over 200 pounds at the time, so the goal was about 100 grams of protein a day.

I was actually already getting much closer to this amount than I realized, but because I am so goal-oriented, I immediately leapt into action to ensure I would exceed those 100 grams.

I added Greek yogurt and low-fat cottage cheese (both solid sources of protein) to my diet. I also began drinking a protein shake a day, and I changed out my leafy green lunchtime salads in favor of turkey breast sandwiches.

Mission accomplished. I've probably been averaging 150 grams of protein, which is a good thing when you're regularly strength training and trying to build muscle.

The problem is that, having enjoyed success with this regimen, I'm sticking with it through thick and thin.

My dinners vary, but my breakfast, lunch and snacks are all the same every day.

The food choices are healthy, but I know I need more variety. Consuming essentially the same thing on a daily basis almost inevitably means I'm eventually going to fall short on my intake of certain vitamins and minerals.

Or at least I believe that to be true. I haven't consulted a nutritionist about it.

The point is, healthy eating should not be formulaic eating. I've not gotten sick of anything in my new diet to this point, but I'm also depriving myself of the joy of variety and experimentation.

I will have to fix that.

I just so relish the feeling of accomplishment when I get to check the box on my daily to-do list that says, "Eat 100 grams of protein."

The official summertime uniform of the Midwest suburban dad

We never got together and formally ratified this (there are, after all, probably a few million of us), but somehow, collectively, many of us non-coastal, suburb-living dads have made a decision.

We have silently agreed that we're all wearing pretty much the same thing to the graduation parties, barbeques, and other soirees to which we and our wives are invited each year in June, July and August.

The designated uniform is this:

• A solid-colored polo shirt (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: A short-sleeve button-down with a semi-daring pattern, or perhaps even a polo with multiple shades...scandalous!)
  
  
• Khaki shorts (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: None. You'll wear the khaki shorts and like it, though some of the more daring will perhaps opt for darker shades.)
  
  
• Deck shoes with short (hopefully no more than ankle-length, but preferably no-show) socks (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: I guess you can wear some nice sneakers, you slob.)

There are exceptions to this, of course, and quite a few of them. Many more dads have real fashion sense than you might realize, but the rest of us are going with the ensemble described above. It works, it's comfortable, and it requires very little forethought.

I do have a few short-sleeve button-downs I'll break out for especially momentous summertime occasions, but for the most part, it's polo-khakis-boat shoes for me, brother.

Dads, if you and I are at the same grad party, and I see you across the room as I'm filling my plate with potato salad and pulled pork, and you're sporting this dad uniform, I will tip my bottled water at you in a gesture of solidarity.

Then I will walk over, discern whether you are a Tool Guy, a Car Guy, or a Sports Guy, and engage you in relevant small talk until it's time for my wife and I to leave.

This is the suburban dad lifestyle. Embrace it.

My top five 1980s arcade games

I spent quite a bit of time (and money) in arcades in the early and mid-80s. The games were so much better than the systems we had available on our TVs at home that it was worth dropping a few bucks in quarters for an hour or two of fun.

For me and my friends, the primary destinations were Galaxy Gardens (the nearest game room), Up to Par (the biggest game room), and Fun and Games ($3 all-you-can play Tuesday nights!)

I don't have any photos from the time, but I distinctly recall wearing a series of very 80s painter's caps on these arcade excursions. Often I would decorate these caps with small metallic pins of my favorite musical acts of the time...most notably Men at Work, the Police and Duran Duran.

I did not, for the record, wear any neon, though.

As I've mentioned here before, video games kind of passed me by once the 90s rolled around, but I still have very fond memories of the golden era of arcade gaming.

Here, then, is one man's (and only one man's) ranking of the five best games from that period. Many of my fellow Gen Xers will be outraged to find Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Dig Dug, Centipede, Missile Command, Berserk, Joust and a host of others left off my list. Those were all worthy choices, they just didn't make my personal top five.

(5) Vanguard

This is a dark horse entry, to the point that many won't even be familiar with it. I was a frequent player for a few reasons, including the variety of settings through which you could fly your ship, the fact you had four directional fire buttons, and maybe most importantly, the very cool, Flash Gordon-inspired music that would play when you passed through one of the glowing energy fields. I pumped a lot of tokens/quarters into this one. (Speaking of great 80s video game music, while I never liked the game itself, you can't beat the driving distorted guitar riff of Reactor, which you could hear cutting through the arcade noise no matter how crowded it was.)

(4) Gorf

Gorf was among the first games to incorporate voice synthesis. It would semi-mock you with cries of "My Gorfian robots are unbeatable" and "Prepare yourself for annihilation!" Like Vanguard, I liked the variety in this one, even though it kind of ripped off Space Invaders and Galaxian. If you could get through the five different challenges, you would rise in rank from Space Cadet to Space Captain. If you could survive five full cycles of missions, you would reach the ultimate rank of Space Avenger. You could also get yourself more ships if you were willing to spend TWO quarters instead of one. This was a big investment but often worth it.

(3) Donkey Kong

I have grown to love the original Donkey Kong more in the 2000s than I ever did in the 80s. I play it on my laptop thanks to the amazing MAME emulator, and I've gotten to the point that a game isn't successful if I don't make it past the first "pie" board, as pictured here. (I call them "pies," but I think they were supposed to be tubs of cement or something similar. Mario was, after all, a career tradesman.) I love the barrels and rivets levels, and the pies are great, but I can do without the frustrating elevators. All in all, though, a very fun experience every time you press that one-player start button.

(2) Galaga

Lots of people loved (and continue to love) Galaga. It took the concepts of Galaxian and Space Invaders to another level of enjoyment, rather than just recreating them à la Gorf. The wrinkle whereby you could allow your fighter to be captured and then earn it back to be a double-firing, dual-ship juggernaut at the bottom of the screen was genius. And as valuable as they are to the environment, I never minded wasting hundreds of those darn bees every game. They deserved it. We have a replica cocktail arcade game in our basement that includes the original Galaga, and I play it often.

(1) Track and Field

My early-80s gaming friends could have told you even before they clicked on this post that Track and Field would be #1 on my list (and it isn't even close). If you were around back then, you will remember this as the game in which players had to repeatedly hit two buttons quickly to propel their little track athlete through the 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, hurdles, hammer throw and high jump. The faster you alternated button hits, the better you did. Which led some to cheat through the use of combs or pencils held in such a way as to create a faster cadence of button mashing. I always played it straight, though, and I was pretty good at it, which is probably a big reason why I liked the game so much. Depending on the whim of the arcade owner, this game could be set to end after the high jump no matter how well you did, or it could simply start over through the cycle of events, though with tougher qualifying times and distances. Either way, this is one I wish I also had in my basement. But I just checked on eBay, and these machines are going for anywhere between $1,800 and $4,000. I didn't love it that much.

Running through neighbors' backyards probably carried less risk in the early 80s than it does now

Mr. Kevin C. Buchheit, the man who served as my Phone-a-Friend when I appeared on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" (true story).

Today is my friend Kevin's birthday. I've known Kev as long as I've known our mutual friend Matt, which is to say since about 1974.

Kev has always been one of my best friends. We shared a lot of common interests growing up, and I'm very proud of the work he did for 20 years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent (a job from which he is now officially retired).

Back when we were annoying adolescents, Kevin, Matt, Jason, Todd and others of our band of Harding Drive friends would do something we simply called "The Route." We would traverse the entire length of our street on foot, but not using the sidewalk.

No, we would do this by sneaking through people's backyards, one after another. This would involve hopping fences, pushing through pricker bushes, avoiding dogs, and generally trying to keep a low profile as we trespassed on everyone's property.

The logical question is why exactly we did this. And I have no logical answer.

I have no answer at all, actually, logical or otherwise. It was just something obnoxious that, had the Wickliffe Police ever been notified, probably would have landed us a stern talking-to, if not outright conviction on some low-level misdemeanor.

I believe I completed the entire Route on both sides of the street, though for whatever reason, the west side was easier to navigate than the east (fewer bush-related obstacles and lower fences, as I recall).

As I think back on this, I realize we were fortunate not to have been threatened by an angry neighbor at one point or another. Plenty of them probably owned firearms, and some were likely of the shoot-first, ask-questions-later variety.

But then, the people of Harding Drive tended to be a little more tight-knit in those days, and I'm guessing most would have recognized who we were (even in the darkness of a summer evening) and simply yelled at us, rather than putting a bullet in our backsides.

Nowadays? My sense is that just as many people own guns in 2024 as did 40 years ago, but now they seem to be less trusting and more likely to use them on unidentified intruders.

All of which is to say I'm thankful we survived long enough to celebrate Kevin's 55th birthday today. Lord knows, we pulled plenty of stupid stunts back then that could have kept at least one of us from making it this far.

Happy birthday, Kev.

When you're the youngest by a wide margin, you get to hear about the totally separate life your family lived before you came along

I had no idea how to illustrate today's post, so I just went with this great photo of my son Jack taken many moons ago.

Today is my brother Mark's birthday, while this Saturday will be my sister Debbie's birthday. They are awesome siblings, and they deserve to have the best possible birthdays. So happy happy to my big bro and big sis!

I have mentioned here before that I am the youngest of four children. The gap between me and my next sib (Mark) is nearly 13 years. I came along relatively late in the game, as my mom was 37 and my dad 40 when I was born, which was pretty old for new parents in 1969.

You say "mistake." I say "pleasant surprise."

Anyway, this meant I would often hear stories about the days when Mom, Dad and the three kids lived in Park Forest, Illinois, then later in Euclid, Ohio (on good old Pasnow Avenue).

I never lived in either of those places. By the time I was born, we were firmly settled in Wickliffe on Harding Drive, where I lived the first 22 years of my life and where my mom lived for 57 years until she passed away.

The Park Forest and Euclid houses may as well have belonged to another family altogether. I have no connection to them, nor can I relate to the things I'm told happened in them.

It's like my parents and siblings lived a completely different existence in which I played no part at all.

Thus, I can readily relate to our youngest child, Jack. He constantly hears stories about our old house on East 300th Street, where Terry and I lived for the first 11 years of our marriage. All four of Jack's older siblings have memories of that house (though I wonder about Melanie, who wasn't even quite 3 years old when we moved out of the house).

To Jack, it's just a house on a street we often drive down. The other day he told me he has trouble even remembering exactly which house was ours.

And why should he remember? He never lived there. It's a place to which he has no attachment at all.

Yet it's also a place where we as a family – well, six of us anyway – made many lasting memories. It was the first house Terry and I owned, the place to which we brought home four newborns, and the place where we celebrated many other firsts and milestones.

It's a house full of happy memories...memories that necessarily exclude Jack, much like those old homes in Park Forest and Euclid do for me.

The silver lining in all of this? As the youngest, you often get spoiled rotten. You get everything your older sibs never got.

On balance, I still think Jack and I got the better end of the deal. 

When you're not someone who swears a lot, people find it either funny or disconcerting when you do

It's a minor miracle that, having grown up with Bob Tennant as my father, I'm not someone who swears particularly often.

(NOTE: We use the word "swears" here in Northeast Ohio in the same way those in other parts of the country might use "curses" or "cusses." It just means uttering what are commonly referred to as "bad words.")

It's not that I don't ever swear, I just don't do it often. And when I do it, most of the time it's in a joking or funny way.

At least a couple of my kids find it borderline disturbing when I use a swear word, though, even when they know I'm quoting someone else or doing it simply for comic effect. They're just not used to hearing it from me.

On the other hand, while my dad didn't go around cussing up a storm, he would routinely toss around many of George Carlin's famous Seven Dirty Words.

I remember one time when I was maybe 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark and I were in the living room with Dad. Dad told us both to kneel down and touch our faces to the carpet, and then to repeat after him. We complied.

DAD: "I suppose."

US: "I suppose."

DAD: "And you suppose."

US: "And you suppose."

DAD: "That my ass is higher than my nose."

MARK (who was 4 or 5 at the time): "That my ass is higher than my nose."

ME: "Ahhhhhhh! Mark, you can't say that!"

Dad and Mark thought the whole thing was hilarious. I, on the other hand, apparently had my delicate Victorian sensibilities gravely offended.

I don't think myself morally superior simply because I'm not someone who swears frequently or with any conviction. If anything, the fact that I don't swear, don't smoke, and only very occasionally drink makes me about the blandest suburban dad you can imagine.

But like Popeye, I am what I am.

And you can take that s**t to the bank.

BLOG RERUN: The flawed strategy of the bunnies by the side of the road

(NOTE: I have mentioned here before that I often have little idea which blog posts are going to resonate with people and get a lot of clicks and which ones will fall flat. When I published the following in June 2021, I thought for sure it would be a hit. It still makes me laugh. But the engagement was almost zero, and page views were minimal. I still can't understand it, so we're trying again. Maybe I'm wrong here.)

Originally posted June 11, 2021: I take the majority of my morning walks/runs along our street, Miller Avenue, and its creatively named westward extension, West Miller. Together, these streets provide a simple (if hilly) 2.32-mile loop I use as the basis for most of my A.M. excursions.

The route passes by a series of wide grassy areas in which you can usually find some combination of deer, racoons, possums, birds, and skunks, depending on how early you get out the door. Also featured there are what Terry and I simply call The Bunnies™.

These are some common species of wild rabbit, but we never call them "rabbits." It is always "The Bunnies™."

This morning while chugging down West Miller, I had a very typical encounter with one of The Bunnies™.

A bunny will be happily chomping on grass by the side of the road as I approach. He/she will then see me coming. If these bunnies were smarter and had some system of passing down tribal knowledge, they would have learned from their parents that I am a common sight on the streets in the morning and am absolutely harmless.

(As an aside, I wanted to use the rabbit equivalent of "tribal" in the previous paragraph, so I looked up what a group of rabbits is called. There is apparently some difference of opinion out there, but one of the common designations is a "fluffle" of rabbits. Really. I would have happily used that word except I don't know how to render it in adjectival form. "Fluffle-ey" knowledge? "Fluffinial" knowledge? "Flufflenian" knowledge? I have no idea. So I stuck with "tribal.")

Anyway, rabbits don't seem to have any method of societal knowledge transfer, so they rely purely on instinct. And this bunny's instinct told him I could definitely be a threat and he should do what The Bunnies™ always do when I approach.

He stayed where he was and sat perfectly still.

This is not, it must be said, an ideal approach. For one thing, The Bunnies™ are not camouflaged against the grass, so they're readily visible even from a distance. And even though they generally do a good job of remaining motionless, it doesn't matter. I'm already staring right at them.

Regardless, here's what also happens every time: They will stand there until I get within a few feet, and then they'll run away in terror. Every time.

The problems with this whole philosophy are evident:

(1) You, as a bunny, are very quick. By waiting until I'm right on top of you before you run, you nullify this advantage and make it easier for me to lunge out and get you (which, let's be clear, I would never do, but you don't know me).

(2) More importantly, if this is your strategy, then you have to stick to it. Have some nerve, bunnies. If you're going with the stand-perfectly-still approach, see it through to the end. The assumption here (the key to this whole method of defense, really) is that I don't see you in the first place. Why ruin it by running away at the very late minute and making yourself extremely obvious? Why, The Bunnies™, why??

I have no answers, but I'm considering some sort of leaflet campaign among The Bunnies™ urging them to reconsider their absolutely terrible approach to keeping me from killing them.

Which, again, I would never do. But they're bunnies. They can't be expected to know I have their best interests in mind.