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!

On grad school, blogging and Cleveland sports championships

Hello. It's nice to see you again. It hasn't really been that long (a little more than three months), but I feel like we haven't talked in forever.

The following things have happened since March 25th, the date of this blog's last post:

• I started school and completed classes in public relations theory & ethics, and public relations management.
• I decided to quit school.
• I went to Europe, and over the 10 days I was there, two of the sports teams that I support passionately won championships. (NOTE: I puzzled a bit over how to construct that sentence. In the event, it almost seems as if "passionately" describes the way those teams won their championships. And I'm sure they were passionate. What I meant, though, is that those are teams I passionately support.)
• I came back from Europe, and now I'm on vacation in Delaware.

To that last point, I'm sitting with my laptop on the patio of our rental condo in Bethany Beach, Delaware. It's nearly 80 degrees at 9 in the morning and very humid, but I love being outside, drinking my coffee, and doing a little writing.

That is, after all, the point of vacation, right? You do things you love, and maybe do them with people you love. I get to do both this week.

We'll be going to the beach, of course, and there's a nice pool right outside of our condo. I am not, it has been documented, much of a water sports guy. But I'm going to be in my bathing suit every day because I think in recent years I've somehow gotten away from being Fun Dad.

When the kids were little, I think I was Fun Dad. I did all sorts of Fun Dad things, from swimming with them to playing kickball with them to riding bikes and whatever.

Then, for reasons I can't quite identify, I got away from being Fun Dad. I became Serious Stressed Dad. Not good. Yeah, work got more intense, and I stupidly added the graduate school thing, but there really are no excuses. I feel like I have lost time to make up for. Maybe this vacation is a start.

As for the grad school thing, what can I say? I tried it, and I loved it. Or at least, I loved the material. And the writing. And even the heavy academic journal reading. But the time it took? I hated that. I hated that with a passion.

So I weighed my options, and on balance it seemed best to just walk away. And I have. Yesterday I completed my final class assignment, and I have no plans to return to the program any time soon.

Everyone tells you, "Oh, don't worry, you'll find time for it someday." And maybe I will. But for now I'm at peace with the decision to hang it up.

Because I really just need to live life, you know? I need to spend time with my family. I need to sit and think. Sit and read. Sit and...do nothing sometimes, I guess. I hardly ever do any of those things, but now is the time to get back to them.

I am one of those people who always feels the need to fill up any Time Vacuum that exists in my life. I quit doing this? Great! I can start doing that! Only recently has it occurred to me that you don't have to do "that." You're allowed to have stretches of free time in which you just live and breathe and grow and be.

So that's what I promise to start doing. Which is why I'm not going to bring this blog back on any regular basis. I'll occasionally dash off a post or two, but I'm not doing the three-days-a-week thing or whatever. I hope you'll still come back to read my very sporadic missives, because I so appreciate it when you do.

Finally, the sports championships...I don't know what to say, because this is entirely new territory for me and for every person over the last 50-plus years who has supported a Cleveland-based professional athletic team. With the exception of the old indoor soccer Cleveland Crunch, none of those teams had won a title since 1964 until my beloved Lake Erie Monsters and Cleveland Cavaliers did it a week or so apart recently.

And I was on another continent for both title-clinching games. The Monsters won the American Hockey League's Calder Cup while I slept peacefully in a London hotel, while the Cavs miraculously came back from a 3-1 series deficit to beat the vaunted Golden State Warriors while Elissa, Chloe and I were snoozing in Barcelona.

As a Cleveland sports fan of my generation, you defined yourself by resiliency. That's all we had was next year. We came back again and again, and usually the reward was just more misery. And now...we won. My teams are the best. I would write more about this, but I can't even grasp what it means. Maybe there's another post in me at some point in the future once I come to terms with the whole thing. It's just stunning.

Suffice it to say, this is a weird and delightfully wacky time in my life, and in the life of the whole Tennant family. We're on summer break, vacation is starting out wonderfully (other than the bedbugs Jared found in his bed last night...really), and the chaos that is normally July for us won't start in earnest for another week or so.

I am blessed. And so are you in some way, I'm guessing.

That's all we can ask for. And so it goes.