The deer on my morning walks are not at all impressed by me

I spend so much of my morning walks this time of year worrying about skunks that I sometimes forget about the deer.

Deer are very common where I live (they may be common where you live, too). This is a significant change from my years growing up in a suburban neighborhood with closely packed houses. Back then, deer sightings were real events. I remember deer roaming onto our street maybe three times during the 22 years I lived there.

Now, with the deer population in Northeast Ohio generally rising, and with us living in a somewhat more rural (though still decidedly suburban) area, deer are as common as dogs. Or at least it seems that way.

Being out on the road walking/jogging five mornings a week, I come across the various deer families in our neighborhood quite often, especially in the fall.

I see them in the spring and summer, too, but for whatever reason they seem more prevalent in October and November. On one recent morning I came across four different groups/families during my 2.3-mile jaunt.

Their fur is darker this time of year, and I never knew why until I just looked it up. Apparently the darker coat helps them better absorb the warmth of the sun ("solar gain") during a season when sunlight becomes a decidedly iffy proposition around here.

The males also have antlers now, of course. And while I've never had one act aggressively in any way toward me, I give those spiky-headed bucks a wider berth.

For their part, the deer react to me in one of two ways. They're either skittish and run away at the first sign of me. Or, more commonly, they eye me warily but stand their ground as I pass by.

Some seem genuinely interested in figuring out exactly what I am, but mostly I'm just a momentary distraction. As long as I'm not a threat – and it usually takes them about three seconds to realize I'm not – they don't care about me that much.

Which I suppose is the way of things.

I would happily pet them if they would let me, but they have no real interest in coming closer...even the ones who aren't scared of me.

So I confine my animal petting to our two cats, Ginny and Molly. To their credit, those girls do appreciate me, maybe because I'm the one who provides them fresh food and water every day, as well as being someone who is always willing to give them a scratch behind the ears.

It helps that neither has antlers. The power dynamic in our house would change noticeably if they did.

The promise of June

For some people, the start of a new year is the time to reenergize and look ahead with optimism. For others it's the coming of spring.

To me, though, you can't beat the arrival of June.

I once called June "the greatest month of the year," and I stand by that.

Part of it is the weather. I am grateful to live in Northeast Ohio 365 days a year, but when it comes to getting outside and being active, June has the best balance of warm, sunny days without the near-Florida-like humidity that comes along in July and August.

Also, for the first several years of your life, June probably meant summer vacation. You played, you relaxed, and you got yourself ready for the next grade up in school, whatever that may have been.

It is also as good a time as any to address whatever it is in your life that needs addressing. Just as the cold and snow are behind us, so too can be the problems and issues that have weighed on your mind for so long. The calendar has flipped, so your attitude may as well change with it.

Easier said than done, I understand, but you have to start sometime. June 1st is a pretty good candidate.

Happy June, everybody (even to my Southern Hemisphere friends for whom June is more a reminder that winter is on the way...on balance, you still have better weather than we do.)

I am impressed by customer service professionals whose native language may not be English

In my experience, middle class Americans like to complain about things.

Actually, all Americans like to complain about things.

Well, really, all humans like to complain about things.

But for the moment, let's focus on good old, middle-of-the-socioeconomic-road Americans.

One of the things against which I often hear my fellow proletarians rail is when they call a company for customer service and have to deal with someone who is obviously not an American.

I don't mean to imply they're being racist. They just find it challenging to understand the person on the other end of the line, which I get.

In the past couple of days, I have made a total of seven combined customer service calls to our now-former cable provider but still Internet provider WOW, and our new streaming provider AT&T TV.

Every one of these calls resulted in me talking to a person who had what I would describe as either a Spanish or maybe Filipino accent.

I was blown away by two things: (a) I could understand all of them clearly. I've studied and practiced a lot of French in my life, but if I had to assist a French person over the phone in French, they simply wouldn't be able to understand me, no matter how hard I tried. (b) They could understand me.

That second point gets to something I've often mentioned over the years to those who, like me, have lived their whole lives in Northeast Ohio: We have an accent. Many vehemently deny it, but we do. Linguistics scholars have classified and described it in detail.

Maybe it's because they're exposed to so many American movies and so much American TV, but these customer service pros never seem to have trouble understanding me despite the mix of Midwestern flatness and curved Cleveland vowels with which I speak.

I know they have a lot of practice at it, but really, it's impressive.

I realize others have had far more negative experiences with customer service people they simply couldn't understand, but it seems both WOW and AT&T have done a great job hiring technicians who can be understood conversing in English.

(And by the way, make no mistake: These professionals often come from countries where prevailing wages are low. I'm not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but there's no doubt labor costs are lower when organizations go this route, which is why the person identifying themselves as "Jenny" on the other end of the line almost certainly wasn't born with that name.)

The best part: Our transition from a cable-dependent household to one that uses streaming TV (and that installs and outright owns its own equipment) has gone off with very few hitches. Thanks to these wonderful people who patiently answer my questions in their second language.

The real slog of winter begins now, but it's still going to be a great year

We here in Northeast Ohio get snow in December, and sometimes it's a lot of snow. But I never feel like "real" winter has begun until New Year's Day.

This is the point when the holidays wind down and the long, cold, gray reality of a Cleveland winter sets in. Living on the shores of Lake Erie, we will see precious little sunshine for the next few months. And in the meantime we're likely to get at least a couple of blizzards, a lot of ice, and generally sub-freezing temperatures.

Which by the way is fine. I love living here, and that kind of weather is just part of the deal. I'm not complaining at all.

In fact, I'm feeling good today. It's the start of a new year, and like every year before it, I choose to see it as a time of opportunity and possibility. I am in most ways an incurable optimist.

This is not a case of me being a Pollyanna, or at least I hope it isn't. It's simply making the deliberate choice to be excited for whatever lies ahead over the next 52 weeks.

If you think this year is going to be a good one for you, you're probably right.

And if you think 2021 is going to be a bad one for you, you're also probably right.

It's not a platitude, it's a fact: You, like most folks, are going to be about as happy as you make up your mind to be.

But you know what would make me especially happy? If you made up your mind to grab a shovel and help clear out my driveway the next time Mother Nature dumps a bunch of the fluffy white stuff on it.

I choose to believe snow is beautiful. I also choose to believe it's even more beautiful when it doesn't get in the way of me backing my car out of the garage.

I don't miss driving to and from work

I'm all about finding the good things that come out of this pandemic, and one that I share with many is not having to deal with my work commute.

As commutes go in Northeast Ohio, mine is on the long-ish side at about 40 minutes each way. I know many people who go longer/farther than that, and many more whose drives to work aren't even half that long.

My office is just shy of 35 miles from my house. That means, in an average week pre-pandemic, I would put 350 miles on my car just to earn a living. Take away six weeks or so each year for vacation and being out of town for my job, and that meant 16,000 miles a year on my car in commutes. I was regularly putting 24K+ total on the odometer annually.

Again, I know people who log more miles, but for me, relative to my past commutes, that was a lot of miles.

Now I end up in the office for one reason or another only about once every 2 or 3 weeks. And when I do drive, there is less traffic on the road than there used to be, as many others are working from home like me.

The downside is that I used to use that drive time to listen to my classical music. Symphonies, in particular, can take 40 minutes to an hour or longer, and now I have to deliberately make time for listening to them. I also haven't listened to an audiobook in more than nine months.

But given the savings in gas and wear and tear on the car, that's a really small price to pay.

Once this thing is over, if I can continue working from my kitchen table a few times a week regularly, I'll feel like something good has come from it.

From snow shovel to lawn mower: The transition looms

You're reading this on March 11th or later, but I'm writing it on February 2nd, which of course is Groundhog Day.

(NOTE: I've been cranking these blog posts out at a prodigious rate this winter. I like being ahead of the game. Way, way, way ahead of the game. It makes me feel better about the whole enterprise.)

As I type, there is something like a foot of snow on the ground here in the Cleveland area, which is guaranteed to happen at least once every winter but generally occurs two or three times. We don't get as much snow as, say, Syracuse does, but we do tend to get more than Minneapolis or Chicago.

Which is why mid-March is such an interesting time in our part of the country. Depending on how quickly spring feels like coming, I am often able to put away the snow removal equipment by this point in the year. But some years, our worst blizzards hold off until the latter part of March and even early April.

It's all seemingly random, and we Northeast Ohioans just kind of roll with it. We start complaining well in advance of Valentine's Day, of course, but we put up with it as long as we have to because we obviously don't have much choice.

By this time of year, I'm itching to break out my lawn mower. I don't really like shoveling snow (in part because it screws up my morning routine), but cutting the grass has never been something I've minded all that much.

We have a decent-sized yard. Not huge, but spacious enough on three-quarters of an acre. We inherited a riding mower when we first moved into the house, but I was never a huge fan of it and didn't mourn when it broke down.

Instead I use a push mower. One with a drive system so that I'm not forced to push the entire weight of the machine around, but still a push mower that cuts only a two-foot swath at a time.

It typically takes me just over an hour to cut our entire yard, and what I love about it is that the results are immediate. I get to the end and then look back over a nice little field of green, uniformly trimmed grass blades that conveys the message, "Hey, this guy actually does at least a little something to take care of his yard. You should admire him."

My wife makes fun of me when it comes to lawn moving, and deservedly so. I plan entire weekends around cutting the grass and when I'll be able to do it, influenced by such factors as the weather and what else is on our schedule. We'll be out someplace and I will, without irony, say the words, "I can't wait to get home and mow the lawn."

It's one of those man things that most husbands do because...just because, I guess. It's a job that falls to us and most of us do it willingly. Or at least we complain less about it than we do about other jobs.

But I'll continue to enjoy pushing my mower around until I can't do it anymore, which given Toro's ingenious Personal Pace Drive system will probably be at least another three decades.

And if I do hit the age of 75 and am still push-mowing, you can be darn sure I'll be wearing plaid shorts and black socks while I'm doing it.

Snow, go away. Bring on grass-cutting season!

This is my hometown

As I type this, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado, with rain falling outside and thunder crashing off the mountains that wreath the city.

I'm here on a business trip, and I cannot deny the beauty and attraction of this wonderful place.

Boulder comes by its liberal-leaning, green-focused consciousness honestly, and whatever you think of their politics, you have to acknowledge the earnestness of the hippies who make the city what it is.

Tonight I walked back from dinner along pedestrian-friendly streets while sipping a Starbucks mocha frappuccino light. Well, actually, I didn't walk...I strolled. I never stroll. I walk purposefully almost everywhere I go.

But in Boulder, you stroll because you can't help it. There are invisible waves of laid-back energy flowing everywhere, and doing anything quickly or with a sense of urgency just seems so out of place.

I'll admit, I love it here.

I'll also admit that I would never live here in a million years.

Not that I can really find anything wrong with Boulder. It's just that I wouldn't want to live anywhere other than where I do now.

I would say the same thing about London, New York, Toronto, Paris and Beijing – all cities I've visited and enjoyed, but places that will never be more than temporary destinations for me.

I have lived my entire existence in Northeast Ohio. And specifically, in a little town called Wickliffe, about 15 miles east of Cleveland.

We get made fun of a lot by people around the country. People hear "Ohio" and think "hicks." And when you tell them you live within short driving distance of a major city, they realize you're talking about Cleveland and laugh.

It used to make me angry when people mocked Cleveland, a city I love. But now I realize they do it out of almost total ignorance. And I think to myself, "Good. That will keep it less crowded for those of us who already know how great it is."

I'll be the first to tell you the weather in my part of the world isn't always ideal. And we don't have the same cool vibe as Boulder. And our economy has been limping along for several years now.

But Northeast Ohio has beautiful changes of seasons. And largely unknown cultural and restaurant scenes. And it has salt-of-the-earth people who work hard, raise families and live their lives in a straightforward, genuine way. Seriously, it's like a Ford Truck commercial come to life.

It also has my family. And wherever they go is where I go. As long as it's not Siberia. Or Pittsburgh, which has the Steelers and therefore may as well be Siberia to me.

But really, even if I didn't like where I lived, I would stay in order to be close to my family. They're my tribe, you know? I could no sooner separate myself from them than I could separate myself from my right arm.

Nor could I separate myself from good old Wickliffe, which almost inexplicably has seven or eight nice parks  for fewer than 13,000 people living in four square miles. What's that all about? We don't have a real community rec center, but by gosh, we have more swings per capita than any town you care to brag about.

I often say that Wickliffe is like Mayberry without Otis the town drunk. Or Floyd the barber. But we did once have Chicken and French Fries Charlie.

Chicken and French Fries Charlie was an unshaven mess of a man who used to hang out at the snack bar of the now-defunct Zayre's discount store. He always seemed to be there when my friends and I walked in, and he always seemed to be eating (you guessed it) chicken and french fries.

This was back when discount stores all had snack bars, you understand.

I don't know what ever happened to Chicken and French Fries Charlie, to be honest. I'm not even sure he had a home to go to when Zayre's closed each night. But somehow he had enough money to buy those paper containers of chicken and french fries, so I guess he had a job.

The point is, Wickliffe has always been full of characters like Charlie, which is another reason I love it.

Many of the people my wife and I grew up with have left, but we choose to stay. And I wouldn't be surprised if we end up staying until the bitter end.

Or until the entire city becomes one gigantic park, I guess. Whichever comes first.