The three mornings a week I don't exercise are as valuable as the four I do

This guy is a good example of how happy I am in the morning
on my "off" days.

As a creature of habit, I follow essentially the same morning schedule most of the time,

Two days a week, I go for a brisk 2.3-mile walk.

Two other days a week, I strength train in our home gym (upper body one day, lower body the other).

The remaining three days are "rest days," at least as far as intense physical activity goes. Those are the days when instead I exercise my mind.

And I so look forward to them.

I enjoy sitting at the kitchen table doing my New York Times puzzles, playing games on my phone, and catching up on the news. It's a fun way to spend those first couple hours of the day, and it gets me mentally ready for work or whatever else I have to do.

It also allows my body to recover from the relative pounding it takes walking on hard asphalt and slinging around heavy (heavy for me, anyway) weights in the basement.

Going to bed the previous night knowing that in 7 or 8 hours I'll be trying to figure out the Wordle or playing solitaire on my phone, rather than sweating through my shirt, is a good feeling.

Don't get me wrong. It's not like I don't want to exercise.

It's just that, much as even the most satisfied employee welcomes the weekend, recovery days are a good way to break up the demands of physical activity. They are always well received.

Because I tend to like order and routine, those off days are still somewhat regimented. After I feed the cats, get them fresh water, and scoop out their litter boxes, I make myself a cup of coffee, sit down at the kitchen table, and do the following things in the following order on my phone:

• Play Wordle (I do OK)
• Play Connections (usually perfect, but not always)
• Play Strands (my strongest puzzle)
• Play Mini (my weakest puzzle)
• Play solitaire until I "beat" the game
• Play Yahtzee until I score a combined 750 points over three successive games (this can sometimes take a while)
• Read my news digest emails, including the 1440 (highly recommended), the Cleveland Plain Dealer's "Wakeup", and my customized Google News update

Only after all of those things are completed do I make myself some breakfast, eat, wash my dishes, and head to the shower to get ready for the day.

As I type this, tomorrow is one of these off days. In just 12 hours I'll be awake and Wordl-ing away.

I can't tell you how excited I am.

Do you have one go-to game you play on your phone?

Recently I had to pick up my son Jack from school. He was going to be a few minutes late in coming out, so he told me to "just park and play that little Yahtzee game on your phone."

It would be funny if he wasn't so spot on, because that's exactly what I did while waiting for him.

I'm not a big phone gamer, but I'll go through phases in which I download and playing certain games for a time. There was a cribbage game that used to command a lot of my attention, along with a solitaire app, a game where you kick a football insane distances, and good old Wordscapes.

These games have come and gone off of my phone, but the one that remains (and that I still play at least once every day) is a very entertaining version of the dice game Yahtzee.

Of note is the fact that this game actually spells it "Yatzy." Presumably, the good people at Hasbro have a trademark on the official spelling.

No matter, since it's the same game in which you continuously roll a set of five dice to score points by creating various combinations (three of a kind, four of a kind, full house, small and large straight, etc.) The most valuable hand, of course, is a Yatzy/Yahtzee, in which the same number comes up on all five dice.

For whatever reason, I never get bored of this game. My high score is in the 600s, a feat I never expect to accomplish again. Against long odds, I rolled something five Yatzy/Yahtzees. It was crazy.

I know a lot of people like to play Words with Friends, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and a whole host of phone games that have stood the test of time. For me, though, it's all about that relatively bare-bones but oh-so-entertaining Yatzy app.

I am in fact going to play it right now.