This is the 1,000th post in the history of this blog

Except it kind of isn't.

I mean technically, yes, there are now exactly 1,000 posts on the blog covering a span of more than 17 years. In that sense, yay for a cool milestone!

It's just that the first 26 posts chronologically, from late 2006 and early 2007, weren't really written for this blog. They appeared on a separate, short-lived blog from that time in which I chronicled my experiences as a contestant on The Price Is Right.

That blog, like this one, was constructed on the Blogger.com platform, so a couple of years ago I decided to migrate those 26 posts over to this space, which is relatively easy to do on Blogger. It was a nice way to ensure that little bit of history didn't get lost in cyberspace, since the old Price Is Right blog is now long gone.

Anyway, technicalities aside, 1,000 is a nice round number, and it provides an occasion to say thank you for popping in and reading these little essays. Whether you're someone who reads all three new posts every week or are just an occasional visitor, your patronage is greatly appreciated.

Since I started this blog in late 2011, my pattern has been to post regularly for a time, then to put the whole thing on hold for extended periods while I attended to other parts of my life.

This latest stretch of regular writing has lasted almost exactly one year. I started my current three-times-a-week blogging cadence on June 23, 2023, and here we are, still plugging away with new content on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

It's difficult sometimes to come up with topics about which to write, but I'm able to brainstorm just enough material – and sprinkle in the occasional "Blog Rerun" – that this one year of posting is probably the longest uninterrupted stretch I've had.

Again, though, none of it matters if there's no one on the other end of the line to read it, and to engage with the posts on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. And so I say once more, thank you.

Let's see if we can get to 2,000 posts now.

I don't know what other bloggers do, but this is how I come up with topics to write about

The nose. Work on the nose, AI Blog Post Image Generator.

STEP 1: Go to blogger.com and click "+NEW POST" button. This opens up a blank white screen. Big, big mistake. The level of intimidation engendered by a blank white screen cannot be overstated.

STEP 2: Look around the room to see if anything there inspires an idea. Usually it doesn't, unless I want to write about mundane objects in my immediate vicinity like pencils or dictionaries.

STEP 3: Think about all the things that have occupied my time and attention over, say, the past week or so. This is almost always a series of boring work-related events or chores around the house, so rarely does an interesting topic spring to mind when pursuing this line of thought.

STEP 4: Mildly panic. Go get a cup of coffee to reset myself and perhaps gain some inspiration. Briefly consider writing about coffee. Realize I've done it before. Many times.

STEP 5: Return to ominous white screen. Think about the advice my wife would give me in this situation, which is always some variation of "write about me." Briefly consider this. Sometimes follow through on it. Other times realize that, like coffee, this is ground I've covered many times.

STEP 6: Try panicking again. Say a silent prayer of thanks that I write these posts 3-4 weeks in advance just in case writer's block rears its ugly head, as it so often does.

STEP 7: Stumble upon a promising idea, begin to write about it, quickly realize I've had this idea before. Delete everything. Return to blank screen.

STEP 8: Read my friend Peter Vertes' excellent blog to see what he's writing about. Quickly realize I am highly unlikely to successfully replicate his point of view or choice of topics, as I do not happen to be witty nor Jewish nor gay like him.

STEP 9: Swallow my pride and find an old post I can run again, since no one except me remembers anything I wrote in 2014. Position this post as an ultra-exclusive "Blog Rerun." Feel shame.

STEP 10: Sometimes I will mercifully end this process with Step 9. More often, though, I feel obligated to come up with something new and eventually find an idea that is probably only of interest to me. I bang out 300 words about it, make the AI Blog Post Image Generator come up with an illustration to go with it, and set it to publish on a future date. I come away feeling neither satisfied nor accomplished.

And that, my friends, is what I go through to produce these blog posts...which, as I always say, are worth about what you pay to read them.

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.

Facebook as a validation of human worth

I just checked how many "friends" I have on Facebook. The number was 751.  The average number of friends for a Facebook user, according to Facebook itself, is 190. Does this mean I'm four times more likable than the average Facebook user?

Obviously not. My wife will tell you it just shows I'm a sucker who can't say no to any Facebook friend request. I like to think I'm more discriminating than that, but I suspect she's probably right.

I put "friends" in quotes because not all of these people are my friends, in the best sense of the word. They're all people with whom I'm acquainted in one way or another, of course, and I would genuinely enjoy having conversations with 99% of them. But "friends?" Not really.

With the advent of social media has come a variety of ways to measure one's "influence" in the online world. I put that in quotes, too, because there are so few people whose online personas are truly influential, in that they drive others to buy certain things or make particular changes in behavior.

I think measures of online influence exist solely to cater to our collective egos. The most obvious ones are the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers you collect. But there's also this service called Klout that aims to measure "social influence" by tracking your activity on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.) and assigning you scores in "True Reach," "Amplification," and "Network Impact."

I think Klout is silly. I also log on to Klout virtually every day to check my score.

I am embarrassed even to admit this, because I really do think Klout is silly. But it actually matters to me when my Klout score falls from 55 to 54. What did I do wrong? How come it dropped? Maybe I need to make my blog posts funnier. Or maybe I need to Tweet more...even though I really don't have anything all that interesting to say.

It IS a lot more satisfying to blog when I write something that gets a lot of page views the day it's posted. I can log on to Blogger.com and find out instantly how many people have read a particular post or looked at the blog in general. Sometimes it seems random to me which posts will get read and which ones won't.

I did one recently on my interest in military history that didn't get a lot of readers. Seventy-five people looked directly at the post itself, while another 150 or so people went to www.theystillcallmedaddy.com that day. Typically, a new post will get 90-120 visitors the day it's posted, and the website will see additional traffic of 200-300 people.

The headline I assign to a post obviously has a lot to do with whether viewers will click through and take a few minutes to read it, especially among those I don't know. People that come to the blog via The News-Herald Community Media Lab are generally the ones who will make or break the relative success of a post, since they're not clicking through as a favor to me but rather because they're really interested in the topic du jour.

Still, there are some widely read posts that have caught me by surprise. The most successful post in the not-even-five-month history of this blog was one I did called "The Art of Dadness." Nearly 400 people have clicked directly to the post itself, while several hundred others went to the main blog page the day it was put up.

"The Art of Dadness" was a heartfelt expression of my views on modern fatherhood and how it can improve, but I didn't think that much of it when it was written. And the thing is, I still have no idea why it has nearly quadruple the readership of other posts I've done.

Another popular post was about our experience hosting two Brazilian students for 12 days in January. That one sort of went "mini-viral" among the Brazilian ex-pat community and employees of the Council on World Affairs. So yeah, I know why those numbers were high. But other posts? It's a shot in the dark sometimes.

By the way, let's keep all of these numbers in context: I'm thrilled when 400 people read something I wrote. There are hundreds and hundreds of bloggers to whom a post that only drew 400 readers would be cause for despair. A lot of people can draw 1,000 readers simply by posting 50 random names from the phone book. I am not one of these bloggers, nor will I ever be.

The point is, there is almost no reason to derive any sort of self-satisfaction from how many online "friends" you have or how many people click on your half-hearted attempts at blogging. Regardless of how far technology advances, it's your relationships in the real, physical world that really matter and that help create a fulfilling existence.

Not that I'm going to stop checking my Klout score. Maybe if I just write about my tiny hands a few more times, I can push it as high as 56...

(SEMI-RELATED NOTE: Since we're being self-referential here, you may have noticed over the last couple of months that ads have begun appearing on the blog. This was by choice. Google will pay you to post ads on your blog based on how many people view and/or click on them. Want to know how much money I've made in two months of doing this? $2.92. That's right, not quite three bucks. Not that it matters much to you, nor should it. But if any of the ads you see are the least bit appealing or touch on something in which you're interested, a click-through to add a few pennies to my kids' college fund would be appreciated. Thanks!)