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.

If you have a basement gym, you might as well use it

Over the last year, I've gotten a lot of mileage here on the blog posting about my adventures at the gym.

I was never a weight lifter until May 2024, when Elissa and Mark bought me four sessions with a trainer named Kirk at Ohio Sports & Fitness (OSF) in Willoughby, Ohio. My knowledge and enjoyment of strength training really blossomed under Kirk's guidance, and I enjoyed working out with him twice a week almost without fail for 13 full months.

As of a month ago, however, I no longer go to OSF, nor is Kirk serving as my trainer. This has nothing to do with the gym or with Kirk. The facility is great with a lot of friendly and very helpful people. As for Kirk, what can I say? He's an amazing personal trainer whose extensive knowledge blends well with his positive personality.

He's a good egg, that Kirk.

No, my disengagement from the gym has nothing to do with them. It was simply a decision I made several weeks ago when I decided I needed to free up some time in my otherwise hectic life (something I mentioned this past Monday in an egregiously gratuitous game show-related post).

One of the changes I made in my routine was to shift the site of my twice-a-week strength training to our house rather than an outside gym.

It turns out we have a pretty nicely equipped gym in the back room of our basement, thanks to the efforts of my son Jared. When we still lived with us and was really into lifting, he stocked that room with everything you really need to build muscle.

That includes two adjustable weight benches, a rack for bench pressing, a barbell and various weight plates, a full assortment of dumbbells, a machine for hamstring curls and quad extensions, and a bunch of other stuff I won't even list here, all placed on a series of heavy-duty rubber horse mats.

For the longest time I felt guilty I wasn't taking advantage of this nice exercise setup located right in my own home. Now I do.

I admittedly miss Kirk, and I miss the atmosphere at OSF, but so far this change has been for the better. It cuts significant time off my morning routine, and it doesn't involve any sort of membership or personal training fees.

It also helps that my strength training goals are relatively modest. I'm not looking to bulk up or anything. Really, all I want is to maintain what I have in an attempt to stave off age-related muscle loss.

The Tennant Gym is more than equipped to help me do that.

Now if only I could get a machine for the basement that makes me not want to eat cake all the time...

Hold the eggs, toast and sausage, please: Eating the same breakfast every day, year after year

I'm still at a stage in life where chaos is the rule and continuity the exception. The kids may be mostly grown, but there are enough variables in my daily existence to keep things interesting.

One thing that never changes, though – and that's almost a literal "never" – is my breakfast. Every day it's the same thing eaten at the same time and generally with the same utensils.

With very few exceptions, you will find me sitting at the kitchen table between the hours of 7:00 and 7:30am eating these exact foods:

• A 1/2 cup of rolled oats cooked (microwaved, really) in water
• A banana
• A cup of black coffee

The oats are eaten out of the same black plastic bowl designed for the purpose. The banana is usually medium ripe and medium-sized. The coffee is without creamer and drunk from one of only three mugs I have in rotation.

I should mention this is all by choice. No one is forcing any of it on me.

Whatever else the day may have in store, it starts with this never-changing breakfast.

There is a certain comfort in it, to be sure. For one thing, I never get sick of the plain oats, the banana or the coffee. Ever. They're as tasty for me now as they were when I fell into this routine however many years ago (I honestly can't tell you when it started).

There's also very little prep time involved. I mix the oats and water and microwave them for exactly 1 minute. The banana is quickly plucked from the fruit stash on our kitchen counter. And the coffee comes out of the Cuisinart machine Terry bought me for Christmas that I just love.

All told, from the moment I start making breakfast to the moment I start eating it is less than 3 minutes.

This comes in especially handy on days I have to go into the office or get myself to some other morning commitment.

Lunch and dinner will vary, but breakfast? It's my most important meal of the day not for its nutritional value, but for its reliability.

You will understand, then, how in some ways I have been a 76-year-old man for most of my life.

I had no idea how great a short work commute would be

Until the outbreak of COVID in March 2020, I maintained a daily schedule much like that of millions of other Americans. Five mornings a week, I would get in the car and drive to my workplace. For a full decade of my professional life, that drive was a considerable one – at least by Northeast Ohio standards – of 30+ miles each way.

For more than a year, I drove a few days a week down to Akron, a distance of more than 40 miles.

There are some advantages to a longer commute, as I enumerated in a blog post  in 2015, but for the most part, it was a big hassle. It gets tedious, you're constantly having to fill your car with gas, oil changes become more frequent, there's always construction, accidents and other traffic snarls, and on and on.

Then, in June 2022, I accepted an offer to join Materion Corporation, a global company based in the nearby city of Mayfield Heights. Let's set aside the fact that, professionally speaking, it couldn't have worked out better. I love the team members with whom I get to collaborate, and the work itself is interesting and challenging.

From a purely logistical point of view, this change has been a godsend. My commute to work, which I make three days a week, is rarely longer than about 15 minutes and involves no highway driving at all. On light traffic days when the stoplights cooperate, I can get there in 13 minutes.

The days I broke 45 minutes to Akron always felt like a win. And 40 minutes was pretty much the norm for the 1,000 or so times I drove to the Vitamix corporate headquarters on Cleveland's southwest side over my eight-year tenure there.

Being so close to home makes it much, much easier for me to get to my various sports PA announcing engagements. It means far fewer times when I need to bring a change of clothes to work and run out of the office at 5:30 to drive straight to a field or gym.

On the other end of the day, not having to leave the house until 7:30am is...well, I know it's an overused word, but I can confidently say it's amazing. Life-changing, even.

An extra half-hour may not sound like much, but it allows me to do everything I've wanted to do in the mornings for many years but couldn't squeeze in without having to wake up every day at 4:30am.

Again, I'm not saying long commutes are all bad. I don't get to listen to the same number of podcasts that I used to, and it's harder for me to feed my classical music habit unless I'm very deliberate about carving out dedicated time for it.

But on balance, for me, short commutes win hands down. I had no clue what I was missing.

With gainful employment on the horizon, I need to get back to my 5am wake-up time

It is rare that anyone in the house is awake before me. Even over these last couple of months of not having a job, "sleeping in" for me is when I don't roll out of bed until after 6am

I have always been an early riser, and presumably I will always be an early riser.

Still, my current schedule, while not exactly what you would call "decadent," won't do once I start work at Goodyear next week. I need to get back to setting that tried-and-true 5am alarm.

I could get up later than that, but I'm not willing to sacrifice any part of my morning routine, which will generally look like this on days I'm in the office:

5am-5:30am: Get up, get dressed for exercise, get the cats fresh food and water, scoop their litter boxes, sweep around those litter boxes

5:30am-6:10am: Exercise, cool down

6:10am-6:30am: Shower, get dressed (only 20 minutes...this is the advantage of being a 51-year-old man)

6:30am-6:50am: Eat breakfast, scan the papers

6:50am-7:00am: Brush teeth, get ready, get out the door

7:00am-7:45am: Drive to work

7:45am-8:00am: Get in, get to my desk, get coffee, and get going

Right now Goodyear staff are only in the office two days a week, and that arrangement is likely to last several months while they figure out what their workplace model is really going to look like. I could potentially sleep in a bit on work-from-home days, though I'm still likely to be up at 5:00 and maybe exercise a while longer, or take some extra time to empty the dishwasher, start laundry, etc.

I know many of you get up much earlier than 5am, and many are up, shall we say, significantly later in the morning. Either way, I'm looking forward to getting back into more of a rigid schedule.

The monotony of being unemployed in a pandemic is getting to me

I write these blog posts about two weeks in advance.

I have no idea how I'm going to feel as you read it on May 26, but as I write it, I can say unequivocally that the pandemic/unemployment lifestyle is driving me insane.

I am a creature of habit and generally thrive on routine...just not this one.

My days are endless loops of driving Jack wherever he needs to go, taking care of the cats, washing dishes, making the bed, doing laundry, cleaning up as needed, and of course, looking for a job.

None of those activities is especially unpleasant, but taken together, it's all becoming a little tedious.

You know how so many American housewives back in the 50s and 60s got hooked on pills because they couldn't stand living the same day at home over and over and over? I absolutely empathize.

I admittedly also get to do more enjoyable things like play my sax, write these posts, watch TV with Terry, read, etc. But it just feels like the menu of options is limited, and I've ordered everything on it several times already.

This is privileged, First World whining of the highest degree, I know. I am in a very fortunate position compared to many. It's just that I'm not at all good at being bored.

Some people are, you know. I'm not one of them.

(Incidentally, it is not lost on me that my wife has lived this life for many years, particularly during those long-ago days when I would go to the office and she would take care of the house while tending to a large brood of small children every day. But she is superhuman and thus doesn't count in this discussion.)

I need to start working again. I'm very confident the right opportunity will come along, and possibly very soon. But until then, well...

I would be fine if I never unloaded a single dish from the dishwasher ever, ever again.

What is a household chore you do absolutely every day?

My days tend to vary, which I like, but there are two things that happen every morning, virtually without exception:

(1)  I feed our five cats, give them fresh water, scoop out all five of their litter boxes, and sweep around those litter boxes.

(2) I empty the dishwasher (having most likely been the one who loaded and started it the night before).

Unless I am traveling and away from home for one reason or another, these are unchanging parts of my daily schedule.

There is a certain comfort in the routine, I'll admit, though I always feel better having tackled these chores than I do when I'm starting to tackle them.

The one tiny variation with the litter box box thing is that, on Sunday mornings, I sweep a much larger area of the basement, since there are always pockets of stray litter that somehow get transported as far as 30 or 40 feet away.

Other than that, it's the same thing over and over and over. They're jobs that have to get done, and someone has to do them, and it just happens to be me.

How about you? What is on your to-do list almost every day of your life?

I take a lot of showers, and they're all the same

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I take more than 700 showers every year. If you were to videotape a random sampling of, say, 20 of these showers, you would be amazed by one thing.

(NOTE: OK, stop right there. At this point I could be going in a number of directions with this, most of them not very nice. Rest assured, though, that that lead paragraph was written with the best of intentions. Read on...)

What you would find is that all of my showers are identical. And when I say "identical," I mean it. Every time I step into the shower, I do the same things in the same order. Every. Time. I'll bet my showers are essentially the same length, probably all within 15 seconds or so of each other.

I don't do this intentionally, mind you. It's just that after thousands and thousands of showers over the years, I've developed a system that works for me: Wash my hair, rinse, grab the soap and work from top to bottom starting at the neck, rinse, wash my face using whatever face wash stuff I happen to have, rinse yet again. Turn off water. Grab towel, dry off. Move on from there.

I do not deviate from this pattern. Is that weird? I'm guessing it's actually pretty common. I'll bet most of us have a bathing routine that rarely changes, whether we realize it or not.

I also put on my clothes in the same order every day, but again, I would venture that you do, too.

Or am I just trying to make myself feel better about being an obsessive-compulsive freak?