Oh, pay day, how I love you so

I just found an online calculator that, when you input your annual income, can tell you where you rank globally in terms of wealth.

If you've ever wanted to feel really, really rich, you should try this calculator (GlobalRichList.com).

Actually, tools like that are mixed blessings. Sure, they make you feel like Bill Gates (which most of us are, compared with a stunning proportion of the rest of the world's population). But they also make you feel a bit guilty. Or at least that's what they do to me.

Being born in the United States means there's an excellent chance you rank among the richest 1% of people in the world (I'm thinking they include children in their formula, but still...) And I don't doubt you've worked very hard to get there.

But Americans strutting around because they're among the richest people in the world is a lot like the guy who claims to have hit a home run after he was born on third base.

Now I'm not trying to start class warfare here. Nor am I a bleeding heart liberal who thinks all wealth is bad. I'm just stating the undeniable fact that, no matter what problems you may have, you're still a lot better off than most people on the planet, and it's largely because of the circumstances into which you were born.

Nothing wrong with that. It just is.

Anyway, I bring this up because today is pay day at my place of employment. We get paid every two weeks, which is a schedule I like.

So does my wife. Getting paid every other Friday means that, two or three times a year, there will be a month in which I get an extra check. And she uses those extra checks to get ahead on bills, pay for emergency repairs, buy me Gala apples, etc.

When I worked at the Cleveland Clinic, we used to get paid once a month...on the 15th, if I remember correctly. Talk about having to manage your money.

On one hand, sure, it's nice to get a huge lump of cash deposited into your checking account all at once. But by the time you got to, say, the 7th or 8th of the following month, unless you were really disciplined, you were running a little short of funds.

But it's not the money I love so much on pay days as what the money buys. Specifically, pay day often means it's Terry Goes Grocery Shopping Day in our house. And that woman can shop. Well.

By the time I come home from work on pay day, she has usually returned from an epic shopping trip that has taken her to three or four different stores, where she has purchased all of the food, toiletries and other staples needed to support a family of seven.

She goes to three or four different stores because she has a system down, you see. She knows where to find the best prices and the best products. She knows how to use coupons to maximum effect. And she knows how to stretch that food budget of ours to its outer limits.

Anyway, by the time I walk in the door every other Friday, the kitchen is filled to overflowing with fruits, vegetables, meats, snacks, and new Keurig coffee cups. I love the fruit, as I've mentioned, but those Keurig coffee cups make me tingly.

I get so excited to see all the newly purchased food that I don't mind the fact that three-quarters of it will be gone by the end of the weekend, thanks largely to the voracious appetite of my 15-year-old son, Jared.

Jared regularly consumes seven meals in a day. I'm not kidding. It's sometimes even more. And he's as thin as a pencil.

I resent him for this, but it never lasts long. I get so distracted by the new crop of juicy apples and the K-Cups that there's no room in my brain for resentment.

Yes, pay day, I love you. You make everything OK.

Four teenagers in the family? Yes, sir, may I have another?

In a few weeks, my daughter Melanie will turn 13. When that happens, we will enter a six-month period in which we have four teenagers in our family at one time.

Specifically, our oldest four will be 19, 16, 15 and 13. I will freely accept offers of prayers, happy thoughts, and Prozac.

(SIDE NOTE: "Prayers, Happy Thoughts and Prozac" could be a good name for a band. Or at least the name of an album. I'm going to form a band not so much to make music, but just so we can use that name.)

This stretch of parenting four teens will end fairly quickly because my oldest, Elissa, will turn 20 in March. Twenty is a weird age. It's only a milestone birthday in that you leave one decade of life and enter another, but it doesn't get you anything in the way that ages 18 and 21 bring new freedoms and legal privileges.

I remember being 20. It was a long time ago, like centuries ago, but I remember it. I remember having more hair (and none of it being gray). I remember being able to go directly from a dead sleep into a fast morning run with no need to "warm up." I remember going to college every day and then working 6-8 hours at night and thinking nothing of it.

I also remember regularly making foolish decisions, so I guess you take the good with the bad.

Anyway, on the surface, having four teenagers in the family at the same time would appear to be a nightmare. And it certainly does have its challenges, from the mood swings to the school drama to the brain damage.

Yes, brain damage. Anyone who has parented a teenager, or even dealt with one, will tell you the only way to explain their behavior sometimes is that they must have suffered some sort of cerebral injury.

And indeed, the teen brain really is still under construction, busily forming the connections and functions that serve a person well later in life.

During those years when the contents of a teenager's skull are being built up, they do things that are puzzling to a rational (and even a not-so-rational) adult. You have to roll with this. Guide them, correct them, help them, sure. But in the end, acceptance is a lot easier.

Still, looking at the big picture, it really is a fun adventure when you have teens in the house. Their friends come over a lot, they keep you busy, and they tend to be noisy, irreverent, and altogether a good time.

Which is what I try to remind myself whenever they frustrate me, since it's guaranteed that I will miss the chaos of these years when it's all over.

I'm interested to see how it will play out when little Jack, our youngest at age 7, is a teen. By then, Elissa and Chloe and possibly Jared will presumably be out of the house, and Melanie will be knee-deep in college, leaving Jack to navigate those years with just his parents and a bunch of pets left behind by his siblings.

Being so much younger than the others, his experience of teenager-dom will be a little different than theirs. It will, in fact, be much like mine. My elder three siblings were 16, 14 and 12 when I was born. Which meant that by the time I started school, they were all either out the door or well on their way.

So when I was a teenager, it was just me, mom and dad living together. It couldn't have been nearly as loud and raucous in their house then as it is in mine now.

But I was definitely just as brain damaged, maybe more so, than my own offspring. Some things, it seems, never change.

There's something to be said for living on a street with a great name

I'll be the first to admit that I have street name envy.

I grew up on Harding Drive, presumably named after the 29th and potentially most boring U.S. president, Warren G. Harding.

Actually, I've come to find out in recent years that President Harding wasn't all that boring. He was quite the ladies man, as evidenced by the four (and possibly more) extramarital affairs he carried on. And as a young guy, he was reported to be strikingly handsome.

But still, he was Warren G. Harding. And that's an awful lot to overcome.

Anyway, I lived on Harding Drive for the first 22 years of my life. Then Terry and I got married and bought our first house, which was on East 300th Street. A numbered street name. That's not even boring, it's something less than boring. East 300th Street aspires to "boring."

We lived there for 11 years. Then we moved to our current residence, which is on Miller Avenue. The only streets more white bread than "Miller Avenue" are the ones with tree names like Oak, Elm and Maple. And even then, Miller Avenue certainly gives them a run for their money.

One reason I've always wanted to be rich is because rich people seem to live on streets with incredibly cool names. Names that evoke English mansions and cool pastoral life. Names like "Fox Hunt Glen Cove Lane," "Crimson Dale Estates" and "Snobby Caucasian Equestrian Bluffs."

These are street names that say something about you. They say, "I make a lot of money and can afford to live in an area populated solely by people who look and sound like me. I own three large SUVs and hire various hard-working minorities to tend to my lawn and flower beds."

I've always wanted to live on one of those streets, but I'm starting to think it's never going to happen.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Dave and Cathleen, have a cool street name: Locust Grove Drive. I like that one. I mean, if you ignore the tendency of locusts to devour everything in their path and destroy vast swathes of farmland, it's actually quite a nice name.

And by the way, who makes the determination whether a given thoroughfare is a "Street," a "Boulevard," a "Lane" or whatever? The developer/builder? The city? A contest winner?

As you'll notice if you bothered to keep track of the details above, I've lived on a "Drive," a "Street" and an "Avenue" thus far in my life. Someday I'm hoping for a "Path," a "Vista", or a "Terrace." I might die from happiness if I ever manage to buy a house on a "Knoll," a "Canyon" or (the best one yet) a "Promenade."

By the way, I cannot recommend the "Street Name Generator" highly enough. Just visit that page, pick a random word from each of the three columns, and in just a few seconds you'll have your own ritzy-sounding address!

One possible outcome from the Street Name Generator? "Umber Snake Swale." If you don't think that's 10 different kinds of awesome, then I'm not sure you and I could ever be friends.

A day at the beach is no day at the beach

I'm sitting at the computer in a wet bathing suit as I type this, having just returned from a couple of hours at the beach with my family.

This is a relatively rare occurrence for us, you understand, or at least it is for me. I go to the beach approximately once a year. I swim in a pool maybe once or twice in that same year.

And that's about it for me, as far as water recreation goes.

It's not that I don't like the water, it's just...well, yes, actually it is that I don't like the water. And I know when it all started for me.

Like suburban moms everywhere back in the 70s, my mom made me take swimming lessons at the local pool one summer. It was good for me, and better yet, I think it may have been free. Or at least it was very, very low cost. So hey, why not?

Swimming lessons were given in "phases" back then. Phase I encompassed the basics, like opening your eyes underwater and reciting water safety rules or something. I cruised through that. And Phase II wasn't much tougher, though I'm not sure how I passed because I'm pretty sure it required you to float on your back, and to this day I cannot float on my back.

I'm one of the few people I know of whom this is true, by the way. Most folks just instinctively know how to float on their backs. But I sink like a rock. My wife is mystified by this, as well she should be. I defy all commonly accepted laws of physics.

Regardless, they passed me through both Phase II and Phase III in fairly short order, though I can't remember what you had to do to get through Phase III.

The trouble came with Phase IV, which was when they taught you to do the American crawl (also known as the "front crawl," or "just plain old swimming.") This is a skill I could not master. It is a skill I still haven't mastered some three decades later.

I don't know why, but there was something about the simultaneous need to kick, stroke and turn your head in rhythm in order to breathe that just stopped me cold. Couldn't do it then, can't do it now. I tried. Oh yes, I tried. But they wouldn't pass me beyond Phase IV because I simply couldn't learn the skill, no matter how hard they tried to teach me.

You have to understand, I was not especially well equipped at that point in my life to deal with failure. Not getting something right on the first try was foreign to me.

So when I repeatedly failed to pass the test to get out of Phase IV, I began to hate swimming lessons. And in turn, I began to hate the water.

The result is that I still don't like spending more than 10 consecutive minutes in any body of water, be it a kiddie pool or a major ocean.

Which isn't a good thing when you live in Ohio, where we have real "summer" for only about 2 1/2 months out of every year. When it's warm enough to swim, people here really, really get into swimming. And if you don't match their enthusiasm for it, they do little to hide their contempt for you.

The stereotypical Ohio vacation is to travel to a body of water and spend a week there doing whatever it is that normal, water-loving people do. My family doesn't take those kinds of vacations, and it's mostly because of me.

In addition to my low-level swimming skills, I should also mention that water always makes me cold. Always. I don't care if it's 95 degrees outside and the water is at bath temperature, I will still be cold.

Having lost a decent amount of weight in the past year doesn't help in this department. Previously, I at least had some insulation that kept my body temperature from falling into the hypothermic range. Now I just look at the water and my temp falls several degrees south of 98.6.

There's also the little matter of not really liking to have my shirt off in public, which I've mentioned before.

The only really enjoyable part of a trip to the beach for me is playing football catch with my son Jared. This is actually fun, or at least it's fun for 10 minutes until my 43-year-old rotator cuff catches my attention and asks, "Um, what exactly do you think you're doing?" And then I have to stop.

Other than that, though, a trip to the beach means, for me, being cold and making concerted efforts not to drown. This is not, by any stretch, a "relaxing" activity.

Which is why I should be living in Kansas or some other severely landlocked state, just so I wouldn't feel so pressured every summer to swim and fake enthusiasm for all things aquatic. As far as I'm concerned, summer can't end fast enough.

Memories of the greatest job in the world (for an 18-year-old)

There are jobs in this world the existence of which most of us are utterly unaware.

I used to hold just such a job.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, I reported for my first day of work as a part-time sports agate clerk at The News-Herald, the newspaper that would, a few years later, become my full-time employer.

These clerks, which I believe the paper still employs, do the grunt work that sells papers.

In my case, that meant taking dozens of calls every night from statisticians and coaches reporting the results of their recreational, high school and occasionally college athletic events.

More important than the final scores was the opportunity these callers had to give the names of up to three players on each team who did something noteworthy.

In the case of a little league baseball game, that may have been the kid who hit two home runs. For a basketball game, it was usually the guys/girls who scored the most points.

Whatever the reason for giving these amateur athletes their 15 minutes of fame in small agate type (thus the job title), having their names collected in print every day under the Community Scoreboard was a major reason why The News-Herald was one of the largest suburban daily newspapers in Ohio.

Which you can understand. If Little Johnny got his name in the paper, you can be sure Mom and Dad would rush out and buy 5-10 copies as keepsakes. So would Grandma. And the next-door neighbor.

So the work we agate clerks did had some importance from a sales and financial point of view.

Not that I cared much about that. What my 18-year-old self cared about when he walked into that newsroom for the first time on August 22, 1988, was that he was going to get to work at a newspaper. They could have had me sweeping the floors for all it mattered.

I caught the journalism bug early in life. I read The News-Herald front to back almost every day from the age of 14. Then I joined my high school newspaper and absolutely loved it. I could picture myself making a career out of journalism. And if it could be sports journalism, all the better.

Which is why I jumped at the chance when, one afternoon during the sweltering summer of '88, I came across a blurb in the "Area Sports in Brief" section saying that The News-Herald was looking to hire two sports agate clerks.

I needed a job at the time. I was a few weeks away from starting my four-year undergraduate career at John Carroll, and if nothing else I knew the cost of gas from driving to school every day (I was a commuter student) was going to be brutal.

So I applied and, thanks largely to the fact that News-Herald prep sports writer Joe Magill had been one of my high school track coaches and was therefore a nice inside reference, got the job.

I cannot tell you the thrill of typing or writing something, and then turning around 12 hours later and seeing it in print. Even if my name wasn't attached to it. I could point to it and say, "I did that," knowing that nearly 50,000 copies of my work were floating around Northeast Ohio that day.

A few months after starting at The N-H, I was given the chance to cover high school events with a byline, which was a dream come true. Eventually, at the veteran age of 20, a column mug with my photo began running alongside some of my stuff. This was, as far as I was concerned, the pinnacle.

Later, after I graduated from Carroll, the paper offered me a full-time job as a sports writer, which I gratefully accepted. I stayed there for five wonderful years, leaving only because of the demands of my growing young family.

But the experience I picked up at the paper absolutely shaped my future career in marketing and public relations. Taking those little league and high school scores over the phone for hours on end, night after night, was a great resume-builder, believe it or not.

Nowadays I think the clerks at the paper have most of the scores emailed to them, though I can't be sure of that. I choose to believe it's true, though, because otherwise I wouldn't have the credibility to say, "BACK IN MY DAY, WE USED TO TAKE 1,000 SCORES A NIGHT OVER THE PHONE. AND WE TYPED UNTIL OUR FINGERS BLED. AND WE LOVED IT!"

And honestly, we DID love it. God bless the agate clerks of the world.

Why, on the whole, being a pirate is a pretty sweet gig

The downside of being a pirate

• The hours. It seems like sailing the seven seas is a hard job and requires a lot of long hours. Not a problem if you really love the work, but still...
• Inordinate risk of on-the-job injury or death. There are a million ways to get hurt or get dead when you're a pirate. Like, for instance, when you try to take over another ship, you could get a sword through the gut. Or the captain could make you walk the plank. And then there's the apparently ever-present risk of scurvy. I'm in public relations, and I've never known a PR professional to die of scurvy. So score one for my side.
• Surly co-workers. If the movies and television are any indication, pirates as a group aren't the friendliest lot. The experts will tell you that workplace relationships are important, but I just don't see Black Bart standing around the water cooler talking about last night's ball game.
• High chance of alcohol poisoning. If you're not on duty on a pirate ship, then you're drinking. And usually you're drinking rum. I had a bad experience with rum more than 20 years ago and have tried to avoid it ever since. No way I make it even a week on a pirate ship if I'm forced to drink rum.
• Little chance for advancement. I'm not sure how the org chart looks on a typical pirate ship, but it seems to me that unless you're the captain or at least the first mate, the other positions within the organization are all less than desirable. There's just no potential for promotion for most of the crew.

The upside of being a pirate

• The travel. You get to see a lot of Caribbean islands if you're a pirate. And if you break the ship's rules, you'll get to know one particular island really well when they strand you there. But seriously, no endless days at a desk for you, me bucko!
• The potential payoff. If there's one thing pirates live for more than rum, it's gold. And they tend to find it at an uncanny rate. Assuming your captain is a fair man who evenly distributes the booty once it has been claimed, you're in for a handsome salary. Note, however, that income equity is not a notable feature of most pirate ships.
• The wenches. There are, of course, virtually no women on pirate ships. But when you hit one of those exotic ports of call to patronize a local watering hole, you will almost certainly be waited upon by a busty server in an off-the-shoulder white top. And after months at sea, this will not be an unwelcome sight.
• The status. Pirates are much cooler than, say, accountants. Or PR guys, for that matter. For all the risk of death and dismemberment, there is a certain cachet in being able to say offhandedly at a party, "Yeah, I'm a pirate." And you don't have to look like Johnny Depp to enjoy this little social perk.
• The movie rights. Speaking of Johnny Depp, being a pirate means there's an excellent chance some Hollywood producer is going to want to make a movie about you, or at least he'll want to cast you in a movie, which is just as good. Pirate movies never go out of style.

Conclusion

If you can stand the constant specter of death and the poor hygiene of your shipmates, then being a pirate is a solid and even admirable career choice. You'll need to make sure you have no moral qualms about killing innocent seaman on passing merchant vessels in order to steal their worldly possessions. But really, once you get past that, the rest is all gravy.

Four things I know I'm supposed to do but don't

Read the Classics

I have a degree in English and history from a well-regarded institution of higher learning (John Carroll University...go Blue Streaks!), yet I have never read The Scarlet Letter. Or Pride and Prejudice. Or Moby Dick. Or Don Quixote. How could this be?

(Actually, I know how it can be. Upper-level English courses get so specialized and esoteric that you end up reading the collected works of a 17th-century Finnish poet and have no time for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or War and Peace, also books I've never read.)

The point is, I should make time to atone for the glaring holes in my literary resume by actually reading these books. But I don't. Nor will I, at least not any time soon. It's easier to lament not having read them than it is to check them out of the library and crack open the front cover.

Lift Weights

I just mentioned this recently. I'm not a strength training guy. Never have been. I run. I run quite a bit. But I never touch the weights.

And it has always been like this. Even when I played football in high school, I was not a frequent visitor to the weight room. And by "not a frequent visitor," I mean I showed up there once a year to perform the mandatory weight-lifting tests set forth by my coaches. Then I wouldn't visit again until the following year.

I know I'm supposed to lift, but I can't stand it. Just like a lot of people know they're supposed to do cardiovascular exercise but can't stand running, cycling or climbing aboard the elliptical machine. To each his own, I suppose.

Take Care of My Fingernails

First off, I have abnormally small hands. And thus I have abnormally small fingernails. Making matters worse, I bite those fingernails. I bite 'em right down to the nub.

I admire people who take care of their nails, particularly guys. Society doesn't necessarily expect men to do much in the way of fingernail work, so I like the extra effort put in by guys with clean, nicely shaped nails.

My nails are ugly. At our wedding reception, the photographer took a picture of Terry's hand and my hand together as we showed off our new rings. Her nails are, as you would expect, beautifully manicured. Mine look like they belong to a 7-year-old. A hyperactive, nail-biting 7-year-old.

I'm embarrassed by it, but not so much that I'm motivated to do anything about it. My ugly nails will live on as long as I do.

Drive Under the Speed Limit

Depending on the mood I'm in, I'll drive anywhere from 5 to 15 mph over the speed limit. Not terribly bad, but still not legal, either.

The trouble is, I have kids. And I'm supposed to model proper driving procedures for those kids. Which is why I try to shield their eyes from the speedometer when I'm going 75 mph down a stretch of 60 mph freeway.

I should slow down, I know. And I don't. There are those who drive way faster than I do, but that's no excuse for breaking the rules. I will freely chalk this up to a classic case of hypocritical "do as I say, not as I do" when it comes to my children.