Happy birthday, Mom!

My mother turns 85 years old today. Every year I announce her age on social media without asking her if it's OK and without fear of retribution, because Mom is further away from getting a Facebook account than your typical Amish farmer is.

Mom could handle a computer just fine if she wanted to. I know this because she's smart. She either doesn't admit or doesn't know how smart she is, but that's because she's Mom and self-deprecation is what Mom does.

I remember when Mom was the single smartest human being I knew (and she still ranks right up there, though she has admittedly been surpassed by my wife, who over nearly 25 years of marriage I've come to find out knows at least a little bit about virtually everything...and I don't mean that sarcastically).

From birth until the age of 5 or so – and really quite a ways beyond that – my mom was my world. She was the person I was with most or all of every day. I don't know if it's because I was the baby of the family or whether I just had social issues or a little bit of both, but I was especially dependent on my mom for a long time. My only problem with starting kindergarten is that it took me away from Mom for hours at a time.

After awhile, of course, it was fine. By necessity, you learn eventually to untie yourself from mother's apron strings because, otherwise, a 47-year-old man living at home and hanging around his mom all day would be a little bit strange, wouldn't it? Or maybe "demented" is the word.

Anyway, no matter how old you get, your mom is still your mom and she deserves your time and respect. My respect she has. Lately what I haven't given her is my time.

I could give you the excuse that I work long hours, that I have a lot going on, that I'm not home most of the time, blah blah blah blah. But Mom lives all of 7 minutes away in the house where I grew up, and where she has lived for 54 years since the latter days of the Kennedy Administration.

Getting there for a 15-minute visit, or calling her most days of the week, isn't and shouldn't be that difficult. But sometimes I treat it like it is.

So note to self: More phone and face time with Mom. Do it.

In any event, happy birthday to Mom. I owe way, way more to her than I could possibly realize, and I hope she's around many more years for me to let everyone know exactly how old she is.

10 things I really should understand a lot better than I do

(1) Plumbing (or wiring, or heating and cooling, or virtually any other semi-complex system within my house)

(2) The economy

(3) Why airplanes don't just fall out of the sky. You can explain aerodynamics, air lift, wing shape and everything to me as much as you want. I still don't see why every jetliner I've ever been on was able to stay aloft for more than four seconds.

(4) How to read Shakespeare. I've tried. Believe me, I've tried. But when I come up against "Against the which, a moiety competent / Was gaged by our king; which had return'd / To the inheritance of Fortinbras, / Had he been vanquisher," I pretty much dissolve into a puddle of ignorance.

(5) How a saxophone, an instrument I've played since 1979, actually works.

(6) Bridge, Hearts, Spades and about 47 other popular card games

(7) How a baby actually emerges from a woman. I've watched it happen live and in person several times. And yet I still think it was all done with mirrors or CGI or something. I know the size of a newborn baby. And I know the size of the orifice from which it supposedly passes. The two don't match up in any way at all. I don't care what geometry you use, THAT ain't fittin' through THAT. So I want to know how they actually do it.

(8) Why accents exist (I mean linguistic accents. Not, you know, rugs.)

(9) Cricket (Again, to clarify, the sport. Not the insect...though come to think of it, I know almost nothing about the bug, either.)

(10) How to juggle, do a backflip, or whistle through my fingers. These are all physical acts that utterly escape me.

My theory of leadership: Get good people and get out of their way

I never set out, in either my career or my personal life, to be a leader. It just kind of happened that way.

At Vitamix, I head up a team of three very talented communications professionals. I inherited one and hired two, and I couldn't have been more fortunate with the mix of ability and dedication that resulted.

At home, of course, I'm theoretically the co-head of a household of seven people, though I recognize aptitude when I see it and leave many important executive decisions to Terry. My job, in those instances, is to support her. I'd like to think I do it well.

I'm also the president of the Wickliffe High School Girls Soccer Boosters. A more appropriate title would be "coordinator," because my role is largely to channel the vast energy and ideas that emanate from the three wonderful ladies who are my fellow officers.

What I have learned, in all of these situations, is that effective management starts with recognition of what you yourself do well and what you don't do well. I know my limitations. I know what I can and can't do, and I don't pretend that my talents extend any further than they actually do.

I will make suggestions and coach when I can, but if you ever find yourself reporting to me in any capacity, I promise you two things:

(1) I will not micromanage. I trust that you are a responsible adult and that you have the ability to do your job well. That's a given. I'm going to step aside and let you do that job. I expect you'll deliver fabulous results (or else I wouldn't have hired you) and keep me apprised of what's going on.

(2) I will go to bat for you every chance I get. One of my responsibilities is to take some of the slings and arrows for you. Some you'll know about, others you never will. And that's the way it should be. You don't need to be distracted by things that are beyond your control, or by people who may or may not understand what you do and how you do it. Let me run interference for you.

If I ever fail to do either of these things, or if I'm letting you down in some other aspect of our working relationship, I expect you will let me know.

And that about sums up my philosophy on leadership.

So far it has worked out. Check with me again in two decades when I'm thinking about retirement and I'll let you know the final result.

Occasionally sacrificing what you want to do for what you need to do: The hard part of adult life

One of my essential and ongoing dilemmas – just ask my wife, who has to hear me whine about it all the time – is that I want to run a marathon. It would be my second marathon. The first happened way back in 2001.

OK, you say, go run a marathon. Not so fast. Marathon training requires a lot of time, especially those long weekend runs. I don't have time. Or at least, the other choices I make in life create the circumstances in which I don't have time.

Because really, I DO have the time if I choose to create the time. But I have family commitments, chores, job-related obligations, etc. All of those take precedence over the quest for Marathon #2, as does that pesky little biological need for adequate sleep.

In reality, I choose not to have the time to train for a marathon. I also choose to go to church virtually every Sunday morning. I also choose to be married and raise a large-ish family.

These are all life decisions I've made that affect my allocation of resources. Those resources include time, money, and energy, both mental and physical.

Maybe someday, when the kids are a little older or maybe my professional and personal circumstances have changed for whatever reason, I'll have more time to do the things I've put off. But in the interim, this is the life I've chosen, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

If you're any older than 15 or so, you know what I'm talking about. It's interesting watching my daughter Elissa adjust to this most inescapable of grown-up realities as she settles into her first full-time job. She claims she's not very good at the adulting thing, as many people her age do, but I would say she's far ahead of most of her peers.

Whenever I get a little disappointed about not being able to do everything I want to do, I take stock of what those little personal sacrifices have done for me. I am blessed beyond measure, largely because of the way I've chosen to react to all of the gifts God has given me.

Sure, I can't just up and go on a weekend trip at the spur of the moment. But how important is that when compared with having a wonderful wife to whom I've been married for nearly 25 years? And children I love being around? And a job that provides us with so many material gifts countless others on this planet lack?

I have a car to drive, food to eat, a roof over my head, and a warm place to sleep every night. If you stop taking things like that for granted for just a second, and recognize how close to NOT having them you really are, suddenly the other stuff pales greatly in comparison.

I may or may not run that second marathon someday, but if I don't, it really is OK. That, I suppose, is at least one wise thing I've come to understand in my 47 years.

On healthy eating, food that tastes bad, and the Ultimate Trade-Off

By all accounts, I eat in a manner that most people would term "healthy."

Of course, as an American, it's not difficult to eat healthy compared with your countrymen. When you begin to understand what healthy eating really is, you quickly become appalled at what doctors call the Standard American Diet (and its appropriate acronym, "SAD").

We don't exactly eat in a way that promotes feeling good and longevity, folks. We just don't. And what's worse, our #1 export as a nation is our poor dietary habits. The Type-2 diabetes epidemic is becoming a global phenomenon, though I would guess we still lead the world in insulin shots per capita.

I ate that way for a long time. Not as much as some folks, but still not ideal from a medical standpoint. Then I started doing some reading and found out what our bodies truly need. And it ain't the chemical-filled "low-fat" stuff that was all the rage in the 90s and beyond. It's real food, as close to its natural state as possible.

My diet is not perfect. I'll be the first to admit that. These days I don't eat as much protein as I should, and I've not been able to give blood in a while because my iron levels are always too low (though interestingly, I feel like I have a lot of energy most days). I also eat way, way too much fruit. It fills me up, and there can be a lot of sugar in fruit, though as I understand it, it's a natural sugar that's metabolized differently from the added sugar that permeates everything at the grocery store.

But as I try to evolve my eating patterns, I think I'm definitely getting better. There's improvement, which is good.

Here for example is absolutely everything I ate yesterday (Friday, March 31st):

BREAKFAST: 

* 1 cup oatmeal (1/2 cup plain oats, 1/2 cup water...I honestly love how it tastes, though I know many people would say it's incredibly bland)

* 1 banana

* 1 cup coffee with 16-18g of half and half

SNACKS (eaten throughout the day...I snack a lot):

* 3 more bananas

* 4 apples

* 1 grapefruit

* 1 carrot

* 1 ounce walnuts

* 1 packet Chicken of the Sea pink salmon

* 1 cup plain Greek yogurt (yes, I eat it and like it plain)

* 1 whole-wheat mini bagel
* 1 Weight Watchers cheese stick

* 3 more cups of coffee prepared just like the one I had at breakfast above

LUNCH:

* 1 greens salad (even mixture of spinach and kale) with a combo olive oil/red wine vinegar dressing

DINNER:

* 2 ounces bran flakes with a cup of almond milk (NOTE: This is a very, very light dinner for me. I usually eat more than this, but Terry is out of town and the kids ordered pizza that I didn't want to wait for. So cereal it was!)

This was about how I ate every day last week, and I lost 1.4 pounds (I also jogged four days, which is important to note). That's a good, sensible weight loss, and I didn't feel especially hungry at any part of the day.

Should I have eaten more whole grains and protein? Yes. But that's just one day. It's a snapshot. I get more of those things on other days.

Every day I try to get my share of healthy fats, which generally consists of nuts, the olive oil on my salad, and any fish I can scrounge up when it's available. I try to get whole grains (i.e., not white bread or white rice), I try to get vegetables (though generally not enough), I have no problem meeting my fruit quota, and I'll eat lean meats when we do have meat.

I read all kinds of books and articles about healthy eating, and I know the areas in which I'm lacking. You can suggest anything and I'll probably be aware that I should be eating it. But this is my general approach, and medically it seems to work in terms of my blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. All of those important numbers the doctor always talks to you about.

Many people will say that this type of food isn't enjoyable for them, and that they would rather have fewer but fun years vs. more but bland-eating years. And I offer up no judgment on that whatsoever. It is, in the end, what I call "The Ultimate Trade-Off."

You have to ask yourself: What do I want? What are my goals? What makes me feel best? And while we all know the "right" answer to that question in terms of health and wellness, the real "right" answer varies for each of us.

It may be that you want to eat steak every day for the rest of your life, and if you die early, so be it. And I completely respect that. I am not the Food Police for anyone but myself. What I want out of life and what you want out of life may differ, but neither of our approaches is inherently better than the other.

In the end, as I said in yesterday's weight loss post, we all have to make our own decisions. The key is being truly comfortable with the one you make and living with it. If you can do that, then you've got a big part of this whole "life" thing figured out.

Some thoughts on weight, health and BMI

Every once in a while, I come on here and talk a bit about my personal weight loss (and gain, and loss, and gain, and loss, etc.) journey, in the hopes that it will be somewhat interesting to you and that you'll at least read past the headline.

This is one of those days.

I went to my Weight Watchers meeting last Saturday and got back to within two pounds of my goal as a Lifetime Member, which means I don't have to pay to come to meetings and to access the E-Tools on my iPhone that allow me to look up the point values of various foods, track my eating and activity, etc. It's a nice little incentive to stay at or around your goal weight: Eat too much and you end up paying.

My weight losses have always been followed by weight gains. It's a reality that many, many people face, and that I may face for the rest of my life, I don't know. But looking back over just the last nine years, I've had significant weight losses at the following times and gained much or all of the weight back each time:

2008: Lost about 30 pounds, gained it all back by 2010

2011: Lost 15 pounds or so, gained it all back by 2012

2013: Lost something like 45 pounds, gained 25 of it back by early 2016

2016: Lost that 25 I had gained back PLUS 25 more. Yes, a 50-pound swing, though that took me down into the mid-160s by last fall and, honestly, as much as it pains me to say this, that was just too much.

2017: By the early part of this year, I had gained 25 of the pounds back again, and now I'm starting to lose it again.

I weighed in at 186.4 this morning (Saturday, April 1st), a figure that would surprise many people just looking at me. I don't look like I weigh 186 pounds, though I will say that much of it is in my legs. I've told you before that we Tennants carry a lot of weight in our thick English-German calf and thigh muscles.

Still, I really don't think I'm quite yet at a medically ideal weight. What that weight should be, though, constantly baffles me. It's not 165, but it's also not 185.

"Hey, Scott, here's a thought: How about splitting the difference and stopping at 175?"

Yes, yes, you're probably right. It's just that I have a hang-up about being in the "overweight" or "obese" section of the Body Mass Index (BMI) charts.

People attack the BMI scale all the time, claiming it's unrealistic. But I think that's because most people don't understand exactly what BMI is.

BMI is not a set of numbers designed to make you feel like a fat slob. As I understand it, it's simply a table based on straight actuarial data. It's telling you, in essence, "Look, you do what you want. We're just saying that people under this particular weight for your height tend to die early a lot less often than people who are over that weight. That's it. That's all we're saying. It may seem like an unrealistic number to you, but the stats are the stats."

Yes, I know that people who are especially muscular get thrown unfairly into the overweight/obese category on the BMI chart. I understand it's not perfect. I'm just saying its purpose is really only to show you how likely you are to suffer an early death based on your height and weight. There are, and always will be, exceptions.

Of course, there are many things that contribute to being "healthy," and maintaining a proper weight is just one of them. But it's an important one, to be sure. For my height (5-9 1/2), I don't enter the "normal" weight zone on the BMI chart unless I'm under 172 pounds. My 186 weigh-in this morning puts me at about 27.1 (under 25 is healthy/normal). A 27.1 BMI is classified as "overweight."

Do with that information what you will. We all have to make our own decisions. I'm just having a hard time balancing the medical "hey, you're in good shape" with the subjective "hey, you look too gaunt" from family and friends.

The more important question I should be asking myself is how I'm going to go about maintaining that true goal weight once I get there. And I'm looking into that now. A different maintenance philosophy and a whole lot of prayer seem to be the preferred strategy.

One key thing for me, as Terry told me countless times as I refused to listen, is that I need to show up at weekly Weight Watchers meetings. I just have to. They keep me accountable and motivated. When I stop going, I gain weight. It's a simple pattern, not hard to recognize, yet time and again I try to do it on my own. Dumb.

OK, I've written more than I should have on this. I wanted to talk about healthy eating apart from weight, but you know what? I'll do that in tomorrow's post. I really need to go grab an apple (and not a Twinkie) right now.

OK, so apparently cheaters DON'T prosper

Remember the whole thing where I asked you to click on the ads in my blog so I could make a few bucks? And how I even thanked you for doing it after my Google Ads account balance shot up?

I included this line at the end of that thank-you post when it suddenly occurred to me that what I was doing may not have been entirely ethical: "You don't think the Google AdSense people will read this and take away my cash, citing some obscure rule about soliciting ad clicks or something, do you? Maybe we should just keep this between ourselves..."

Well, guess what! (You already know where this is going.) I received the following note of reprimand from the Google Ads people:

Hello, 

We recently detected invalid activity in your AdSense account. As a result, we’ve temporarily suspended your account for 30 days. During this time, no ads will be served on your sites. 

Why was my account suspended?We found instances of one or more users clicking repeatedly on your AdSense ads which is prohibited by the AdSense Program Policies. Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest. Publishers may not ask others to refresh or click their ads. This includes asking for users to support your site, offering rewards to users for viewing ads or performing searches and promising to raise money for third parties for such behavior. Additionally, clicking your own ads, automated clicking tools or traffic sources, robots, or other deceptive software are also prohibited.

The note was actually much longer, but the gist of it was:

• We know what you did, smart a**.
• There's a rule against that to which you clearly agreed, but you never even bothered to read it, did you?
• Your account is suspended for 30 days, which means no ads will appear on your blog AND we're going to withhold the payment to which you were otherwise entitled AND we're probably going to refund all of the revenue you've recently generated to the affected advertisers.
• And there's nothing you can do about it. Nyah nyah nyah!

Yes, the earnings that pushed me over that magical $100 payment threshold are probably going to be rescinded. That's $40 in income gone in a flash, and there's no doubt I deserve it.

So yeah, I screwed up. I should have read the fine print a bit more closely and realized (as a marketing professional myself) that solicited clicks aren't of any use to advertisers.

I guess, then, my request to you is to stop clicking on the ads unless you're really, genuinely interested in something. I appreciate everyone chipping in with a few clicks, but them's the rules, you know?

I guess we'll put that classical CD buying binge on hold for a bit...