Only now, 18 years later, have I become familiar with our upstairs bathroom

When we bought our house back in 2003, I had a dream that I was walking through it and discovering all sorts of long hallways and new rooms of which I hadn't been aware. The house just went on forever.

It's a decent-sized house for our family, but trust me, it's not that big.

Except I'm experiencing a little deja vu, as I'm only just now getting to know a room in the house where previously I had spent maybe an average of 30 seconds a week.

That room is our upstairs bathroom. Or, as I've often referred to it, "the kids' bathroom." The kids' rooms have always been upstairs, so that bathroom has pretty much been theirs over the years.

The only time I generally set foot there is during my weekly toiler paper rounds, when I happily restock each of our four bathrooms with TP. And that has been about it. I never used it to shower (or any other purpose for which it's intended), and it's not a room I've ever cleaned with any regularity.

Until recently.

By the time you read this, I'm hoping our master bathroom renovation is complete and it's no longer the case that the upstairs bathroom is suddenly the most popular room in the house.

As I type this, though, we're very much mid-renovation, so all showering and other functions are happening up there. A bathroom that rarely entered my consciousness previously is now the star of the show, as rooms in our house go.

I've heard reports that this bathroom is dirty and disgusting, usually relayed by one child blaming the state of it on a sibling. So a few days into the renovation, I cleaned it.

My conclusion: It wasn't exactly pristine, but I've seen far worse.

If nothing else, I have newfound appreciation for this full bath that has existed in relative anonymity (at least in my mind) since George W. Bush's first term.

Not that I'm ever going back in there, mind you, but it was nice to get to know a place that I'm paying for.

The good fortune of having wonderful neighbors

I take for granted far too many blessings in my life. One is the fact that, for the past 18 years, we have had amazing neighbors.

They have been the same neighbors the entire time, by the way. Even with 18 years under our belts since we moved in, we are still the newcomers on this end of Miller Avenue.

Just to the west of us are the Warnekas, Tim & Beth. They have been there forever and a day and are just about the nicest people you will ever want to meet in your life. Their kids, Chris and Bridget, spent a lot of time playing with our kids when they were all growing up.

In fact, I am going to post a brilliant video that Bridget, Chloe and Jared made back in 2010. It is a tour de force of acting and video editing that deserves to be remembered. None of them is likely to be happy I've posted it, but it's too good not to share:

On our east side are Joe and Lisa, whom I've mentioned here before. My kids have been cutting their grass for the past decade or so. Last summer, Terry and I got to visit the campground where they spend much of their time during the warm-weather months. Quite often you will see Joe in our backyard doing pull-ups on our playground set.

We are a fairly tight-knit group among these three houses.

Which is just something I take as a matter of course until I hear horror stories from others about their neighbors. It makes me realize how fortunate we are to have such kind, considerate, pleasant people living near us.

That realization, combined with another viewing of the Tik Tok video above, makes me inordinately happy.

We mark the passing of time through anniversaries...good and bad

Dates stick in my head, so it's never a problem, for example, when I have to recount the various jobs I've had and the precise start and end dates for each.

I can rattle those off no problem. Even though it's probably sufficient to say I started at Dix & Eaton in "December 2002," I'm always very specific. It was December 2nd, 2002. My last day at The Cleveland Foundation? Why, that was February 1st, 2011 (a Tuesday).

Today is one of those job-related anniversaries. On this day in 1997, I started as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. As I always like to point out, this is and was a real publication, and it was such an interesting and fulfilling job. I was only there for a little more than two years before I accepted my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic, but without Urology Times, that Cleveland Clinic job likely wouldn't have happened.

So in that sense, May 12th is a good day.

Unfortunately, it's overshadowed by another May 12th date. On May 12th, 2009, as I was brushing my teeth in preparation for a trip to the dentist, we received a call from my brother telling us that my sister Judi had suddenly, shockingly, passed away.

She was only 56, just five years older than I am now. And she was Judi, the oldest sibling and driving force of our family. She organized things. She laughed and smiled. She made everyone happier.

And then...she was just gone. In many ways, we still haven't recovered.

Every May 12th for the rest of my life, I will think about that day and the days that followed. It was just stunned sadness, and it lasted for a very long time.

It never really ended, I suppose.

Still, we move on, because there's nothing else to do. Days like this come and go on the calendar, and as we get older, connected to each one is a memory, a milestone, and a set of emotions.

Some are good. Some aren't.

On balance, this one is an "aren't."

Break out the home movies!

The person in our family who gets most excited about watching old videos of our kids is not even, biologically speaking, a member of our family.

She is Lyndsey, my son Jared's girlfriend. Like all of the significant others in our little circle, we have long considered her to be part of the family despite what both the government and DNA evidence might suggest.

It's Lyndsey who, when a group of us find ourselves together in the living room, will excitedly say, "Let's watch home movies!"

This prompts me to retrieve a small plastic bin from our closet containing nearly 40 DVDs full of home videos we've shot over the years, along with a multi-page printout detailing exactly what can be found on each DVD and what year(s) it was shot.

I am nothing if not organized.

Lyndsey is the one who selects a disc to watch, and I then pop it into the Blu-Ray player for everyone's viewing pleasure.

Mine was really the first generation with easily accessible video cameras that documented our lives from infancy through high school and beyond. People had movie cameras prior to that, of course, but I didn't know many of them, and they simply weren't as prevalent as those VHS cams that could be seen all around school sporting events and concerts back in my day.

The current generation, of course, has had their lives captured on digital video (mostly via smartphone) from the moment they emerged from the womb. Seeing themselves on a TV screen is nothing to them.

At some point a few years ago, I decided to convert our old VHS and camcorder tapes into a digital format before those old magnetic media deteriorated or otherwise bit the dust. It was a long project, but I'm glad I did it.

The footage we have covers a period ranging from 1988, when I graduated high school, through about 2012, when we started shooting most things on our phones and storing them directly onto hard drives or Facebook.

Watching this stuff is a lot of fun, particularly when the kids get to see themselves as newborns (and in the case of Melanie, from the time she was just a few minutes old and still covered in goo while laying in the hospital warmer).

I so wish we had video footage of Terry and me as infants. But alas, we were born in the very late 60s. It just wasn't that common back then.

So we've made up for it by building a library of video clips of all of our kids. We may be compensating a little.

They're not all gonna be winners: Reading an everyday blog

At one point in the memorable (to me, anyway) David S. Pumpkins skit on Saturday Night Live, the wonderful Kenan Thompson, an elevator operator in a haunted house, says, "Hey look, it's 100 Floors of Frights. They're not all gonna be winners."

I often think about that line when I'm writing a blog post I know is likely to amuse only me and almost no one else. More often than not, low page view numbers on that post prove me correct.

I am truly grateful that anyone would ever choose to read even one of the entries here. The fact that many of you read regularly, and some read every day without fail, is immensely gratifying.

All of which is to say that, posting every day as I've done since Nov. 30th, pushes you to the limits of your creativity. Some days, ideas come readily. Others, it's a struggle.

Then again, you as a reader get exactly what you pay for here, so maybe I shouldn't feel too bad.

I appreciate your feedback on the good posts and your patience with the not-as-good ones.

Like today, for example.

Music is my way of keeping my brain from turning to mush

If you read books and articles about longevity and the ways in which you're supposed to take care of yourself as you get older, you will inevitably come across the admonition to challenge your mind continually.

Whether it's learning a new language, taking a class, or just doing difficult crossword puzzles every day, the idea is that your brain is like a muscle. And as with any muscle, it must be constantly worked or else it will eventually lose functionality.

I would argue my brain has already atrophied somewhat, but my weapon of choice in the fight against cognitive decline is the tenor saxophone.

As I've mentioned before, I take weekly private lessons from a marvelous sax player and teacher named Ed Michaels. Ed is a talented musician and educator, and just an all-around good guy. I get excited for Mondays at 5:30pm, which is when I get the Google Duo notification indicating that Ed is calling and it's time for our virtual lesson.

These lessons, and my subsequent practice sessions throughout the week, are not easy. Nor would I want them to be.

Ed throws a lot at me, but he does it with a smile and always with the encouragement that he's doing it because I'm "an A-plus student." Whether he's just saying that to make me feel good or he really means it, it doesn't matter. It always inspires me to work harder.

And hard work it is, as I've never formally learned, for example, chord structures. Seventh chords are the foundation of jazz improvisation, so I spend a lot of time playing outlines and scales around major seventh, dominant seventh, minor seventh, half-diminished, and diminished 7th chords.

These are, as Ed calls them, "The Big Five." And the sound, feel, and sax fingerings for them do not come naturally to me. Thus, I have to drill myself continually.

I'm getting there. I'm no Charlie Parker, nor will I ever be, but slowly, I'm getting closer to playing like Bird than I ever have.

It's not only fun, it's also making my mind work hard, which is largely why I do it.

Forty years from now, when I'm a drooling mess and about to keel over, my goal is be able to play the best solo on "Autumn Leaves" you'll ever want to hear.

I almost can't wait.

At what age do you start noticing you've left crumbs on the counter?

I'm trying to think back to when I first became aware of my own household messes and the need to clean them up.

I'm not talking about cleaning your room when you're a kid, but more like the debris you leave behind when you make yourself something to eat in the kitchen.

I assume, at some point when I was growing up, it finally entered my consciousness that:

(A) Hey, I just made a sandwich and I notice there are bread crumbs and a tiny dab of mustard on the counter.

(B) Mom would clean that up if I just walked away, but she shouldn't have to do that.

(C) I'm going to use a wet dishrag and wipe down the counter before I go back to my room.

I don't remember it, but I also assume that, prior to this moment, I pretty much just walked away, oblivious to the fact that I had left my mother yet one more household task to handle.

I bring this up this because there are crumbs left on our kitchen counter all the time. Like almost every day. I'm not quite sure which resident of our house is doing it, but I know it's not me, and I can say with certainty it's not Terry.

Which leaves the three of our kids who still live with us. Rarely does anyone ever own up to having done it, but I don't even care about that so much as imparting the valuable life lesson that you must be aware of your own messes and clean them up.

Is this something you learn from your parents? Or does it just suddenly dawn on you as one of the major milestones in the maturation process?

And none of this "I was going to come back later and clean it up." You make a mess, you clean it up right away.

The only exception is if the house is on fire. And even then, you clean up that counter if the flames are two or more rooms away.