I only care so much about my lawn, if I'm being honest

From April through November, I devote an inordinate amount of brain power to figuring out each week when I can cut my grass.

When will I be home to do it? When is it supposed to rain? How long is it now? Will there be enough daylight remaining if I wait until I get home from work?

It takes me about an hour and 15 minutes to do the job using my walk-behind mower. I may eventually give in and buy a riding mower, but for now I really like the exercise opportunity offered up by the walk-behind.

Still, as much effort as I put into making sure the grass is regularly cut, that's the extent of my commitment to the lawn.

I do not water my grass, no matter how long we go without rain. I don't fertilize or aerate it, either. We DO have a lawn guy who handles the fertilizing and weed control, thankfully, because I'm simply not going to do it.

The result is that our backyard is starting to look a little brown and sparse. I don't love that this is happening, but when you consider all of the demands on your time and resources, I feel like the grass falls pretty far down the list.

That's not true for everybody, which is just fine. There's nothing wrong with working to maintain an attractive lawn. It's just not a priority for me.

Eventually I would love to live in a nice house with a small yard where the lawn maintenance gets (presumably) much easier. Maybe we can move to one of the desert states where you have colored gravel in front of your house instead of grass.

To my knowledge, you never have to worry about mowing rocks.

My fruit addiction is out of control

Soon after I started at Goodyear, I had an onboarding meeting with Laura, our Chief Communications Officer. She gave me great insight into the company, and we talked about our personal and professional backgrounds.

There was, in short, a lot of information exchanged.

But what Laura mainly took away from our conversation was that I eat a lot of apples. At least that's what she mentioned to my boss, Doug.

And I don't blame her. I eat four or five apples a day, and that's virtually every day of my life.

If that were the extent of my fruit consumption, it would be one thing. But it isn't. I also eat a minimum of three bananas every day, along with one or two servings each of whatever other fruit we have in the house...grapes, pears, berries, whatever.

All told, I have a minimum of nine and often as many as 11 pieces/servings of fruit every day. Not occasionally, but every day.

A lot of people who hear that immediately warn me about the ill effects of excessive fruit sugar. Yet my blood glucose levels and A1c are always comfortably within the normal range whenever I have blood work done.

This has been on my mind lately because I recently had a physical with a new health care provider and am enjoying the benefits of a roughly 25-pound weight loss.

I often mention here that I'm a Weight Watchers Lifetime member. The WW system, which is based on a daily allotment of points, has most fruits and vegetables at the zero-point level. That doesn't mean they're "free," in that you're supposed to keep your intake of them at a reasonable level.

My intake is pretty clearly somewhere beyond "reasonable." Yet it's exactly what has allowed me to maintain my weight where I want it to be. I never feel especially hungry because of all the fruit I push down my gullet.

I realize it's too much fruit by almost anyone's standards, but it works for me.

The only drawbacks are the expense and logistical hassles of constantly having to buy fresh fruit. Terry handles much of that work, God bless her, but I find myself making special banana and apple runs to the grocery store all the time.

It's a small price to pay.

You need to “control your variables”

This is Moritz (the man, not the toddler).

My son Jack’s cross country coach (to whom the kids and parents alike simply refer as “Moritz,” which is his last name) is so good at what he does.

Whatever the talent level he’s presented with each year, he gets the most out of the Wickliffe High School track and cross country teams, let me tell you.

Several times a week, we receive reminders from Moritz on the upcoming practice schedule, meet information, and training tips through an app appropriately called “Remind.”

Recently Moritz scheduled a speed-work practice for what was going to be a fairly warm day. A Remind message came across that read, “Reminder we are on the track today, so drink water! Make sure you’ve had a good lunch. Control your variables!”

I love that last sentence: Control your variables! In other words, as I’ve mentioned here more than once, concern yourself only with the things you can influence.

Because, of course, there are some things you can’t influence. Worrying about those things is a waste of time and energy.

But if you’re a 15-year-old cross country runner, you most certainly can (and should) control what goes into your body. What you eat and how much you drink directly affects your performance, so think hard on these things.

The parallels to your own life are obvious, I’m sure.

I promise to spend today controlling my variables.

Stop being horrible to customer service people

As I have brought up before, my daughter Melanie is in the Disney College Program and is living these days in Orlando, Florida. She operates water slides at Blizzard Beach, a Disney water park.

This obviously entails dealing with members of the public, which depending on the day and the person can be the best and worst parts of the job, I imagine.

Recently she relayed a story in which a father basically yelled at her for doing her job. I won’t go into the details, but it has to do with a family raft ride, the number of people allowed on an individual raft, and the challenge of getting groups with different numbers of people onto the ride.

Melanie handled the whole thing very professionally and at the end of her shift was named “Slide Op of the Day” for dealing so well with rude people.

There are two ways to look at this situation. One is to say that, well, it’s good experience for her because that’s how people are and she’s going to have to learn anyway.

The other is to question why we’re OK just saying “that’s how people are” and leaving it at that. Why don’t we hold each other more accountable for being decent human beings? Why is it OK to be nasty to a college kid (or any person) who did not create the policy she is enforcing and could in fact lose her job for not doing so?

I know you get frustrated when you’re on the phone with the cable company. I know it’s exasperating when no one at the electric utility can resolve an obvious error on your bill. I know you just want to get in and out of the grocery store and start seething when the checkout person is slow or inept.

But this is where you need to be a grown-up. This is where you need to realize that the person to whom you’re speaking is trying to fix your issue and has no control whatsoever over the rules and regulations in effect.

If you yell and scream at these people, you have failed as a human being. I’m sorry, but you have.

I realize I’m coming at this with extreme bias, seeing as how this happened (and has happened multiple times to Mel in various jobs) to my little girl. Had I been there when that guy started popping off, I guarantee there would have been a scene.

I get that my perspective may be skewed. But it is so pointless, so immature, and so utterly stupid to yell at a person who’s trying their best to manage the situation and help you that I’m telling you right now to stop doing it.

That’s it. Just stop doing it.

Or work a shift as a customer service rep. If you haven’t done it before, I predict you last maybe two hours before you lose whatever faith you have in humanity.

3 things I have learned from my grand-chinchilla

Not actually Percy, but representative of the species

Terry and I have no human grandchildren, but our oldest two kids own a variety of pets that fit the bill nicely at this point in our lives.

One of those is Percy, a fluffy gray chinchilla who belongs to my daughter Elissa. Percy is, for a chinchilla, something like 1,000 years old. Elissa regularly takes him to the vet, and they have remarked there that he is the healthiest, most well-cared-for rodent they’ve encountered.

This is because she spoils him, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Unfortunately, Percy has a tumor, and there’s no real way to treat it. But he continues to live every day the same way he has lived for the past decade-and-a-half.

Doing pretty much whatever he wants.

Percy used to live with us when Elissa first got him, so I do feel a certain bond with the little guy. He has taught me many things along the way, but here are the three important ones:

(1) Everyone deserves to have an anger shelf

Percy has a cage that is, as far as I know, like the Cadillac of chinchilla cages. It is large, multi-storied, and decked out with just about everything a chinchilla could want. It includes a little slab attached to the back wall of the cage on which Percy sometimes hangs out. Elissa informs me this is his “anger shelf.” I like that idea. Each of us should have a place we can go when we’re frustrated or just plain mad at the world so we can work through whatever we’re feeling. This is an excellent concept, though I’ll admit that, to my untrained eye, angry Percy looks exactly the same as contented Percy.

(2) Everyone deserves to be loved beyond what they probably actually deserve

Whether he’s at his regular home or spending some time at Grandma and Grandpa’s (as he is for a whole week as I type this), Percy is constantly showered with love. I’m sure he enjoys this far more than he lets on, and he’s better off for it. And so is every one of us who is unconditionally loved by others. Don’t ever think this is a blessing reserved for someone else, because you should have it, too.

(3) Everyone deserves the benefits of being judged by a friend

When Percy used to live with us and his cage was in our living room, I would sometimes look over and realize he was staring at me. Just sitting there staring at me. Elissa once informed us that, when he does this, he is judging you. I like to think he’s doing it with the best of intentions, and that if he could talk, he would report his observations to me in the name of self-improvement. Criticism isn’t always a bad thing, if it’s offered lovingly and with the goal of making us better people. (Or maybe he harbors seething hatred for me. Again, his little chinchilla face always looks the same, so I could be misreading this situation by a mile.)

There is something to be gained from every unhappy experience, even if we don't see it right away

Twenty-five years ago last night, I got maybe 90 minutes of sleep.

You may rightly question why there is a small space in my brain that stores this information. Please know I don't have a satisfactory answer for you.

But it's true that the night of September 29, 1996, was a restless one for me.

It was a Sunday evening, and the next day I was scheduled to start a new job as a plan document specialist at a firm called Self-Funded Plans, Inc. Basically, I wrote and edited health insurance documents.

I am now very good at being the new guy, having worked at a number of different organizations over the years. But at that point, I had almost no idea how to handle a new job.

For the previous eight years, since my first week in college, I had worked in the sports departments of daily newspapers: first as a sports agate clerk and later a staff writer for The News-Herald, then for a year with The Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau, then back to The News-Herald for a five-year stay as a full-time sports writer.

And it was great. I loved almost every minute of it.

But as I've described before, it was never going to be a long-term gig for me. I thought it would be, but once Terry and I got married and started having kids, the nighttime hours and relatively low pay made for a bad combination when it came to raising a family.

So I saw the Self-Funded Plans job in the newspaper (OLD GUY ALERT), applied for it, and got it.

And I was so nervous.

To that point, I hadn't worked in a "real" office. Newsrooms look like real offices, but they're not. They're unique.

This was also a 9-to-5 job, which wasn't something I was at all used to.

I also didn't know if I would like it, which made me nervous.

All of these things came together to render me sleepless most of that evening. Midnight came and went, as did 1am, 2am, and 3am. I went out into the living room somewhere between 3 and 4 and still mostly couldn't sleep, but I strung together those 90 fitful minutes of rest on the couch before rising miserably at 6 o'clock.

It was a rough first day, both physically and mentally.

Ultimately, it wasn't a job I enjoyed very much. I spent most of my seven months there thinking I had made a big mistake leaving the comfort of newspapers and entering the world of health insurance.

But over time, it turned out to be a great move. From Self-Funded Plans I went to Advanstar and became the managing editor of Urology Times. It was largely my health care experience at Self-Funded that got me that position.

Then it was the combined health care experience at Self-Funded and Advanstar that helped me land my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic. And that in turn led to a few very enjoyable and productive years at the prestigious Cleveland PR firm Dix & Eaton.

And so on. One position built on the next, and it has all landed me at a very happy, challenging, and frankly fun place in Goodyear.

All of which is to say that, as in many things, we have to force ourselves to consider the long term when we're unhappy in our current situation. Yes, you may need to make a change, but don't underestimate what you've learned from that miserable job or dead-end relationship.

Each of those experiences have made you you. And, if I may say it, you turned out pretty darn well.

Do you have a favorite year of your life?

I was a history major, and I often use the past to help better understand the present, but that's the full extent to which I look backwards.

Other than that, I'm very much a "live in the moment" kind of person.

Which is why, if you ask me what my favorite year is, I'll always say the one in which I'm living right now. And I mean that.

But if you really pinned me down and forced me to pick a year I especially enjoyed, the first one that pops into my head is 1987.

It was a good time all around. It spanned my junior and senior years of high school. It was the first full calendar year in which I dated Terry. It was a 12-month period in which I matured appreciably (which was probably related to the fact that I was dating Terry).

I also got my first speeding ticket that year, and I'm sure there were a few other missteps over those 365 days. But taken as a whole, 1987 was a solid time for me.

I would also nominate 1992 when we were married, and the years 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2006, as those were the years our kids were born.

Really, though, I have no room to complain about anything, so the reality is that any year in which I'm upright and breathing is a good one.