In my experience, you're better off building some margin into your life and settling for something less than perfection

Whether or not you're the sort of person who makes new year's resolutions, you may be thinking about some changes in your life as the calendar turns to 2025.

For me, these thoughts always center around health and wellness. That's because I'm inconsistent when it comes to taking care of myself: In some areas I'm pretty good, in others...not so much.

Part of the reason for this is that I've never yet found a diet and exercise routine that's sustainable, or at least not one that's sustainable for me.

Until recently (I think).

I'll tell you what I'm doing these days when it comes to what I eat and how much I exercise, but this post isn't really about me. It's about you. What I'm doing isn't going to mean much, but maybe reading about it will convince you to allow yourself a little grace.

Because that's my problem, you see. I've never allowed myself any margin for error, and I get down on myself whenever I fall short of my poorly set, overambitious goals.

I've known for years this isn't the ideal way to approach life, but I've never been able to break the cycle.

Again, until recently (I think).

Eating-wise, I consume about 2,600 calories a day, with heavy emphasis on getting 150 grams of protein. 

This is more food than I usually consume when I'm trying to lose weight. In the past I've tried to eat around 2,000 calories daily and sometimes less.

This works just fine until it doesn't, which is usually after a week or two of starving myself.

2,600 calories will, in time, probably get me to a comfortable 190 pounds and likely no less, and this is just fine. Previously, I wouldn't have thought it was fine because it still places me in the "Overweight" category on the BMI charts, but I've finally learned to ignore those.

In terms of exercise, I go to the gym four days a week and lift weights. I also do endurance exercises there that get my heart rate going.

For a while I was going to the gym five days a week and trying to get in extra cardio on the off days, but again, it simply wasn't something I could keep up.

The fact is, while I enjoy strength training, it beats me up. I've been trying to get a left shoulder injury to heal for a couple of months now, and both forearms have minor strains resulting from poor lifting form.

Not to mention my weak hamstrings and quads after leg days, and the jelly-like feeling in my triceps and core muscles after upper-body workouts.

As a man of somewhat advancing age, I need time to recover. And right now, three days of recovery each week is perfect...much preferable to my previous two days.

This routine will never get me looking like Chris Hemsworth, but then again it doesn't have to. My health goals are to feel stronger and more energetic for as long as I can, not to star in the next Marvel movie.

Theoretically I should be doing a bit more cardio, along with additional flexibility and balance exercises.

But I don't. Nor do I plan to. What I'm doing now is what I can do, and that's good enough.

I am actively allowing myself to be less than perfect. There is part of me that sees this approach as weak and soft, and another part of me that understands it's all I can do when you combine it with my home, work and PA announcing schedules.

Now, whatever challenges you're facing in life, I hope you approach them with an eye toward pushing yourself to be better, but doing so in a realistic way that leaves a little extra time in your schedule (the "margin" mentioned in today's headline) and that you can keep up without flaming out.

Maybe you already knew this, but it's OK to approach life this way. It really is.

You'll be better off for it.

The only good thing about hurting my shoulder is that now I'm reading books again

At some point recently while lifting heavy weights above my head at the gym, I injured my shoulder.

It was the kind of soft-tissue injury that, when you're a 55-year-old person, does not heal as quickly as perhaps it might have earlier in your life.

So in addition to popping ibuprofen caplets like M&Ms, I've also made a nightly routine of icing and heating the shoulder.

Among the things Terry bought me for my birthday was a sling device with a cold pack that's ideal for icing a shoulder. As for the heating part, we have a big fabric doohickey filled with corn kernels that I pop into the microwave for a minute than slap on my shoulder for 15 minutes of heat therapy.

I don't know how much this icing and heating regimen has helped, but one thing it has done is given me time to read for the first time in...well, for the first time in a while.

I tend to live life in a (perhaps needlessly) hectic manner that allows little time for quiet, reflective activities like reading. Normally I'm bouncing from one task to the next, stopping only at night to get 6 or 7 hours of shuteye before getting back after it again the next morning.

Sitting on the couch while allowing the ice and heat to work their magic, I'm forced to stop and relax. I could spend that half-hour on my phone, but instead I've been using it as reading time.

It has, for example, given me the opportunity to read through the wonderful "From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World" by Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst (also a birthday gift from my daughter Elissa and her boyfriend Mark). And now I'm on to some war-themed books from Terry (also birthday presents...she's very good to me whenever I turn a new age).

None of this reading would be happening if I hadn't overdone the dumbbell shoulder presses. So I guess the injury was God's way of telling me to slow down.

Or that I'm old.

Or maybe both.

A quick (and heartfelt) Merry Christmas to you

Christmas Day is one of the most special days of the year in our family. For many of the people who read this blog, I'm sure the same is true.

Which is why I'm not going to bother you today with any of my regular blabbering. It is Wednesday, however, and as the masthead at the top of the blog says, we provide new posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

So I'll simply say this, and I mean it: Whether you're a consistent visitor to this site or just someone who stops by every once in a while (or maybe this is even your first time), thank you.

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for throwing a 'like' or two my way every once in a while, and thank you for supporting an endeavor that has now lasted – off and on – for 13 years. I genuinely appreciate it, and I appreciate you.

Have a wonderful Christmas, a safe and happy final week of the year, and a blessed 2025.

I don't wrap presents well, but I wrap them

 

The AI Blog Post Image Generator gave me this photo. It distorted the guy's face, and I think he has six fingers on his right hand and only four on his left, but it...does the job. Merry Christmas, AI Blog Post Image Generator.

One Christmas many years ago, sometime early in our marriage, Terry noticed that all of the presents I had given her were exceptionally well wrapped.

As if an older woman had wrapped them.

This was because an older woman had, in fact, wrapped them.

I don't know if this is still a thing, but back in the day at Great Lakes Mall, you could have any gift wrapped for just a few dollars. There was an area in the middle of the mall where a group of expert wrappers stayed busy making everyone's packages look exceptionally festive.

I was quick to take advantage of this opportunity, given how much I disliked wrapping and the fact that my wrapping skills had always been somewhat lacking. I unhesitatingly forked over the cash to get all of Terry's stuff wrapped.

I was proud of how nice her presents looked, but I could quickly see that I had messed up. She wasn't mad or anything, but it was clear that she preferred for me to make the effort to wrap her gifts, rather than paying an expert to do it.

I got it then and I get it now, so I have been personally wrapping her stuff every Christmas since.

It took me a few years to get the hang of it. One time I used a piece of stinky old rope I found in the garage to bind one present. I have no idea what I was thinking.

But eventually I fell into a rhythm and can now wrap presents with something approaching proficiency.

The lesson I learned then as a young somewhat-newlywed (and should have already known) is that it's not so much what you give your loved one but the thought and effort that go into selecting and presenting it.

And now, 32 years into our marriage, I offer this guidance to any young man who is looking to make his girlfriend, wife, mom, sister, etc. happy on Christmas (or any other gift-giving occasion).

In most cases, she would much rather receive the box you wrapped yourself with the loose, uneven edges and the funny-shaped corners than anything wrapped by Marge at the mall with the curled ribbon and festive bow you never would have selected on your own in a million years.

Trust me on this one.

BLOG RERUN: I generally don't cook because I end up bleeding into the food

I prompted the AI Blog Post Image Generator with the phrase "man bad cook," and it returned this. Which is...actually pretty good, though it appears that steaming pot is not in fact resting on top of either stove burner.

NOTE: Today's Blog Rerun was originally posted here four years ago today on December 20, 2020. You will note that I continue not to cook.

As I type this, I have a batch of Moroccan Lentils bubbling in the slow cooker on the kitchen counter.

This is an extraordinary sentence in that I very rarely have anything bubbling, cooking, roasting or otherwise being turned into something edible through the application of heat. I don't cook. Or at least, I hardly ever cook.

There are reasons for this, the chief one being that I married an incredible cook and she feeds me and my family delicious food every day. Terry and I laugh over the fact that in 28 1/2 years of marriage, she has made exactly one dish I didn't like. And for the record, she didn't like it, either. It was an eggplant thing, though I generally like eggplant.

That means she's batting something like .99998, which is a championship-level culinary performance by any measure.

To be fair, I am also the least picky eater you may ever run across. I like everything. I really do. You would be hard pressed to name a food I haven't eaten and enjoyed, or at least wouldn't be willing to try. So that helps.

Still, she's a great home chef.

So I don't really have a need to cook. Plus (and maybe this is just because I haven't done much of it and therefore haven't developed the knack) I don't really have the talent or inclination for cooking. It doesn't interest me. Only the eating part does.

One of the last times I tried cooking a full meal for my family, I think the main dish was fennel chicken. As I was chopping ingredients, I sliced my finger and, despite my best efforts to staunch the flow, managed to bleed directly into the pot.

I look at it as added protein.

Anyway, these Moroccan Lentils caught my eye when I saw the recipe in one of Terry's cookbooks, so I bought the ingredients and am making them. And really, there's no "making" involved. It's a slow cooker recipe, so you measure everything out, dump it in, mix it, set the slow cooker going, and that's pretty much it, other than occasionally wandering over to smell your creation and stir it.

If that was all there really was to cooking, I would be the Gordon Ramsay of our house.

The old band uniforms in our living room are full of meaning

As recently as mid-November, these old band uniforms and hats were still sitting on a table in our living room.

Just before our local high school was torn down a year and a half ago, my wife heroically rescued a wealth of Wickliffe Swing Band artifacts that otherwise would have been destined for the dumpster.

Like someone pulling valuables out of a city about to be overrun by an invading army, Terry loaded up her car with old band photos, trophies, uniforms, recordings and other memorabilia.

The fact that the school didn't appear interested in making the effort to save most of it was somewhat despairing, but that's a different conversation for a different time.

The result was that, for many months, our basement and garage have been filled with band stuff. This has only been an inconvenience when I've had to haul around boxes of heavy old trophies and plaques from as far back as the 1950s. Those were the only times I complained.

Otherwise, I'm glad our house could serve as an impromptu storage facility for what I consider to be vital artifacts from our city's history.

Because all of these items mean something. They are reminders of generations of Wickliffe musicians and their directors, and of the hard work that went into countless halftime performances, Christmas concerts and jazz band performances.

They are not nuisance items to be swept aside in support of some vague notion of "progress." They are tangible remnants of an institution that has, for decades, been important to our community. They should be preserved. They should be with the people who care about them and about the band itself.

As I type this in mid-November, we still have most of these items in various places around our house. Terry was able to give away some of the uniforms to various alumni, and her plan is to give away as many of the other items as possible at some point soon (with an encouragement to make a donation to the band if you take something).

In the meantime, it's all still here. The trophy the band received for its participation in the 1981 Nordonia Festival of Bands, the plaque it was given for marching in the 1977 Fairview International Band Festival, the composite photo of band members from the 2001-02 school year, and countless other bits of nostalgia are strewn about our living room, our basement storage room, and our garage.

And I couldn't be more proud.

Any community or organization is the product of its own history. That history shapes us all. We really shouldn't be so quick to throw it away.

The guy who almost never works from home is working from home

My company's headquarters building is undergoing some pretty extensive renovations, so they kicked us all out and told us to work from home for a couple of months.

That makes it sound harsh, but the renovations are very much welcomed, and we're already an organization in which office-based employees work from home two out of five days each week anyway.

Or at least most people do. As I've mentioned here before, I go into the office every day, even on Mondays and Fridays when only a relative handful of people are there. It has nothing to do with being anti-work from home. I just focus better and prefer being in the office environment.

What happens when you do that, though, is that you kind of forget how to work from home when you have to. And by that I mean I have trouble getting into the right mindset when it's time to head upstairs to my office and start the workday.

All of the things that are so convenient about working from home are the things that distract me from my work tasks.

Like, for example, you can do laundry when you work from home! But on laundry days, I mostly think about when it's time to put the clothes into the dryer and when I can fold them rather than the things I'm supposed to be doing for my job.

You can also see your spouse/housemates when you work from home! Yes, but while this is enjoyable, it's also distracting. And while I know my wife loves me dearly, when I'm working from home, I'm invading the space she's used to occupying alone Monday through Friday. I totally get where she's coming from here after 32 years of marriage.

You can run to the store if you need something or schedule an oil change when you work from home! Again, yes, but again, distracting. I lose focus.

I realize this is a me problem, and that most people are mentally strong enough to be productive when they work from home. I'm simply not one of them.

So while there have been certain conveniences during this extended period of the office being closed, there is admittedly part of me looking forward to January 20th, which is the day our building is supposed to open back up and I can return to some semblance of a routine.

Somehow I think Terry is looking forward to that day, too.