My boys have never been ones to do anything in a quick and efficient manner, as is the life of kids, I’d guess.  As any parent can attest to, it can be pretty annoying, and by pretty annoying, I mean REALLY FREAKING ANNOYING.  Just last night I noted that it took 45 minutes from the time they headed up to their rooms to the time they were actually in bed, and all they had to do was brush their teeth and put on their pajamas. 

This translated to sports as well, especially with Preston.  He’d barely jog during soccer, staying out of the chaos.  He’d walk from the dugout to the tee in tee-ball, and at best jog around the bases.  Matt, on the other hand, wasn’t totally lacking hustle, but he is slow.  Or more accurately, tentative.  Yesterday at soccer practice he was easily the last of the 10 kids to finish his dribbling drills, mostly because he seemed so concerned with keeping control of the ball while the other kids flew through like nobody’s business.  I’m sure if he’d gone half as quickly as them he’d have done just as well keeping possession, but he worries about messing up.  Not sure why, really.  If he messes up we encourage him to keep trying.  He just gets frustrated.

What struck me as most impressive and filled me with pride was the fact that he was flat-out hustling in all the drills.  As much as the other kids were outpacing him in the dribbling drills, he was out-hustling them and then some everywhere else.  He listened, he worked hard, and he stayed focused and concentrated on what he was doing, whether tending goal, doing kicking drills, retrieving soccer balls, or practicing throw-ins.  It was really neat to watch.

By the end of practice he was sweaty and tired.  His toe hurt and he limped to the car.  He sat in the trunk while I removed his shoes and socks and shinguards.  On the way home he wolfed down a bag of fries from McDonald’s and picked at his now-broken toenail. 

He’s getting so big.  My boy.

Wednesday morning the little man goes in for his very first surgery.  A couple months ago he had abdominal pain that was diagnosed as constipation, got his very first enema (and there I was without a camera) and sent home, only to return the following day with the more definite appendicitis diagnosis.  For their misdiagnosis, the hospital gave us a free weekend in one of their finest rooms, complete with iCarly and Spongebob up the freaking ying-yang, not to mention a chair that made your back feel like ying-yang after “sleeping” on it.

The deal with little kids, it seems, is that unless it’s an emergency situation, they work to clear the infection first and only then do they remove the appendix, usually about six weeks or so later.  Yeah, I thought it was weird too, but I’m not a doctor, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

So we went with that, assured that we could vacation and play and whine and cry and… wait… We went with that and were assured that our summer plans wouldn’t be squashed by his rogue appendix and thus far all has been well.  We had a blast in Chicago.  The boys loved the weekend we spent on the beaches of west Michigan, and we all got through the end of tee-ball season and the start of soccer season (so far).  In two days time my son will be recovering in a way his dad never has, and here’s to hoping he always has that on me, for I’ve never had any kind of surgery, nor do I wish to.

That sound you hear is me knocking on wood.  A little for myself; a lot for my son.  We’re all a little nervous, as you can imagine.

By the way, I’m so totally going to Zingerman’s this week/end.

7:00 this morning, or thereabouts, I officially turned 38 years old.  Normally I’d take this day off work and waste it at home doing nothing but we spent last weekend at the beach, which made me feel guilty about taking this day off.  Also, my son’s having his appendix removed in a couple of weeks, which brings with it a couple more days off of work.  So here I am, close to heading home, and I’m okay with that.  Inevitably after an uneventful day such as Father’s Day or my birthday, I can’t help but think I wasted it.  Not today, though, even if I did forget to send that broken DVR to Directv, which @pgoodness will thankfully do for me later.

I had my free Starbucks coffee today, and the nice ladies at the Dearborn, Michigan location on Michigan Avenue were surprised I didn’t want a latte or whatever the hell you freaks drink.  “Venti Pike” was my order, same as every other day.  I treated myself to a breakfast sandwich as well.  After I leave work in a few minutes I’ll stop at Merchant’s Fine Wine and grab a six-pack of Goose Island Summertime, which is flavorful without aftertaste, which is unusual, pleasant and refreshing.  The Outback Steakhouse disaster from Monday night will be quashed as I grill my own steak and park my ass on the deck for the evening.  Hell, I might even pick up a cigar on the way home for fun.

I’ve gotten a boatload of happy birthday wishes today and am completely overwhelmed by it all.  I’m pretty sure they started while I was fast asleep last night even, and have continued all day long via Facebook and Twitter, with good tidings coming from all corners of the continent it seems.  Social Media is a pretty awesome thing, what with people chatting while 35,000 feet over this great state of mine, to an incredible young boy named Tanner getting a ton of donations so he can live the rest of his life outside of a soulless hospital room. 

So cheers to me, Coop, Cam, Jenn, Barack (!), Satchmo, and everyone else celebrating this fine day.  Be excellent, everyone.

And if you want to give something to me or anyone else whose birthday is today, give to Tanner, here.  You can’t go wrong with that gift.

The Will.

A document that directs what to do after you’ve passed on.

I have one of those.  My kids, my wife, all will be well whenever that day comes, hopefully many, many years from now.

In this case, it’s the will to be better.  To eat healthier, to skip the large portions in favor of the smaller ones that will fill me sufficiently, satisfy me reasonably, and help me be the person I hope to be.

Not mentally – I’m him.  I love my family and my life and enjoy what I do every day.  What I don’t like is myself – physically.  I’m overweight and can’t climb a flight of stairs without being winded.  I’ve tried over and over again to fix this but have yet to succeed.  Every time I try I can’t help but think I’m past the point of no return and give up.  I have no will.  No Will Power.

How does one re-acquire that?  I mean, I’m sure I had it at one point.  Several years ago I lost 30+ pounds by changing my diet and exercising regularly.  That was before kids, but am I blaming it on the kids?  It’s not their fault.  It’s mine.  It’s not sweets and sugars and such – I’m not a big fan of chocolate and desserts and all that.  What I need to watch is my regular eating.  I like food.  I am of the opinion that I need a full plate (or two) to be satisfied.  I don’t seem to have the will to change this.  I need to find it.  I need to find it now.  But how?  It sucks.

Many years and two kids ago I wanted to get my private pilot’s license.  There is a flying school at the airport near my house – one of many airports where bombers were made and Rosie the Riveter toiled during World War II.  I’m not completely sure where the fascination began, but the closest I got was sitting in front of my computer monitor virtually flying a flight simulator.  My first virtual flight happened when I was probably 16 or 17 years old; I don’t really remember exactly. 

Strangely, I never flew in a plane until my wife and I flew to Cancun for our honeymoon.  She even bought me a voucher for an exploratory flight for my birthday one year, which I never used, for some unknown reason.  On that first flight I was nervous and excited and learned that the real thing is so much different than what I did on the computer.  The feel, the shakes and rattles, the clunking of the landing gear retracting were all so vivid.  I spent the flight watching wings flex and feeling the occasional bounce of turbulence as it tickled the plane.  On approach I was awed by the feeling of weightlessness as the pilot slowed us for landing.  It was as if we were suspended in air.  It was really incredible and something I wanted to do over and over again.

I still think it would be neat to learn to fly for real, but my life’s different now.  With two boys who like to keep their eyes in the skies as I do, I feel it’s more important for me to be there while they look skyward and ask questions.  They’ve flown a couple of times and there was no fear whatsoever.  M was excited, P was apathetic.  But neither was scared and they both look forward to the day they fly again.  Even now they enjoy the flight simulator as much as I do and play it as often as they can, and we’re all content with what we have, if even a little hopeful for what we don’t. 

“There’s no sensation to compare with this – suspended animation, a state of bliss.  Can’t keep my mind from the circling skies, tongue-tied and twisted just an earthbound misfit, I.”

Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time thinking about my job and more specific to that, my performance at my job.  A year ago I received a performance review that I was far from happy with, and to this point I’m honestly surprised I wasn’t one of the many in my industry who lost their jobs for one reason or another.  It was bad enough that in a subsequent meeting with my supervisor to clarify some of the things we discussed, I mentioned an “air of inevitability” about my position.  I was lucky, however.  Very lucky, I think.

My problem wasn’t with the quality of my work.  I was told that I did my job as well as anybody else, but I wasn’t as assertive as I should be.  I didn’t disagree with this evaluation at all.  I’ve always been a wallflower, more or less, and if I could sit in my corner, crank out quality parts in a timely fashion and never turn work away, then I was golden.  This wasn’t enough, though.  Right or wrong, I was giving the impression that I didn’t understand the severity of information delays and timing issues as they came up, which was often.

In evaluating myself for 2009, I felt good about the progress I’d made in fixing this, and while I was given some indication that I had improved, it still wasn’t enough and again my review wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.  Fixing this will require a fairly drastic change in myself, and I’m ready and willing to do all I can to make that happen, however, I can’t help but admit that I feel a little overwhelmed by it.  In the few days since, I think I’ve already done well, but it’s been hard.  For ten years I was told that everything I was doing was fantastic, but this snuck up on me.  Again, I don’t disagree.  I just hope I can overcome it and become a better worker.

——–

Now I’m thinking I’d like to learn something new.  Not work-related, but in my spare time.  I used to come home, get on the computer, talk with the boys, play the Playstation, and generally do pretty much nothing before going to bed and doing it all over again the next day.  I took a programming class and I was burned out halfway through the semester.  I don’t think that was the path I wanted to take.

Today my six-year-old and I watched a show about the earth’s climate on The History Channel.  It was awesome.  It measured and highlighted major climatic changes over the last few million years and gave strong theories explaining why these changes occurred and what resulted from them.  11,500 years ago a drastic climatic change occurred that raised the earth’s average temperature by 18 degrees over a decade.  Our current average temperature has increased one degree since 1900.  One.  Look how worked up we are about it.  Can you imagine 18 degrees in a decade?  Holy hell!

Global Warming is a little more of a hot-button issue than I’d like to get into, but it got me thinking.  My son is really interested in science and space right now, so why not something like that?  Maybe the Large Hadron Collider or something.  Maybe find something simple to study, like the sun.  We made a date for the library for Saturday to dig deeper and find something cool to learn about.

I’m open to any suggestions as well.  Hopefully this gets me out of the funk I’ve been in for the last couple of weeks.

The economy kicked the crap out of many industries, businesses and people over the last three years or so.  The doors of many companies closed for good, other companies were sold for pennies on the dollar, and a few lucky businesses stayed above water.  I work for an automaker, and every one of us has been living scared for probably five years now.  Thankfully, I was able to weather the storm and am still employed by the domestic automaker that is leading the way toward a tighter, leaner, and profitable future in the industry.

My wife’s optometry practice seemed to survive the downturn as well, and for her, this is especially impressive considering she lost a significant insurance provider for several months just before the economy went in the tank.  Now, however, she’s dealing with a mountain of debt incurred during lean months over the past year or so that allowed her to not only keep her doors open, but keep her staff employed.  This fact, however, is lost on some people.

From late September through early November I was off work taking care of my wife, who was recovering from surgery related to a melanoma diagnosis over the summer.  I am thankful for the Family Medical Leave Act to be able to provide this time for my wife and kids, but it is an unpaid leave.  Also, as the owner of the company, my wife takes the hit when things get tight, and she’s only received one paycheck since September.  We’ve tapped the 401(k), the savings, even the kids’ college funds.  It’s nothing we’re proud of, and the belt-tightening has been painful, but it’s what we’ve had to do to continue on without her salary.

Nobody else has felt the pain in a manner that would directly affect them.  And while she regrets some decisions and has compromised a relationship or two to keep watch of her people’s backs, her actions have not affected anybody with respect to their day-to-day operation and expectations.

Ultimately, I’m worried about her.  This is keeping her from enjoying the holidays as much as she should be.  I’ve offered my help in any way possible but I know it’s hard for her to pass things on to me, because to her it’s an admission of failure, which it is not.  Still, people call every day.  The office is empty more often than it should be, which is not unusual this time of year, but this is the year where income is needed.  I wish two things – first, that those who are so adamant in their desire to know exactly what “happened” would let her enjoy her Christmas, and secondly, that I knew what to tell them and her that would please everyone.

Sadly, neither of those seem to be happening.

Around Thanksgiving I was somehow not feeling right.  It was nothing I could particularly put my finger on, but something was definitely off.  I knew I’d gotten to a point where I was genuinely worried about my weight and my overall health, but there was nothing especially alarming that supported that feeling, nor did my doctor think I had a lot to worry about.  Sure, he wanted me to eat better and lose weight, and we’d just gotten through several tests that determined I have severe sleep apnea, but really, overall, the status was definitely quo.

I went to the doctor the day after Thanksgiving to see if anything else was wrong, and of course, it wasn’t.  However, that was enough to give me a kick in the pants once and for all.  I can’t eat and/or drink with a sense of invincibility like I did when I was 23.  Exercise didn’t count if it was walking from my cubicle to the bathroom and back once every three hours.  Footlong clubs with extra mayo wasn’t the healthy eating the Subway commercials talked about.

I started eating fruit regularly, vegetables as much as possible, and even had a (non-low-sodium) V8, which was pretty much a salt lick.  I’ve been doing pretty well, especially considering the timing of my bodily renovation, with holiday turkeys and cookies and work lunches to celebrate dotting the calendar and stretching my belt.  I will say, however, that I’ve been successful.  I’ve been on the treadmill at least 4 times a week since then.  I don’t know that I’ve lost as much weight as I’d hoped – maybe just about 6 or 8 pounds, but I can really tell the difference every morning I get to the third notch in the belt, instead of busting my butt to squeeze into the second notch.

Today time constraints led me to an unhealthy breakfast.  Holiday celebration led me to a calorie-filled lunch, then I recovered nicely with salmon, green beans and long grain and wild rice for dinner, only to top it off with a few handfuls of chips while sitting on the recliner watching TV.  Let’s also not gloss over the four beers.

For the first time ever in any health kick I’ve been on, I honestly felt bad about it.  I didn’t eat well, but it wasn’t specifically because of that.  More so, it was because of the realization that this is the exact same kind of thing that derailed me so often in the past.  A fast food trip here.  A delay of exercising there.  Next thing I know I’ll be back up over 260 and hating the walk to my car every day.  This is exactly how I fall back in the rut – by allowing myself a “bad” day.

I just hope that this time I have the will power, and more importantly, the self-respect to hop back on the wagon again tomorrow.

My oldest son is two years into his soccer career, has a year of tee ball under his belt, and is currently in the Kid Kwan Do class at the rec center.  In his first year of soccer he was very tentative and relatively ineffective, although, everybody else on his team was as well.  His second year went much better but he still hasn’t scored a goal.  Tee Ball went well and he really had a lot of fun playing it and he was arguably the best hitter on the team.  I’ll have to work with him on catching in the spring, that’s for sure.

He and his younger brother always talked about learning “karate” and when we saw the class being offered at the rec center we jumped all over it.  Their interest, however, has been lukewarm, I’d say.  It’s not unusual for one of them to say they don’t want to go, and we’re talking about a one-day-a-week, 45-minute class.  Still, they’ve not missed one, and they always seem to enjoy the class, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

Tonight during a break in the class, I was minding my own business trying to find a sushi joint in Ann Arbor via Urbanspoon when I turned and saw the instructor sitting next to me.  Now, it’s scary enough that she could probably kill me with one of her well-manicured nails, but to have her stealthily appear inches from me gave me freaking goosebumps.  Anyway, she proceeded to tell me that my son belonged in the older kids’ class.  She said he’s quick to pick up on everything they do, that he listens well and seems like a natural with Tae Kwon Do, and he’s ready to move up.  He’s six.  The older kid class is 8 and up.

Needless to say, I was thrilled.  Visions of The Crane swept across my starry eyes.  I started humming “Sweep the Leg,” by No More Kings.  Unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual with my son.  I called him over and asked him if he wanted to go to the big kids’ class, which was right after his class, and he flatly said no.  He had a busy day at school, so maybe he was just tired, but I really thought he’d be fired up about it.

Later, in the car, after we’d watched a bit of the big kids’ class, I asked him why he didn’t want to move up.  ”Well, maybe after I get a sticker in every column on my sheet for this class, then I’ll move up.”  He likes this class and I think he knows how well he’s doing.  I also think he’s got a thing for the instructor, between you and me.  He struggles with success sometimes, I think, because, honestly, he’s not the luckiest kid in the world.  His younger brother got the first spare when we went bowling.  His brother’s ticket won the pumpkin at the school dance.  It’s things like that that I think gets to him a bit, although you’d never know it by looking at him.

My son is such a good kid, and he deserves breaks, if for no other reason than for validation of how well he handles it when he can’t catch a break.  We’ll talk about Tae Kwon Do this weekend and make a final decision.  I’m pretty sure I already know what the answer will be, and I’m fine with whatever he chooses to do.