Talk To The Team

As my daughter gets closer to becoming the mother of three, I could not be more excited for her. Or more aware that I personally will do none of the work involved.

She has spent this entire Oklahoma summer—certainly the hottest one since we moved here—getting kicked from the inside by two little people who do not yet have names and somehow already outrank her in the house. Yes, I was gone for a few weeks of the summer. That does not mean I wasn’t sympathetic. I was rooting for her from wherever I was.

Of course, when your daughter has three kids, that means you have at least three grandkids. I would like credit for that arithmetic.

A friend sent me a video last week of his grandson getting ready to have a sibling. Since my friend already has other grandchildren, something ugly woke up in me. Not sadness. Something closer to a scoreboard.

I would love to tell you I am above comparing my family’s headcount to another man’s family’s headcount. I am not going to tell you that because it isn’t true.

The frustrating part is that there is nothing productive I can do about it. New kids don’t get born because Grandpa felt competitive on a Tuesday. If I want to add players to the roster, the actual work has to come from somewhere else entirely, and I am, at best, in a spoiling and snack-providing capacity.

I brought this up to my daughter while she was complaining about getting her ribs kicked from the inside and having trouble putting socks on her swollen legs. She listened to my grandchild-count predicament with the patience of a woman who has significantly bigger problems and said, “You need to talk to the other members of the team.”

The team.

Currently, the team has one active member, my daughter, and three others on the bench. Of those, only one of them are currently qualified to help me pad the stats, by my own arbitrary rule that I would prefer marriage happen first. I would welcome any grandkids, of course, but please forgive me for preferring that my kids get married before they start producing them. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

So, let’s talk about how I got here, competitive about something I have absolutely no control over.

I didn’t become a father until my thirties, which means I spent a good portion of my life watching other men become grandfathers while I was still working my way through the fatherhood portion of the program. My wife and I always assumed we’d be the kind of grandparents who leaked enthusiasm out of every pore the second a grandchild showed up.

Apparently, our other kids—the ones older than our pregnant daughter—either never noticed that enthusiasm or noticed it and decided it wasn’t worth compromising on a spouse to make it a reality.

Their loss, frankly.

Their siblings’ children are going to get the toys, the outfits, and the opportunity to have us visit more. There is a reason I didn’t lead with the visits.

More grandkids would obviously help my case when talking to my peers. It would also give me even less free time than I have now, especially since the odds of getting the other two kids’ grandkids within the ten-minute driving radius their siblings enjoy are pretty close to zero.

Realistically, it would mean my wife and I doing a lot more driving or flying to keep tabs on whatever new pieces of our extended DNA show up somewhere else. I’m willing to make that sacrifice, although I reserve the right to complain about the mileage.

So, to the rest of the team, if you’re reading this, I have no deceptive motives in mind.

We’ve already proven ourselves to be pretty good grandparents. We are soon to triple our grandchildren, which sounds much more impressive when you don’t mention that we started with one. Tripling again—or more—is something your sister is not going to be able to do on her own.

So, do everyone a favor.

Spare her body the record attempt. Go ahead and get married, have some kids, and give your sister a little competition of her own. She has set some lofty goals, but we have faith in every one of you.

And to the hockey boys: you have also been added to the team, although I realize your membership is temporary. We are only your parents for the season, which means in a few months you are going to leave, start your own lives, and—if everything goes according to plan—eventually contribute to your own parents’ scoreboards.

Just to be clear, I am not counting any future children you might have on my scoreboard. Those are your parents’ points. I have my own scoreboard to worry about.

We aren’t trying to rush you. You’ve got plenty of hockey, growing up, and other things to figure out first. We are glad to have you guys around, and we will be sorry when the season ends and you head off to whatever comes next.

But when the time comes, remember that your billet parents are going to be looking for ways to keep the family roster growing.

As much as we enjoy having you guys around, our focus has to be on boosting the score in Grandpa’s selfish little game.

So, if the Gruenbaums can’t cook and provide a bed for you next season, we hope you understand.

After all, there is a team to build.

Retirement Is a Full-Time Job

I am having a real time problem. Retirement was supposed to hand me buckets of free time. Instead I’ve traded one calendar for four, plus a grocery list that never ends.

On the bright side, I’m collecting misadventures faster than ever. Documenting them is where I keep losing. So here’s the current lineup of things eating my hours, in the order they occurred to me.

The hockey boys are back, appetites fully intact. They eat well, generally. What we’ve learned is that “eating well” comes with fine print.

For years we blamed their parents for this. A childhood of fast food runs between practices will shape a palate. This year’s contribution to the family vocabulary is the classic “I don’t eat tomatoes” and “I don’t eat cheese,” which after some gentle interrogation turns out to mean no whole tomatoes and no cheese specifically on tacos or hamburgers. Somehow that’s more specific while creating more questions.

We’re navigating it. What we haven’t solved is quantity, since we’re still cooking for our local kids too, and it’s only the start of the second week of practice. Once the warm-up leftovers start surviving in the fridge instead of getting fought over as second dinner after nine o’clock, that’s our signal it’s safe to go back to boring.

Then there’s the billet coordinator, who giveth and taketh. Really, it’s the coach making every call. The coordinator is just one of the minions relaying it with a cheerful “yes, sir.”

All of our boys made it through the first cut and played in the intrasquad scrimmage. One didn’t show well and was on a plane to “Plan B” the next day. The bed sat empty exactly one night before a non-tendered, non-drafted player got invited to move out of his hotel and into ours. I got a little scrappy making that happen, and I regret nothing.

We don’t do this for the money. It doesn’t hurt that there is some, and in exchange we feed these kids well and let them load up the wifi with all of their devices. And, if feeling extremely generous, we even let them control their own thermostat at night.

In three weeks I’m scheduled to acquire two more granddaughters. My daughter is finishing her last week of Zoom consulting, and everyone has quietly agreed it’s better to have grandpa on standby than to have her explain to a client that she needs a minute for baby maintenance.

So my calendar now includes clementine distribution and teaching a toddler exciting new ways to play with toys she already owns, mostly because grandpa needs the entertainment. This is genuinely on my top ten list of things I want to be doing with my life. It has been fulfilling, but grandpa needs a little variety there, too.

The last item is the one I complain about the least: getting to know these hockey kids while I still have them under my roof. Dinners run long. Plans get pushed to make room for them.

Any of them could be gone tomorrow or here through the end of the season, and I’d rather spend the time now than look back in April wishing I had. The billet fees cover food, laundry access, and the basics of keeping a teenager alive. I haven’t run the actual math, but I’d bet money we don’t turn a profit on any of it.

Somewhere between retirement, travel, and grandkids we apparently can’t say no to, the hockey hosting is going to get squeezed out eventually. Whenever that day comes, I want to have done it well and left these boys wanting more, not counting down the days until we stop showing up.

Nobody handed me a vote on how this fall’s schedule filled up, and I wouldn’t trade a single piece of it. I’ll find the time somewhere. Probably by writing shorter posts about it, which defeats the purpose, but here we are.

The Day My Moral Compass Needed a Tune-Up

I know it may appear that my only contact with humans outside of my family occurs on errand days. There is more truth in that statement than I would like to admit. I do, however, still have the ability to recognize when something is out of the ordinary. Or, if that ability has quietly left the building, I at least hope to score some points when I retell the story later.

Having already drained the hot tub twice this year, I have decided to keep a tighter rein on the chemicals. Since I have no desire to learn how to test the water myself—apparently there are limits to how much responsibility I am willing to accept for my own hot tub—I wandered into Leslie’s again.

When I pulled in, I saw a car with a stroller and baby coming out of it. I was hoping they were headed to Rally House to get an OU T-shirt. Surely that would make more sense than what happened next. Nope. They were going to Leslie’s to have their water tested, too.

For a brief moment, I considered running past them and getting my water tested first. I may fail socially in a number of ways, but even I knew that would be wrong. So I waited patiently while mostly keeping my mouth shut as the baby-mama went first. My bottle of hot tub water was already set up for testing, so I stood there like a man waiting for the results of a medical procedure he had performed on himself.

When it was my turn and before the test was completed, the bottle was pushed back toward me. A little probing revealed that the employees had been having a problem with customers not getting their bottles back, resulting in a growing collection of bottles under the counter, each conveniently labeled with a phone number. Apparently, even returning a plastic bottle is now a process that requires documentation.

Eventually, the results came back. High phosphates. Organic material.

The source could have been any number of things. It might have been the hockey boys making a jet-less visit to the hot tub last time. It might have been something else entirely. I prefer hockey boy broth as the explanation because it allows me to blame someone else. The hot tub will do what it does. I just don’t want to be responsible for why it does it.

Sam’s provided most of the other entertainment for the day. After getting gas, I walked inside prepared to fight my usual battle with the compacted shopping carts. To my surprise, there were carts separated and ready to go. I made sure to thank the greeter for helping me avoid the conundrum that must be solved every time I visit Sam’s: finding a cart that is actually usable without having to perform a minor demolition project.

After that, I happily sampled the donuts. Unfortunately, the guy handing out the samples had no idea what the difference was between a cake donut and a yeast donut. He knew the flavors. He knew the decorations. But the basic taxonomy of donuts appeared to be outside his area of expertise.

What are they teaching kids in school today?

I passed on the Dude Wipes. Those are not included in our hockey boy billet fees. We determine what is covered, but we don’t get more money if we spoil them. If my hiney isn’t spoiled, neither is theirs.

The parents of our boys have been instructed to send their billet fees to my Venmo account. Since a significant portion of what hockey boys do is eat, it seems only appropriate that I use that money to pay for the food and necessary paper products we buy at Sam’s.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that while I was shopping.

Instead, I thought I was being clever by scanning everything as I went. Eventually, I abandoned the whole process in the Sam’s app because paying with Venmo wasn’t convenient. I then circled the cart scanning things like one of the other losers who had somehow become technology-challenged in the middle of a warehouse store.

As Sam’s visits go, this one was about average. The parking lot, however, was holding the real excitement.

After unloading the groceries and returning the cart, I didn’t pull straight out of my parking space. The steering wheel was leaning to the right. I was barely halfway out when I heard a noise.

I didn’t think it sounded like metal on metal, but the radio was on and it was Two-fer Tuesday, so I wasn’t fully committed to listening.

In an attempt to be responsible, I backed the car up and looked at the vehicle to my right. The fact that there was no additional sound of metal being rearranged probably should have been a clue, but I wanted to be a good citizen and double-check.

I saw and heard nothing that raised a red flag for driving sins. And that stupid app on my phone, had I still chosen to turn it on, wouldn’t have gathered any insurance-rate-raising data from my parking lot maneuvering.

Still, knowing I wasn’t a perfect driver worked on me during the drive home. The optimistic part of my brain was perfectly happy to believe something had shifted in the trunk. The part of my brain that isn’t quite so naïve kept asking why I hadn’t been more thorough after hearing the noise.

When I got home, that part of my brain went exploring on the passenger side of the car.

That’s when I saw it.

A previously undetected flaw in the paint screamed, “CAR DOOR DING.”

It didn’t feel like a scrape caused by some guy driving through the Sam’s parking lot as if he were the only person there. It looked more like the kind of thing that happens when two perfectly innocent cars have a brief disagreement and one of them loses.

Of course, I had to tell Judy about my possible sin.

I view Judy as my confessor. I figure my moral compass was engineered to bless behaviors that make sense only to a male brain, so I run things by her occasionally to make sure our compasses are still synchronized.

On this one, she reassured me. She didn’t see anything unreasonable about what I had done. There was no big hug followed by, “It’s going to be okay.”

I got the more practical, “Don’t worry about it.”

The other thing about Judy is that she is a non-practicing attorney. I don’t think her compass has caved in the way some legal professionals’ compasses apparently do, but her needle may be skewed a little.

Then again, all of our compasses are probably skewed a little.

I just pray that any skewing that takes place doesn’t eventually assume I am incapable of making mistakes. I have lived with this guy long enough to know he still has more arrogance than he should have. Every now and then, getting figuratively pinched by reality is probably a good thing. It knocks the overconfidence down a few notches.

Of course, that’s only the overconfidence I can still salvage after being married for a few decades.

The Eve of Controlled Chaos

Friday was an errand day—well, at least the morning was. With the hockey boys arriving this weekend, I had to finish up the grocery shopping. Earlier in the morning, Judy and I had discussed what the menu might look like for the first week. After that, we would have time to pick their brains and figure out what foods we could slide into the rotation without causing anyone to thumb their nose too high.

Our returning boy told us, “I like to eat everything.” So naturally, the first night he was here last season, we made a tomato pasta dish. (The things he liked was hence modified to be “everything except tomatoes.”) Our two Alaska brothers have already informed us that they dislike tomatoes and onions, and one of them dislikes peppers. The next few meals should help us get into the finer points of these dislikes. Is it the size? How they’re cooked? Or is it the flavor? Apparently, we are not simply cooking dinner. We are conducting a culinary research project.

The first night this year is tacos. Our carnitas have a few jalapeños beaten into a pulp, so we’ll get to test where the pepper line is. If the problem is flavor, they can fall back on brisket tacos. There is always a backup plan when you are responsible for feeding three teenage hockey players. It just happens to involve another kind of meat.

With my daughter within a month of her C-section—we are all rooting for the natural birth—I picked her and my granddaughter up so she could get out of the house and run some errands. It never hurts to have another adult available when a toddler decides to spontaneously melt down. This particular outing also resulted in one of my rare visits to Hobby Lobby.

I don’t shop at Hobby Lobby. Judy will buy craft items there, and on this day my daughter was shopping for birthday gifts for a church friend’s daughter. My granddaughter had her own opinions about what should be purchased, naturally. My daughter worked within her $25 budget and found a couple of things that seemed like they would actually feel like “her.” Ruth, my granddaughter’s code name for purposes of this blog, allowed Grandpa to push the cart while Mom did the math and performed increasingly sophisticated guesstimations about each gift’s position on the enjoyment spectrum.

As we checked out, we passed the inevitable temptation along the checkout aisle: Horehound lozenges. My daughter didn’t seem particularly excited to see them. I did. Not because I wanted any, but because they reminded me of my dad and the stash of horehound he kept tucked away in the kitchen cabinets of the house where I grew up.

Apparently, even a trip to Hobby Lobby can turn into a brief visit with your past.

The trip to Sam’s was more of a refrigerator “topping off” than a major shopping expedition. We’ll see which boys are still in our house next weekend. They started with 51, and we are told they will cut that number to 34 next weekend. Three of those 51 are staying with us, and there is also a boy trying out who happens to be the brother of a hockey player we had when we lived in Texas.

He is a goalie, so we are hopeful he makes the team. If he does, the billet coordinator has already promised that he will be “ours.” We really enjoyed his family when his older brother was ours. Most billet parents are fine. His parents were exceptional. When they came down for one of their son’s games, they were great fans and made it obvious how much they appreciated what we were doing.

That is part of the answer when people ask why we let young men stay with us when we could just eat out every night and avoid the whole cooking-and-parenting-adjacent experience.

First, we would cook anyway. We just throw a few more pieces of chicken on the grill. Second, most of the boys are genuinely appreciative. Yes, we’ve had a few entitled players enter our home. We tolerated them. And, regardless of whatever antics a kid might attempt, having parents we really liked tended to raise our tolerance level considerably.

There is a little chaos involved, but the boys also bring something we probably wouldn’t get otherwise. They are chasing a dream. Watching them work toward it gives us a reminder of what it looks like when something matters enough to work for. And when that dream takes a detour, we get a chance to help them figure out how to handle it.

The only truly “new” thing on this set of errands was voting early in a runoff primary. There were a series of tables I had to graduate through before I could finally get my ballot. At the first table, I signed an affidavit saying I wouldn’t vote again at another location during the remainder of the voting period. At the next table, I presented my driver’s license again, along with the affidavit. I believe they attached a label to it before sending me on to get my ballot.

At the previous table, I heard someone mention that about 120 people had voted. My ballot number was R103. I’m not entirely sure what the numbering system meant, but it made me wonder if the Republican ballots were winning the early-voting popularity contest. Then I remembered there apparently weren’t any Democratic runoffs, so that probably wasn’t much of a contest. The rules of the runoff simply meant the people participating were concentrated on one side.

There were only two state issues on the ballot, so I filled in the little rectangular boxes the old-fashioned way. No electronic ballot for me. I was told the ballot could be scanned with either side up. In my case, the scanner apparently preferred that I maintain my privacy and scan it face down.

I usually don’t take the “I Voted” sticker, but I thought it might entertain my granddaughter, who was already fighting a cranky mood brought on by incoming teeth or whatever other battle toddlers wage in their ongoing effort to preserve a good mood.

It did not entertain her at all.

Aldi’s was our final stop. We needed a few taco supplies—vegetable toppings for those who eat them and plenty of cheese because meat and tortillas need cheese to graduate to official taco status in all parts of the country. Tomatoes are optional.

By the time the errands were finished, I realized the day had been more than a grocery run and a few stops around town. It was the eve of another transition for our family. The boys arrive Saturday, and with them comes an eight-ish-month commitment.

We “get” to be parents again, but with some significant upgrades. They are mostly self-sufficient, although we may need to help with transportation from time to time. And if they screw up, we don’t have to blame ourselves for whatever parenting mistake supposedly caused it. We can help them navigate the challenge without taking their indiscretions personally.

If they have a great year and grow into better players and better young men, we get to watch that happen, too. Their parents deserve the largest share of the credit, without question. Our job is mostly to provide a home, feed them, encourage them, and occasionally nudge them back toward the idea that their priority right now is supposed to be hockey.

And if I ever need a reminder of just how good I can be at the nudging part, I can always ask my wife.

Yes, dear. You’re welcome.

A Plod Instead of a Skip

The “funk” happens 6 to 8 times a year. The variables change, but the result is usually the same. I do more of a plod than a skip.

I still get the “must get dones” done. The “nice to get dones” wait their turn.

I can fake upbeat for a while if the kids are around. I don’t bother faking it for my wife. She knows me too well, and pretending to be cheerful when I’m not is a lot of unnecessary work.

A bad funk also dulls my humor and makes my brain feel like it’s swimming uphill through molasses. I can still function. Everything just takes more effort than it should.

Naturally, I decided the best way to handle this was to analyze all the reasons I might be in a funk. Because nothing lifts your mood like conducting an internal investigation into your own bad mood.

One contributor is my current battle with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I like my fantasy to have a predictable magic system. Once I understand the rules, I expect the author to follow them.

For the first four books, my son’s enthusiasm kept me going. By about 25% into Book 5, I had to admit his positive review had carried me farther than my own enjoyment.

I probably could have quit sooner, but I let optimism run high. The premise was clear after book one, and each book since has been a little more of a struggle. Vacation was good for the series, since I could read 10% or more in a day. Now the daily trickle isn’t enough to move the story forward fast enough to keep me engaged.

So I have two problems: frustration with the book, and frustration with finding something else to read. I considered starting something new, but talked myself out of it. “Andy, you don’t want to learn a new world’s rules right now. You want something you already understand.”

Well, it wasn’t the best decision.

Now I may have to wander between a couple of books before I find one that fits, with a plot simple enough that I’m not spending three chapters remembering who everyone is. First-world problem? Absolutely. Apparently the funk has standards.

Another contributor: I gave blood the other day. The blood center’s follow-up email announced, “You have a new badge.” Naturally I had to check.

Instead, I found out about the badge I didn’t get.

But I also found something that made me smile. Between double-red donations in Ohio and Texas, I’ve never had an accurate lifetime total. After moving to Oklahoma, I started giving through the Oklahoma Blood Institute instead. I logged into my old Carter BloodCare account this week and found out I’d donated more than seven gallons there alone.

That’s a lot of me being voluntarily drained and sent home with a cookie.

One of my Facebook friends is past 20 gallons. I have no idea what my Ohio total adds up to, so my real number could be higher than I think. Just finding the seven-gallon figure moved my funk down a few percentage points. Apparently even my blood donation history is conspiring against my bad mood.

Then there’s the cold.

A cold makes my brain run slow whether I’m in a funk or not. Add in the lack of sleep, and the result isn’t exactly peak performance. I can plow through what needs doing, but the list has to shrink to keep the frustration manageable.

And then there’s chess.

My son and son-in-law both play at Chess.com. I’ve taken the Duolingo approach: too shy for real people, so I play the AI. I generally hover around 800-900 ELO.

Every time I get close to 900, hope creeps in. Maybe I’m getting better. Maybe I’m finally figuring this out.

Then the AI decides it’s had enough of my nonsense. Does it call me a loser? Of course not. It just does some voodoo with its queen and cleans my clock in under a dozen moves. Once it’s beaten me back down to 800, it puts its “idiot hat” back on and lets me win a few with my low-end strategy.

I don’t have the commitment to go deep into chess. I just want to keep my brain active. Unfortunately, the “you are horrible, maybe you’re not horrible” cycle accounts for a surprisingly large share of my funk.

This is clearly another first-world problem.

Then the hockey boys started arriving Saturday. The last arrived Sunday afternoon.

Thirty-four boys made it through the July camp that picked the roster pool. Now they’re competing against each other and against 17 more boys for a final spot. Fifty-one boys chasing a limited number of spots is a good way to wreck a teenager’s sleep schedule.

The late arrivals were probably off the coach’s radar for one reason or another. But what if they deserve a spot too? I’d hate for one of our boys to get cut because a late-comer showed up and pushed him off the roster.

The older I get, the softer I get. If the boys are in my house, I’m cheering for them. Next Friday night, when the cuts happen, our house could lose one of three beds. I feel for them, living with that uncertainty.

As my wife put it: “They are young. They can handle it.”

She’s probably right. I’m glad I’m not still young, though. I wouldn’t want my life’s direction hanging on something my older brain knows won’t matter in five years. Getting cut from a hockey team isn’t going to determine the rest of anyone’s life.

That doesn’t mean I won’t hate seeing any of our boys go.

Somewhere in the middle of writing all this, something strange happened. My mood improved.

Maybe it was the seven gallons of blood. Maybe it was laughing at my own chess career. Maybe it was admitting how invested I am in a house full of teenage hockey players. Or maybe it was just getting all of this out of my head and onto a page.

Whatever it was, the funk started losing its grip.

That might be the real lesson here. You can’t be satisfied with every part of your life every day. Some days are just plod days. The book frustrates you, the chess computer questions your intelligence, the cold fogs your brain, and teenagers remind you that life can turn on someone else’s decision.

But there are good things happening around us too. Sometimes it just helps to stop and notice them.

So I’m going to address the envelope, put the funk inside, and send it back to the return address.

Unfortunately, I know who lives there. Eventually it’ll find its way back to me. It usually does.

But for now, the shift has begun, and I’m going to enjoy it. Besides, I’ve got a book to quit reading and an AI chess player to lose to.

The Final Flight of the Summer

Finally, the day we get to go home and stay home. Of course, getting home requires traveling, so today is still a travel day. Fortunately, it hasn’t started badly. It has, however, managed to collect a few things that should make it memorable.

Judy’s mom got us up at 5:30. I assume she thought she was doing us a favor. Judy’s alarm was set for 5:40, which might have been cutting it closer than necessary, but it still would not have resulted in our Uber leaving without us. Instead, we were ready early and spent the next ten minutes staring at each other, wondering what people did before smartphones. Eventually, our guy showed up, we gave Mom Hugs 2.0—we had already hugged her last night, but apparently she was banking them—and we were out the door.

Our Uber driver was quite a character. According to his story, he had been retired for more than five years, although I’m not sure “retired” is the word I would use for someone who gets up before 3:00 every morning to lift weights. His wife is a maternity nurse on weekends, and once she finished delivering the baby currently in the queue, they were going to drive to Florida. He claimed he only needed a few hours of sleep, which I suspect is the sort of thing people say right before their body files a formal complaint.

He apparently drives Uber because he needs something to fill the gaps in his day, and we benefited from that decision. He claimed to just love people and talked like he had never had a bad thought about anyone in his life. It sounds wonderful. My mind doesn’t work that way, so I mostly let him talk and limited my contributions to grunts unless he asked me a direct question. When he asked, “What do you do?” I realized he had found a subject that would allow him to talk even more.

If he told us once, he told us a dozen times, “I was born poor. I never had anything. I retired early not because I was rich, but because I don’t need much. I bought two packs of crackers this morning for $2.04. That is all the money I will spend all day.” This was apparently his financial plan for the day, and I respected its simplicity.

He also told us about his daughters. “From the time my daughters just started to make noise, I talked to them at least 15 minutes a day. My wife and I always wanted to be the house the kids wanted to come to. And for some reason, my girls seem to gather friends from broken homes. They sort of became my kids, too. When we went to the beach, we would take them. When we went out to eat, I would get the girls their own table and tell them to order anything they wanted. My only request was that they didn’t waste food. I was born poor, and I will get a little preachy if you waste food. Get a doggie bag!”

He was an enjoyable guy to listen to. He pushed the “happy Uber driver” spectrum about as far to the right as it could go. Our Uber getting to my in-laws had been a Chinese gentleman who had only been in the country for six months. His son was doing a post-doc, so he was cooking for him while trying to learn the language. His English was limited, but he seemed genuinely happy to be in America. Apparently, our Uber drivers had decided to give us the condensed version of the American experience.

When we described what we do and have done, our driver told us we were the first people he had ever driven who had done foster care. I expected a question or two about that experience. Instead, he immediately started talking about something his wife wanted to do. She wanted to bring a child from an orphanage into their home over Christmas and then send him back after Christmas. Our driver thought that was cruel. Why bring a child into a warm, loving home, spoil him for Christmas, and then send him back?

He had a point. And somewhere, there is probably a child who missed out on getting to know this warm Southern man because his wife had a questionable Christmas plan. I don’t think he could have been my best friend, but he could have been a good one.

We had barely gotten to our gate when Judy realized her “I’ll just set my jacket on top of my backpack” strategy only works if the jacket stays on top of the backpack. Apparently, it had shifted during the Uber ride, and our driver never saw it. I opened my suitcase and gave her mine, hoping it would actually make it home and not become another victim of Judy’s “forgetfulness” spell.

We had more than an hour to kill before boarding, so I told Judy I was going to walk for a while. The A terminal at the Raleigh airport isn’t exactly a hiking trail, but I figured I could get some steps in. As I walked back and forth, I began tracking some of the characters inhabiting our little airport ecosystem.

First, the TSA guy commented on my “Yoda Best Grandpa” T-shirt. “I like your T-shirt,” he said. He also informed me, “I don’t need to get steps in. I do 18,000 steps a day.” Apparently, this was important information for me to have. Our Uber driver had also noticed the shirt and said one of his daughters and his wife liked Star Wars. He probably would have continued, but fortunately, he was busy unloading our luggage.

Second, I kept passing a woman wearing a T-shirt that said “Mashed Potatoes.” It’s a short terminal, so we passed each other several times. She only had a backpack, which left me wondering whether she was traveling alone or whether she had five pounds of North Carolina’s finest potatoes hidden in there.

Third, there was a guy who was definitely traveling alone. I felt sorry for him because he had to wheel his suitcase around while getting his steps in. My own steps were unhindered because Judy was sitting at Gate A7, monitoring my stuff while being entertained by her phone. This is what teamwork looks like when you have been married for 35 years.

On the plane, I generally avoid wearing shorts. Pants take up more room in the suitcase, but I also don’t enjoy rubbing knees with strangers. The list of people I know well enough to willingly rub knees with is pretty short, too.

On this flight, Judy and I weren’t sitting together. I had the window seat, and the woman beside me was greeted with, “You don’t have to talk to me. Our Uber driver wore us out this morning.” She immediately put on her mask and didn’t say another word. The guy sitting ahead of me gave me a knowing nod. Maybe his Uber driver’s brother had driven him.

The woman in the window seat in front of me had very long hair. She didn’t do the annoying thing where people flip their hair over the back of the seat, so I appreciated that. Unfortunately, as she leaned against the side of the plane, her hair dangled down onto my uncovered knee.

Was it disgusting? Not really. Her hair looked clean. Was it something I would have preferred to avoid? Absolutely. There are certain levels of intimacy I prefer to earn before someone’s hair touches my knee.

Our connection in Medway was pretty tight. We inadvertently took a detour to the wrong gate, but Judy spotted a Garrett popcorn stand along the way. We figured we might find another one closer to our gate, but potty breaks robbed us of its caramelly goodness. There are few things more disappointing than knowing caramel popcorn is somewhere in the same airport but being unable to locate it before your bladder makes the decision for you.

The head stewardess on our Southwest flight looked like she may have been an original. She ran through the entire Southwest schtick like she had been there when the jokes were written. I’m not judging, but she was either extremely seasoned or had made a questionable decision regarding suntan lotion at some point in her life.

I had a middle seat on that flight and ended up between two kids who were slightly older than a third my age. Judy was sitting in the middle seat directly in front of me. This created an opportunity I could not ignore. Poking your wife from behind when she has forgotten you are sitting directly behind her is one of the small pleasures of marriage. Priceless.

And that brings us to the end of our flying journey for the summer. We won’t be completely escaping airports because hockey-boy pickups are waiting for us, but at least the international portion of our travel is over.

Of our six flights in Europe and six in the United States, I preferred the first four in Europe the most. They implied adventure. The final two flights of both trips implied something different: the closing of a journey.

And I have journeyed far too much this summer. I was grateful to miss much of the 100-degree weather while we were gone, although it appears Oklahoma City saved a few of those temperatures just for our return.

Apparently, even home wanted to make sure we knew we were back.

Another Chance to Make an Impression

Yesterday was my triennial visit to the blood donation center. I just learned that word and I’m proud of it. It actually means every four months, not every three years, but “quadrennial” sounds like a made-up word and “triennial” sounds like I read something once.

The place is full of the heavily pierced and tattooed, all of us there to hand over a pint for the greater good. There’s nothing sneaky about it. Somebody out there needs blood, and in exchange, the center offers free air conditioning and snacks, which is honestly a better deal than most gyms.

I watched the self-recorded video of my visit afterward, the way you’d review game film if the game were “old man talks for ninety minutes while a machine drains him.” My conclusion: they don’t invite me back because they enjoy my company. They invite me back because I do the double red donation, and they’ve decided my blood is worth the price of listening to me.

The initial screener was the same woman from last time. I’m fairly sure we talked hockey during that visit. This time she engaged with me, but not overly, the way you’d engage with a dog that keeps bringing you the same tennis ball. I think she clocked pretty quickly that I was just a lonely old guy who’d talk the leg off anyone who made eye contact.

My blood pressure ran a little high. I blamed needle anxiety, which is a generous way of describing a lifelong hobby of mine. I also may have stretched the truth slightly on the questionnaire. If I’d mentioned our recent trip, I’d have had to list every country, in order, with exact dates in each one, and there was no chance of that. Naming them out of order and guessing at the timeline would have exposed the true state of my memory, and honestly I felt I was sparing both of us the paperwork. I hadn’t done anything else on the naughty list, so skipping the travel questions felt like the fastest route to the gurney.

Which brings me to the business end of the donor center, and my technician, who I’d also worked with before. She started off friendly. Then I kept talking, and I watched recognition arrive on her face like a slow-loading webpage. She survived the appointment. I think it cost her something.

I probably didn’t help my case by opening with “I’m your next victim.” Then I called myself a secret shopper, which didn’t confuse her so much as make her wonder if her performance that day was being quietly graded. It wasn’t. I just like watching people recalculate.

They hand you a squeeze ball while you donate, and mine came shaped like a basketball. I told her I’d have preferred a football. Turns out she agreed. “The Norman donor center gets footballs,” she said. “They have a budget for that. We just take what we’re given.” She’d made peace with it, in the way people make peace with things they complain about constantly.

For reasons known only to the blood-donation industrial complex, technicians aren’t allowed to let you watch the monitor to see what’s actually happening in your arm. Instead, there are little spinning knobs that mean things, sort of, if you squint. Double red donation is basically alchemy anyway, since what goes back into you isn’t what came out. My tech tried to walk me through which knob spins during a withdrawal and which one spins during a return. You squeeze the ball on the withdrawal, not the return, a fact I nearly learned the hard way. We got it sorted before I blew a vein, which I’m choosing to call a win.

I think I ended on a decent note. When the machine gave its final beep, I announced, “I survived another one,” and got an actual smile out of her. We never quite bonded, but I’m already workshopping better material for next time. This is apparently what passes for a hobby now.

So why do I keep doing this? There isn’t one clean answer, and not every part of the experience is the center throwing confetti and begging me to come back in sixteen weeks. But you don’t donate blood out of boredom either.

The t-shirts help. I get a new one every time, and while not all of them are “wow,” a couple have earned a permanent spot in my drawer. The latest one connects blood donation to the dog days of summer somehow. I’m apparently in my t-shirt era, though at this point I think every era of my life has just been a t-shirt era. Congratulations to me, I’m now a t-shirt connoisseur.

My cholesterol has also never been an issue, and giving blood is a nice reminder that I did pass along at least one good gene. When my kids bring up whatever genetic flaws they inherited, I remind them, “If your cholesterol’s fine, that’s me. You didn’t lose the whole lottery.”

On my way out, the front desk person, who must have missed my check-in while on break, sent me off with, “Thanks for your help on that double.” I have no idea if she actually knew that or just says it to everyone, but either way, I fell for it completely. I didn’t book my next appointment, but I’ll probably be back before Christmas to keep the friendship going, see what jokes show up on their own, and hope I don’t lose an entire vacation to “amnesia” again.

Return to Sender

The house to the north of us is full of kids. Not all of them play soccer, but the ones who do have made it their life’s mission to kick a ball against our shared fence as often as humanly possible.

We have the pretty side of that fence. They have the ugly side. This works out great for them, because you cannot make ugly any uglier. Kick that ball as hard as you want, guys, that side was already at rock bottom before you got here.

Now, when I say these kids kick the ball against the fence, I don’t mean a gentle little dribble bumps into it now and then. These are high schoolers. The ball doesn’t roll into the fence, it arrives. Full windup, full commitment, like the fence owes them money.

One kick doesn’t do much. Kick after kick after kick, though, and the nails start screaming uncle. Or if they’re not quite screaming yet, they’ve at least developed an attitude about it. Not all boards are created equal, and apparently some nails just got handed inferior wood and told to make it work.

Eventually the boards give up, and my fence loses its smooth look on the pretty side. I wouldn’t call it “unsmooth,” exactly. I’d call it “those darn kids are kicking their soccer ball again, and would you look at that, the fence is not enduring this assault unscathed.” I like making things more dramatic than they need to be. We all have our flaws.

So every other month or so, I grab a hammer and go pound the boards back into shape. My carpentry skills are rudimentary at best. I know what the hammer is for in a theoretical sense. Hitting the actual nail head, dead center, on purpose, is a separate and much rarer skill that I have not acquired. The fence has three coats of HOA-approved stain on it, and around every nail that keeps losing its argument with a soccer ball, that stain is losing its luster right along with it.

The fence itself, though, is a manageable problem. I deal with it every couple of months and move on with my life. The real issue is the balls that end up in our yard, because now I have to decide what to do with them.

The neighbors directly to the north are a married couple, and they’re both police officers on two different local departments. I have decided this is not the household to walk up to and complain about a soccer ball situation. So when I’m out in the yard, or when I spot a ball sitting there the next morning, I chuck it back over the fence like a good neighbor. Sometimes, if they’re still out there playing, I even get a “thank you” for my trouble.

While my wife and I were traveling recently, my daughter-in-law took over plant-watering duty. I told her that if she found any balls in the yard, just toss them back over. She sent me a video of five balls sitting in our grass. Four soccer balls, and one mystery ball that apparently volunteered for the mission because they’d run out of actual soccer balls to sacrifice.

This past weekend, with the temperature sitting comfortably in the 90s, my wife and I were trying to enjoy the hot tub, which is its own kind of ambitious. While we were out there, I looked over toward the house on the other side of ours. Up until that moment I’d been fairly confident that every single ball that ever landed in our yard came from the police house. But a little doubt crept in.

The house catty-corner to us, the one with the slightly annoying weather station poking into our yard that we get zero access to the data from, had a soccer ball up on their roof, and they were making a whole game out of throwing it up there. I genuinely cannot think of a single scenario where a ball comes off that roof and lands in our yard. But knowing there’s now an active second source of soccer balls in the neighborhood does change the math a little. Not enough to unseat the police house as prime suspect. But it’s there now, quietly present, every time I pause before lobbing a ball back over a fence.

Bottom line: I’m glad the kids are active. I’m glad they’re outside doing something instead of staring at a screen. And honestly, for their sake, I’m glad they have so many soccer balls that launching one over the fence doesn’t mean the game’s over, they just grab another. I just wish the balls came with a mute button and a low-impact setting, so my fence boards could stop taking the brunt of teenage enthusiasm. But I know, I know. Another one of my first world problems, and I really should be grateful for it.

The Chip My Wife Never Plays

It’s been hot in Oklahoma again this summer. Since this is only our second year here and most of our plants aren’t cactus, I’ve been talking to the mower man about an irrigation system. Turns out he’s also an electrician. Turns out he also has a friend who installs sprinklers. The man contains multitudes.

Before leaving for Europe, he gave me a ballpark quote. The allpark numbers pushing $5,000, maybe more.

I told him, “I think my wife will let me have this one.”

She did not let me have this one.

She’d go for something around half his estimate, and I already know that number is the conservative one. So the sprinkler system joined the long list of projects that have quietly died in our house. I get it. I own it.

Here’s why I own it so completely: a few years ago, I carved off a little chunk of our retirement money and handed it to algo trading bots and crypto. My financial advisor told me not to. I did it anyway. That decision gave Judy a veto power that isn’t close to 50-50. It’s more like 60-40, and some days I think she’s being generous with the 40.

I recently sat down with my advisor to close out the company I’d run for twenty years, the one that funded my brief career as a degenerate gambler with better vocabulary. I apologized for not listening to him. He was kind about it, which somehow made it worse. He’s clearly seen clients make mistakes that make mine look like a rounding error. Small comfort, but I’ll take it.

So now, when Judy wants a pedicure or a hot tub or literally anything, I zip it. I’ve earned exactly zero opinions on discretionary spending for the foreseeable future.

The strange part is how well this has worked out for me.

I’ve always been a guy who likes to get his way. Guilt turns out to be a remarkably effective muzzle. I can’t fully bury that part of my personality, but knowing I torched a chunk of our savings on bots that promised passive income and delivered passive regret keeps me in check more than any argument ever could.

Judy has a chip she could play anytime she wants. One mention of the crypto years and I’d fold like a lawn chair. She’s never played it. Not once. She’ll give me a look sometimes, the kind that says she knows exactly what she could say, and then she just doesn’t say it.

That’s either extraordinary restraint or a very patient long game. I haven’t ruled out either.

I only let myself get clipped in one category, though: money. Everywhere else, I’m still fully operational. And even the money-clipping is mostly self-imposed, which I realize makes me sound like a man bragging about his own house arrest.

In overpriced Iceland, while I was doing math in my head over every hot dog, Judy said, “I don’t want to think about the money. I want to enjoy our vacation.”

I have never once had that thought naturally. I have to be talked into it, every time, like it’s a foreign language.

Her attitude about money has genuinely made our marriage better, especially given that she married a guy who projects financial competence while quietly having handed his savings to a chatbot with delusions of Wall Street. Not every marriage survives getting frisked by a promise of “regular ongoing income” that turns out to mean regular ongoing losses. To be fair to the bots, they never actually promised me anything. That was the marketing department’s job, and they did it well.

The one thing keeping me from full self-pity is that my company did make real money, and I did put a good chunk of it away. So it’s not like both hands were empty. One hand made it, the other hand threw it into a wood chipper. Not the trade I was hoping for, but it beats “I lost it all,” which is the version of this story I could’ve been telling you.

I can’t undo the bad calls. I can keep telling anyone who’ll listen that “get rich quick” is a genre of fiction, not a strategy. There might be legitimate investment opportunities out there that won’t put a dent in your marriage. I’m sure there are. I just haven’t found many worth chasing once the number gets into six digits, and I’ve stopped assuming my judgment is sharper than everyone else’s.

Turns out the actual smart move was never picking the right algorithm. It was marrying someone who didn’t need one.

We Found Our Hot Tub Guy

I woke up this morning to my wife’s pillow, thrown at my head. She says she forgot she was sleeping in a shared space. I have questions. Where else would she be sleeping? We had separate beds in Iceland, sure, but we are home now, dear.

Once I recovered from the pillow assault, today had one job on the list: get the hot tub guy out here. The tub is technically still running, but some of the jets have decided to take the rest of summer off. We think it’s a fuse. My wife thinks it’s a “re-fuse-ing” to work. I told her that joke was terrible and she agreed, then used it three more times.

Our Secret Lagoon visit in Iceland had zero jets and lukewarm water, and somehow we still enjoyed it more than our own backyard right now. A hot tub where the inside temperature matches or exceeds the outside temperature is not a hot tub. It’s just a large, expensive bowl of regret. Welcome to OKC in August.

Before the repair guy showed up, I got my walk in early, ahead of the 90-degree wall that hits by mid-morning. My usual walking companion, a kid I’ve never actually met but see most mornings, was nowhere on the trail. Maybe the geese left too much of a mess for him to deal with. Maybe the church’s lawn crew and their two enormous mowers scared him off, since he seems to hate noise. Or maybe he’s visiting grandma before school starts. I like to imagine he has a rich inner life I know nothing about.

I did find a squishy t-ball ball on the path, which felt like a win. My plantar fasciitis has been furious since Europe, all that cobblestone doing exactly what cobblestone does to a heel. One of the women on our excursion said she’d pulled the inserts out of her shoes because the pain got so bad she couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m not chasing a cure at this point. I just want my foot to catch a break, and rolling a ball under it seems to help. The t-ball ball is a serious upgrade from whatever I’d been using. And before anyone accuses me of stealing a kid’s toy, it was sitting in the path of a mower. I saved its life.

While I waited on a text back from the hot tub guy, I thought about how we got here. We came home from our trip excited to sink back into the tub, only to find the jets meant to work on my lower back had clocked out. I called the company we bought the spa from and gave them almost 48 hours to respond before I went looking elsewhere. My wife, ever the optimist, told me to lean on the warranty and give the original company another shot. Their reply, when it finally came, was a form asking me to fill out another form so they could reply to that one. No warranty commitment, no timeline, just enough vague hope to keep me from calling anyone else. That’s the whole business model. Dangle the warranty, stall the customer, collect the check eventually anyway.

So I found a five-star guy on Google instead. He warned me upfront that his labor rate is cheaper than the dealer’s, which was music to my ears after what the dealer charged us for the pergola and everything else in the backyard last year.

He earned his rating. I stood out there while he pulled the panel off, mostly so I could get a photo of the serial number, which I’ve since printed and filed away for the next time this happens. After that I just watched him flip breakers and push buttons until he gave up and called the manufacturer directly. He wasn’t sure they’d even talk to him since he isn’t one of their official dealers, but they did. Together, they tracked it down to three bad solenoids, which had apparently been putting strain on the transformer.

Here’s the part that felt like a small miracle. The manufacturer agreed to ship the parts straight to our house so he could install them himself. We danced right under the nose of the original dealer, and we’ll almost certainly have the tub fixed before they’d have even sent someone to look at it, at a lower price than they would’ve charged us. I’m guessing on that last part, but based on today’s bill, I have a hard time picturing them coming in under it.

My wife tried to talk me out of this whole detour a couple days ago. I’m glad I didn’t listen, because we came out of it with a win and a new guy.

We now officially have a hot tub guy. This is separate from our fertilizer guy, our mowing guy, our bug guy, and our electrician guy. We also have an irrigation guy, who is me holding a hose, a guy who can mount a TV on tile without hesitation, and a guy who will drill a hole in absolutely anything, who happens to be our son. Two years in Oklahoma City and we’ve built out a full roster. We’re open to hiring “gals” for any of these roles too. Fair warning, though: you’ll go broke trying to take our business.