Buckeye Mike

As I sit here in my office on Christmas Eve morning, I look forward to the next 24 hours. In just a few minutes I will walk out the door here and head home, ready to wrap gifts for the boys and help my sweetheart finish up the baking for what is sure to be a legendary Christmas feast tomorrow. I love the holiday season, even more this year than most. My boys, with the signing of the paperwork this past Tuesday, are truly home to stay. Tiffany and I have built a cozy home out of the house we moved in to during the spring. For its ups and downs, I have been at my new job for almost a year and am fortunate to be a part of this work family. As I drove in this morning, I turned on the Christmas music, sipped my coffee, and thanked God for the bounty of good fortune he has provided this year. Even at our best, we all have moments of weakness and failure. While enjoying the successes at my job, I have had a few nasty potholes jump up recently that have threatened to take the whole thing off...

Two years, I was remembering my mother and reliving the last memories I have of her. It was a very emotional and cathartic time for me, and using this blog to recount that terrible time was very therapeutic. I would recommend going back and looking at those posts. I do often, and did last week on the advice of a friend. During that time, I wrote a blog entitled "The Pocketwatch". It is my favorite Christmas story, and has become an annual tradition on this blog. Please enjoy and I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas! As a kid growing up, Christmas Eve was always the most special day of the year. Aside from the Santa visit, the day was filled with so much tradition and family that is was more like an event than a holiday. Everyone would gather at my grandparents house for Christmas dinner. Cars would fill the drive way, be parked on the hill, and even in the front yard. It was always a feast, with us kids pushing everyone to finish their plates so we could get to the...

Went to write a blog today. Half way through I realized it sucked. So I started over.  12-12-12. Cool, but not as cool as 11-11-11. Either way, we are all still breathing. At least for 9 days til the world ends.  Thats it. Loving life.  Day # 618 and still rocks to be me. Have a great day everyone.

I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. I am not a football star, a race car driver, a police officer, a teacher, a pilot, a garbage man, or the President of the United States. I am pretty good at my job, like to write and have thought about penning a book, and enjoy tinkering with my model trains and cars in my spare time. I have a mind for math but am so glad my career doesn't require Algebra. I can shoot a mean game of pool and throw darts with anyone. I like to think of myself as a great brother, good friend, wonderful boyfriend/fiancee, and the type of son that makes my father proud. But none of it has ever come as naturally as the one truth I know about myself. I was put on this Earth to be my boys Dad. There was once a time when I knew the best place for my three sons was with their mother. When we separated, I told everyone that I would leave them with her so she could get max child support and so their lives were not disrupted any more than they needed to be. And whi...

For the last week or so, I have been thinking about the path and where it is leading. At work, the year is winding down and my boss is setting new goals in place. While I am on board with what he is trying to do, I also have to look at the bigger picture and what is best for Tiffany, the boys and myself. I do love my job, but there are times that it seems the minutia gets in the way of the bigger picture. The unfortunate part about that is those small details are the bread and butter of a company like ours. And while you are never going to please everyone, getting those around me to understand that the speed bumps don't negate the highway is another challenge entirely. Recently I have written about a number of topics that will feed into this one. I had a friend tell me I should write a book. And while that seems like an immense project that will require months if not years to accomplish, I look at the blog and think about the things I have written here. My posts are random, and d...

I have a little confession to make. I have never played the lottery before. Sure, I have thought about it many times when the jackpots reached eye popping numbers. My ex-father in law used to play everyday, and would hit for a few thousand bucks every year. I often wondered if, at about 30 bucks a day, if he spent more than he won each year. But I have never filled out a lotto ticket and eagerly anticipated the drawing, hoping that the numbers would come up and change my life forever. However, on the drive back from an inspection in Chillicothe yesterday, I stopped to get something to drink and thought oh what the heck. I had been told that the tickets were a dollar each, and you can have more than one set of numbers to play. I asked the clerk for 5 powerball tickets. She asked if I wanted the power play and I said no thanks, like I knew what I was talking about. She handed me a ticket with one set of numbers and said 10 bucks please. I was a little confused, until she explained that...

There was a time in my childhood that was very bad. From mid 1980 to the end of 1985, my family went through a very dark period that I choose not to think about for the most part now that I am grown. Without going into the details, I will simply say that my mother was married to a very unstable person who I now refer to as the monster. And while this blog is not bout him, or the egregious things he did to me and my family, I will tell you that hate is a very strong word filled with overpowering emotions. And I hate that man. Those were the days before my Dad, before my kids Poppa. When he came into our lives and married my mother, everything got better and better. He was a real man, a real father, and offered us stability that we had never experienced before. But the dark years do have a story, one that I may tell in detail someday. This blog is about a very small part of those times. In those 5 and a half years we moved. A lot. I spent kindergarten and part  first grade in one...