Someone recently pointed out to me that I have a rather drama filled life although through no fault of my own. In recent weeks I have been laid off, failed to have all of the help I needed come through, had a kid disappear for hours and ended up involving the cops, had my dad in the ER with random pain, and most recently discovered that there is no way in hell I can make the Suburban Home Records anniversary party that I have been planning to attend for about a year. I guess that’s more than one person’s fair share of drama and most of it was nothing I could have done anything about. I, like most people, tend to talk about the bad stuff more often than the good stuff mostly due to the fact that what stresses us is what is on our mind. So today I took a look around and tried to find some good stuff in my life and not surprisingly there is plenty. The funny thing is that I am an advocate of finding the good in life and concentrating on it. Recently that has been a real bitch for me because it seems that things are just piling up with no end in sight. This affects my attitude overall and more to the point what I post here and on Twitter. So please forgive me if I have become a soap opera as of late. I really didn’t mean to go down that road.
On the upside my ex-wife has moved back to Houston. That’s a good thing because she already came and got the kids. They will be staying with her for a week and while I will miss them they need a better relationship with her. She’s not real close to us but it’s under an hour drive with no traffic to their place. She, in the past few years, renewed her relationship with her father and they are living in the same triplex as him. So the kids, Anna and Aoghdan, get to develop a relationship with him as well. There’s still the issue of child support, which I could really use right about now but she has never paid it so it’s not like I have come to expect anything from her. She has matured over the years and I am stoked that the kids will finally get to develop a relationship with her that isn’t just a few weeks in the summer. I really don’t have any hard feelings towards her and everything in the past stays where it belongs so this is a very good thing.
I also have made a commitment to be more involved in the kids schooling. This won’t be easy for me but it will be bad ass for everyone involved. It means that I have to not just fall on to the couch when I get home but rather go over the day with each kid and find out what they did, how it went, where they need help and what they are interested in learning. You see we are also dropping a set curriculum and go with unschooling. I used to think that unschooling was an excuse for lazy parents but having read up on the practices and ideas behind it I think it’s a better way to do things. I think the kids will take some time to adjust as will Michelle and I but in the end I think it will be a much better way to teach them what they need to know to get into college and function as adults. I am actually very excited about doing this!
I also recently acquired, or will be acquiring, enough hardwood flooring to do the living/dining area of the house. This means that all I have to buy is the underlayer and can lay it in probably a weekend. It’s a lot of work but that means we are less than a couple of months away from being able to have people over the house again for dinner and parties. We haven’t been able to in a long while and it drives me nuts. I will be so happy when we get it all fixed up. Believe me it’s a long road but there’s light at the end of that tunnel.
So there’s some good things that are going on in my life at the moment. There’s more but I think that’s enough for a Friday post. If you know anyone who wants to fund my going to Denver with the wife in about two weeks please send them my way. It’ll be the first time her and I have ever taken a vacation without the kids. I know it’s a long shot at this point and am not getting my hopes up but maybe one of my readers is wealthy or five of them have sixty bucks sitting around and want to see me and the wife be able to take our fist vacation. Not much of a bleg I know but I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot.
Since I am probably not going to Denver I will be making a Suburban Home mix tape over the next little while and posting it some time in the future so keep your eyes open…
24
Aug
I get so sick of people claiming to have rights they don’t have. Recently we have seen Dr. Laura claiming that her First Amendment rights are being violated in some way because there are consequences to the things she says. Now mind you these are not government consequences but social and possibly monetary consequences. This woman actually has a PhD and doesn’t understand that the First Amendment only guarantees the government cannot interfere with your speech, which they haven’t since she still had a radio show until she resigned, so her First Amendment rights weren’t violated. The idiot told a black lady she needed thicker skin and then, live on the air, said “nigger” a bunch of times and is now upset that people are pissed at her about it! Yeah it’s time for her to walk away from her radio show and hopefully into obscurity where she belongs.
What gets me even more is people claiming that red light cameras, in Houston, violate their right to confront their accuser! At first glance it might seem like it does but that right only applies to criminal prosecution and red light camera tickets are civil violations. The city cannot issue a warrant for a red light camera ticket, they cannot garnish your wages, they cannot stop you from registering your car and they can’t even put it on your driving record! The Texas law allowing the use of red light cameras states:
FAILURE TO PAY CIVIL PENALTY (a) If the owner of the motor vehicle fails to timely pay the amount of the civil penalty imposed against the owner:
an arrest warrant may not be issued for the owner; and(2) the imposition of the civil penalty may not be recorded on the owners driving record.(b) Notice of Subsection (a) MUST be included in the notice of violation by Section 707.011(c)
You do not have a right to confront your accuser in a civil trial so red light cameras are not taking away that right. In fact you can pretty much ignore the ticket altogether since the city can’t even put it on your driving record. The worst they can do is hire a collection agency and put it on your credit report which you can dispute and I doubt they have the resources to respond and have it put back on your credit report. So morons, yes you in the Houston Chronicle’s comments, your rights aren’t being violated because you didn’t have the rights you think you had to begin with. You should have learned this in High School. I pray you are not pissing in the gene pool by having kids and passing on your idiocy.
UPDATE: I so need to stop reading the comments on new articles. They are not good for my blood pressure. And typo corrected.
24
Aug
Yesterday around 5 pm my lovely wife calls me and says that Aoghdan, my oldest boy, and his cousin are nowhere to be found and no one knows how long they have been gone. You see she has been ill and my mom was over watching the kids so that she could rest. At some point James and Aoghdan left the house without telling anyone and disappeared. In hindsight they must have left about 3 pm but we didn’t know that then. So Michelle walked around our neighborhood including going down to the creek, searching the large field down the street and checking at every house where Aoghdan has friends. On my home from work around 7 pm she calls me to let me know they still haven’t been found. My mom had taken Anna driving around looking at all the places Anna knows that they hang out as well as driving every street in the neighborhood around ours so they were nowhere to be found. I didn’t get worried as James is 15 and Aoghdan is 11 and anyone with a lick of sense knows that if you put two boys close to the same together they become instant dumbasses. When I got home to change shoes so I could get out and trek down the creek my dad was there helping look and my brother was on his way. We all looked for about an hour and around 8 pm I called the sheriff’s department as we live in the county. Meanwhile one of our really sweet neighbors was really upset that they couldn’t be found and went out looking as well.
Now I grew up with kid who is now a sheriff’s deputy so when the call went out he mentioned he knew the family and three deputies, including my friend showed up and started planning to knock doors. The procedure is start tight and work outwards. They were estimating how many deputies they would need to knock the whole of both neighborhoods when our neighbor called and said she had found the boys. They were about 6 miles away. She caught them walking in the median on a rather busy street. When she brought them home we found out that they had gone down to the reservoir, a flood control area, which is not a safe place. With the deputies still there the first thing the boys had to do was apologize. While my friend cancelled the extra deputies coming the female deputy that was with there lit into the boys and tore them up. She went up one side and down the other. James started to argue her points, like he does with everyone, and me and my brother shut him down real fast. When she paused my friend would interject comments like “Someone’s ass is getting whipped tonight” or “Boys you gotta take what your dads are gonna dish out like men” and so on. The boys stood there with looks of what can only be described as terror and the deputy described a funeral she had attended very recently for another deputy who died on the job. How did he die? He fell into the reservoir and the current caught him. He wasn’t an Olympic swimmer but he knew how to swim. Theystood stark still as she told them about knocking a whole neighborhood, two years ago, in a similar situation only to find the body of the girl they were looking for in the attic of one of the houses they knocked days later. I found out after the deputies left that the idiots had set a fire, a campfire, in the woods near the reservoir and damn near lost my cool.
When everyone finally cleared out the punishment began. I was way too angry to take a belt to the boy so got PT for a solid half hour. He got to hold the push up position for a few minutes, he got to hold a crunch position for a few minutes and then he got to alternate between sets of twenty squats and thirty jumping jacks. Couple that with him having walked well over six miles he was sore this morning when I started his PT again. He was already grounded so everything else was taken away. His mom just moved back here and her and her husband agreed to continue whatever punishment I deemed appropriate. So he is grounded from everything in the world except playing in the backyard and reading for two weeks and for that two weeks he will do PT at least every evening during that time. Some days I wish I was a dad back in the day where I could take my boys out to woodshed and use a razor strop to teach them some sense but since we live in these “modern” times I have to be more creative. I am guessing that by the end of this two weeks Aoghdan will wish we had a woodshed and razor strop but alas we do not so PT it is. I think I’ll work some wall sits in to routine tonight. If any of you know of any exercises that are easy in form but provide a good workout I would greatly appreciate if you would share them in the comments. I would hate for the boy to get bored with the same PT routine every night!
OK so I didn’t have a party or even go out and it’s five days late to boot but here’s my birthday mix tape. I did put it together on my actual birthday, Aug 18, but I hadn’t been able to take the time to upload it until today. I usually debate whether or not to celebrate the day at all and end up somewhere with friends knocking back a few but this year that didn’t happen. The reason why doesn’t matter and is personal so I am not going to go into it. I made this mix before I knew what was up and it took sort of a morbid turn for a birthday mix even then. It’s five days late but I figured I’d post it anyway in hopes that someone might enjoy it.
I am off to wreak more havoc on the unsuspecting drivers on I-10 all of whom I will shortly think should DIE IN A FIRE. Yes it’s raining in Houston and a single drop within five miles I-10 turns everyone into complete idiots.
17
Aug
Some days you just have to take it easy. Today ain’t one of those days. From finding out there is a fetish involving popping balloons to working with virtual machines in Xen there is very little easy to take. My morning was made just a little nice by Seamus making me a birthday card, “Because tomorrow is your birthday”, complete with a little Potter’s Cards logo on the back that he was a little embarrassed about. I don’t have walls on which to hang things at the new desk but if I did that would be the centerpiece for a good long while.
