One thing I don’t believe that I have mentioned before is that my little brother is a writer, and a pretty decent one at that. One of his books that I believe is currently out of print is called ‘Prayer at Rumayla; A Novel of the Gulf War’. He is doing it in an audio podcast and the book will be going back into print later this year. Right now you can get the podcast for free through iTunes, but he is asking for reviews over at his site. You can get more details about Prayer at Rumayla here and don’t forget to visit his blog while you are there.
Parenting/Family
Check These Bad Boys Out
It’s a pretty crappy picture, but as I mentioned last night when I posted those pics of the girls working on my hair, my batteries crapped out in my camera and I haven’t had the chance to replace them yet. Cell phone pics.
Nothing like a pair of shiny new shoes. Just ask Eric. Now I may not be a flaming metrosexual, but I can recognize the value of a nice pair of shoes. Normally I will wait to buy new work shoes until the current pair have all but fallen apart. When I can feel the ground with the bottom of my feet, it’s time for new ones. The pair I have now are probably good for a month or two, but they look like hell. Waffle batter, plenty of water, grease, and plenty of other unmentionables have touched those shoes, and there’s only so much spit shining that you can do to fix them up. I decided Sunday that I needed to go ahead and get a new pair, so I got on shoesforcrews.com and ordered me up a pair. As Dax will tell you, these are the best damn shoes you can get working in the restaurant industry.
The thing is, I only wear Wingtips. I don’t like Oxfords, and I hate any type of slip ons ad sneakers. Sneakers look like shit when you are trying to look professional. Wal-Mart quit carrying Wingtips. Sears, K-Mart, and all of the shoe stores in my area quit selling them. I guess they are going out of style or something. God forbid something a man wears going out of style. We wear the same clothes for fifty years and they are always in style. Apparently not anymore. Anyhow, Shoes For Crews is the only place I have been able to find them, plus they are non slip, water resistant, and are pretty comfortable.
For something that I just felt like posting, they should be paying my butt for this one.
I ended up running to Villa Rica tonight. Apparently the LDS meeting is professional (suit) dress only. No uniforms. Most of my nice clothes are no longer nice or the must have shrunk. Can’t get them on anymore. I know I haven’t gotten any bigger. You believe me dontcha? Anyway, I picked up a pair of slacks, a shirt and tie. I will forgo the suit jacket. Not happening. Send my ass home if you need to.
That’s about it I think. It’s almost 11 PM and I have to get up at 4:30 as usual.
Devil Knots
There are some things that you always remember about your kids, no matter how much time goes by. When the boy was small, we had these little blue airplane looking things that we put over his shoelaces in order to keep them tied. Eventually they went the way of all things that belong to little kids, they disappeared. We started tyeing his shoes in double knots, but somehow HE heard “devil knots”. Devil knots they have been, through all three kids.
With Pete, it was the red man. On her walker there was a bar that we could put on (I think it was on her walker) and it had three little guys on it that would spin. She would invariably go after Red Man every time.
I actually feel pretty good today. The wife bought me some vitamins yesterday. I have taken them for two days now and I am not quite as exhausted as I have felt for the last couple of weeks. It’s a nice feeling to be at work and actually accomplish something besides wanting to rush out the door the entire day. Of course I could still find better things to be doing, but at least I was able to get some stuff done.
The boy has apparently hurt his wrist, the dumbass. Not for hurting himself, but for the fact that he did it at least a couple of weeks ago. He hasn’t been working out, but didn’t bother to say anything to us. The wife made him an appointment for Friday since I am off. They may need to X-Ray his wrist. Hopefully all will be well.
One of my old manager trainees called me this morning at work asking if I could send her a cook. As I generally cook by myself I don’t have any extras to send, but when I asked her why she told me that she had worked a triple shift and was working on her fourth and just needed some help. Shit. That’s not the way we do things, so I asked her what her boss had said or done last night when she called him with her staffing. She said, “well, he didn’t answer the phone. At that point I would have started working my way up the chain of command until I found some help, but she is new. That is exactly what I did. I called her bosses boss, and when he didn’t answer the damn phone, I called the Area Vice President. She had some help shortly after that and was told to take the day off. Sucks to be her, but she should have picked up the phone yesterday, rather than waiting until 7:15 this morning after she had been there for 25 hours.
Small Miracles
When Pete was born in October of 1997 it was a real shocker. Not that she was born, but all that we had to go through.
We had gone in to the doctor’s office to get the wife an ultrasound, and they noticed some weird stuff on it, so wanted us to go down to Northside and have one there. Originally we had planned on birthing with a midwife in Carrollton rather than being in a big hospital.
We got down there and they wanted to do an internal ultrasound. Apparently there was way too much fluid. Long story short, it broke her water. The wife ended up giving birth the Pete at Northside hospital, and apparently things weren’t looking too good. For awhile they weren’t even sure that she was going to live or not. It was all pretty damned scary.
Some of the details are pretty fuzzy now, but that could be that I just woke up too. I may add to this when I get home from work this evening. My wife has posted about tthis before and probably remembers much more.
Anyway, They decided that the thing to do was move her to Scottish Rite, which is across the street from Northside. Had the wife’s water not broken at Northside Hospital and given birth to my daughter there, if they had moved her at all, it would have been to send her down to Columbus. It is extremely unlikely that she would have lived at all.
If I remember correctly, the surgery itself too somewhere around eight hours. We were on pins and needles all day. I don’t remember ever having been so scared or worried at any point prior or since then.
A portion of her small intestine had never opened up, so everything was trying to go back the other way. She was full of myconium. They ended up taking out about ten centimeters of it, and they moved some stuff around that was in the wrong place.
She ended up being in Scottish rite in the ICU for 40 days or so. When we brought her home, it was still on monitors. We had to feed her every couple of hours, as the amounts she was getting were so small. She still had tubes and whatnot hanging out of her when we brought her home as well. It is just amazing to me that she is living a normal healthy life.
In 1998
This is her at one or so.
With her NEW little sister (at that time)
Halloween 2002
2006 Softball Season. She is playing again this year. Practice has already started but I think we have a couple of weeks before the first game.
The Scurvy Dogs!
Not too bad of a day for a Saturday…
Just got home from work. I ended up having a little bit of help today, so it was a short one for me, which is always nice. The boy is going to play paint-ball and the wife is napping, with Pete at the ballfields, so it is just RePete and myself. Once I have posted a bit and checked my email I think we are going out to plant a tree.
It’s about time to start cleaning my yard up and decide how big of a garden I want this year. I meant to bring some Jabanero peppers with me to the Helen blogmeet last year for Yabu, but I left them sitting on the counter. I have a couple of them in the ground that I am hoping come back this year. It was the first year that I have tried to grow them, so I don’t know how well the roots survive the winter. If not I will probably grow some in containers.
I had a huge crop of tomatoes, and peppers (bells, bananas, chili’s, jabaneros, hell even some I don’t remember) last year. I am thinking about a small area with corn this year. I have a pretty small yard, but I think I could manage a couple of rows of eight or ten plants.
I am also expanding the area around the goldfish pond again. I really need a tiller, but I will do most of it by hand. The soil sucks so bad here that I end up tilling it and then mixing with potting soil and top soil before I plant. Probably I will put in some more of the really big elephant ears. They look great later in the summer when they are really huge. There’s some pictures here somewhere if you want to see.
Monitoring the Kids Online
One thing I set up when the Boy was first starting to get online was a watchdog program so that I could monitor his Internet usage. There are just too many pedophiles and other bad folks out there not to, not to mention the fact that just going to his game sites he can pretty much access any type of porn he wants.
It is particularly important for me to watch what the girls are doing. RePete is still young enough that the only thing even remotely close to computers she gets is playing on my iPaq, but Pete is online quite a bit, at least an hour a day and I want to be able to track what she is doing, but not be intrusive about it.
One way for me to take care of the internet monitoring is with SpectorSoft computer monitoring. It allows me to know every single thing that they do on the computer. Spector Pro records emails, chats, MySpace activity recording, even key logging. That way if they join a site without my permission, I have the passwords and can get in and see what is going on.
My children’s safety is just too important for me to leave to chance, and if I have to feel like I am spying on them to make sure that they are safe, so be it.
PHP Code
Just woke up from my nap. I managed to get about an hour between phone calls and Pete getting home and asking if she could go out and play. My wife calls the girls Pete and RePete, and I am tired of calling them “the oldest girl” so am adopting it. RePete is still sleep, but I will be getting her up shortly so that she will sleep tonight.
I fixed the code at the bottom of each entry that shows the time of my posts. It is supposed to say “Posted xx minutes/days ago by Richard”. Half the time it works, half the time it says 31 days ago, and in the case of the one that I have dated for 11:59 PM tonight it says 30 days ago. It’s a big pain in the butt is what it is. I just used the code from the default movabletype template for that.
Why Am I Still Awake?…
…at 2:30 AM. 22 Hours after I got out of bed last.
Good question and one which doesn’t have a real clear answer other than the fact that sometimes I am a dumb ass of the third degree. Actually I have a black belt in dumbassery.
I got up at the usual time yesterday, about 4:30 AM or so. Surfed the web, posted a little bullshit, a couple of paid ads, drank coffee. Normally I will hit the shower between 5:30 and 6:00. Since I work so much closer to home now it has more often than not been closer to 6 AM. Then I go to work, getting there by 6:30. I was pretty worn out by the time the first shift was over so I locked everything up, picked up the four year old and came home. I attempted to nap for awhile, but was only partially successful.
I had to go back to work at 8:30 to oversee the next shift change and finish the paperwork that I had locked in the office earlier in the day. Count all of the food in the restaurant, count the money, make up my bank deposit so I could drop it at the bank on the way home. Deal with 100 stupid things that needed to be dealt with. It was around midnight when I finally got home. Very rarely can I just come home from work and go to bed. I have to have a bit of wind down time. Normally that’s spent on the computer. I posted some more, and surfed for a few minutes.
Unfortunately the four year old is developing a pretty nasty cough. I took her to the doctor late last week and they said she was coming down with a cold, so we have been fighting that. I am letting her sleep on the couch tonight, she is pretty congested and will sleep better reclining than being flat on her back. That I guess is the main reason I am still up listening to her cough. She’s had some medicine now though, hopefully she will start sleeping a little better, because I am getting pretty droopy here. Nodding off and making all sorts of typing errors. Thank god for spell check. Now if it could just check my grammar and post for me too, all would be well in my world.
I was going to keep her home Friday and spend tomorrow sleeping in, but I may reverse that and keep her here tomorrow. I have someone’s laptop to fix, and taxes to do for one of my waitresses, as well as a couple of netflix DVDs that I still need to copy and send back, so that I can watch them later. I don’t guess I will be getting much in the way of rest tomorrow. One can only hope that they let me sleep in for at least a little while. Since the girl is sick, if she stays home she may sleep in as well. I damn sure am keeping my fingers crossed.
Happy VD Day…
Well, hell with it. Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you suckers out there who are spending their hard earned money on crap that isn’t needed. I suppose there are worse things that you could be doing with it. At least you aren’t like some of the people that have worked for me in the past. A good valentine might be some crack, or a bag of pills. Actually a good muscle relaxer might do me some good right now. My back has been killing me for a few days now. Not real sure why, I haven’t over done it this week. It was a somewhat long week, but nothing too strenuous.
Just received a call from the recruiter that works in my area. I have to go to one of those leadership development seminars on the 26th. Damn. Well, at the very least I will get a free dinner out of it. The last one of these that I had to go to was the one where I won a Smoky Bones gift certificate for my presentation. That’s one of the reasons I have done those stupid porncast videos so enthusiastically. It’s all fun and games, but it helps me to be a bit more comfortable with public speaking as well.
The oldest girls just got home from school, now she is off to play with a friend again. I really need to work on my taxes but I think I will put it off at least until this evening. I’m getting faster with it every year, so it shouldn’t take me too long. I think I am only doing them for one of my waitresses this year as well, so that will be a piece of cake, as well as a quick $50. Now if only we could get the damn Fair Tax passed…
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Somewhat Sad
What a day. I write this with just a glimmer of a tear in my eye.
I’ve gone through most of the day just as normal, not really thinking about anything other than work and trying to make sure that my level of patience stays at a decent level. After my meeting tonight I was talking to my boss about the Boy joining the Marine Corps and hell, I wanted to start crying. Don’t know what’s up with that, but it’s like trying to be two different people at once.
He is in Atlanta right now, took the Asvab this afternoon and will stay overnight. Tomorrow he takes his physical and will get the initial swearing in. From that point on it is only a few months until he goes to boot camp, most likely in June. Hopefully he will be going to Parris Island, it will be a damn site easier to get up there than to go visit the Hollywood Marines out in San Diego.
Sometimes this parenting stuff just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I feel as if my heart is breaking at the same time that it’s busting with pride.
Semper Fi little buddy, I love you.
