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Taking the wee one to the doctor shortly so I figured I would stop in for a minute or two.

My youngest has always been pretty tiny but for the last year or so she has had quite a few growth spurts and the growing pains are excruciating for her. I can remember how my legs hurt as a teen and it was not something I particularly enjoyed.

While it is most likely exactly what I posted above, we just want to make sure that it’s just growing pains. She cries at times because they are so bad. It may just be that her tolerance for pain is not particularly high but we have to be sure.

It’s been a pretty uneventful vacation week so far, which is a good thing. Still trying to make up for lost sleep but the fact that I am staying up too late and still getting up with the family in the morning doesn’t help. Today was the last day this week I would have been able to sleep in due to plans for the rest of the week. Maybe after I drop my daughter at school I can get a nap in.

Anyway, not much else planned. I am going to get back to scanning some of my dad’s old slides tonight and I’ll either post them to Flickr or Facebook or perhaps both. Some of his date back to the early sixties but there are quite a few photos as far back as the 1800’s including some dry plates (glass negative plates). Eventually I will get them all scanned as well as a shitload of documents and then I will donate most of the older stuff to the Sandy Springs Historical Society. My Great Aunt Sold/Donated the last 22 acres of the family property and a park is supposed to be created there. It’s called the Lost Corner Preserve. It sort of pissed me off at the time that my father and his brother were never notified about it but since the land passed from her brothers to my Aunt Peggy there wasn’t a fuck of a lot to do after the fact.

All seems to be well with the site now. The reason stuff wasn’t updating properly was due to a caching plugin I am using. Not much time for blogging today but hopefully I can start getting stuff up again on a regular basis. I have to devote more time to the crime blog but those links will show up here as well.

Not sure what’s going on but it may have something to do with my theme. It doesn’t seem to want to refresh a page until I actually add new content if at all. I didn’t discover it until I had done quite a bit of work getting rid of menus and some of the sidebar stuff and added my own. It’s very puzzling but I will figure it out eventually.

I will be using this as a site to not only occasionally post but also to aggregate everything I do around the web. I am using Diso Actionstreams, which is a port of Movabletype’s Actionstreams plugin. I tried several different Action Stream plugins and either they only offer sidebar content, didn’t do exactly what I want, or were just plain crap.

So I have successfully made the switch over from Movabletype to WordPress. Some of the links and comments may have issues for a while but everything seems to be moving along nicely. There have been some issues with Disqus linking to the old blog from the comments and I haven’t quite figured that one out yet but I may have time later this week.

I am currently on a much-needed vacation which started Saturday. Not doing much this week but the girls and I did manage to drive up to Tennessee yesterday and pay a visit to Eric and his lovely wife. We had a nice lunch in town and just hung out for a while teaching the girls the finer points of shooting pool, something I enjoy doing but am not very good at.

It’s about a three hour drive to their place straight up 113/120 to 441. The last time I made the trip was during October two years ago and at that time the trees were in full fall foliage mode. Very beautiful. The girls were well-behaved on the drive and it was very enjoyable. The drive home always seems to take a bit longer and I was pretty tired. Had to stop about an hour from Eric’s and find one of those nasty five-hour-energy drinks. I hate them and have always made a practice of shying away from any type of energy drink but as I was starting to nod off I had to have something. 5-hour-energy is like crack. Not very good for you and only lasts a little while. It did help me to get home though.

I seem to be suffering from a bit of sleep deprivation, which may explain why I was so wiped out early in the evening. Opened a new store two weeks ago and it’s been kicking my ass. It’s a half hour from the house and is actually well outside the geographical area where my other stores are. As a matter of fact by all rights it should belong to someone else but between myself and my boss we have opened more new stores than their entire team put together. Hell, I’ve probably opened new stores than they have.

It sits right in the middle of fucking nowhere. Very few restaurants and an extremely large residential area. Since we opened two weeks ago every days has been like Christmas. Literally. For those that don’t know Christmas is the busiest day of the year for our company. Up until the last few years nobody else opens their doors on Christmas day and it’s normally standing room only from 6am until midnight. And so I have been working from 630am until whenever I get home. Some days the store manager has worked late and I get to go home but he is brand new, just like 90% of my hourly associates. He’s like a fucking deer caught in the headlights.

I really can’t complain too much though because at the end of the day it translates into more money for me to bank and that’s why I keep doing this.

Anyway, welcome to the sort of new site. If you haven’t been here before don’t expect much. I seem to rarely post anymore although now it’s tied in with my crime site and I may be able to post once or twice a week before I pass out at night. Basically all Skullfucking amounts to is a place for me to rant. I am rude and unapologetic. If you don’t like it go somewhere else and bother someone who gives a fuck. Don’t expect any beautiful prose or wit. I am rambling and jump from one subject to the next and sometimes I just post plain old weird shit.

It’s not often that I have a day at work that’s quite as ugly as yesterday was. Most days it’s just the same old thing at work. Nothing particularly exciting happens and that’s quite a good thing.

Yesterday was a bit different though. Not in the “exciting” department, but damn sure not boring.

I have worked very hard over the last few years to learn to be nice to people at work and not to snap at them when they are doing something I consider wrong. While they do need to “do right” nobody deserves to work with an asshole and that’s exactly what I used to be at work.

It took every ounce of energy yesterday not to tell the person I was working with on the grill to just fucking leave if they couldn’t step up the pace a bit. It’s fucking embarrassing to not be able to get folks taken care of in a timely manner, particularly when I live here in town and have to see those same customers day in and day out.

I have to work with the same woman this morning and hopefully today will go at least a little bit smoother than yesterday did.

Not that I post regularly enough for anyone to actually come here and comment but as I am tired of all the fucking spam that Movabletype lets through, even using Sixaparts spam plugin, I have changed the commenting system.

I have been using Disqus over at my crime blog for about nine months now and it has done a great job for me. It allows for you to continue and comment anonymously or you can sign up there and upload your avatar. You can also use your Facebook or twitter account for verification and it will use whatever avatar you have set up there.

Disqus also allows for comment posting without having to refresh the page, which is something I’ve been wanting for a while anyway.

I did make a few other changes which knocked out my sidebar links and stuff. I’ll get that stuff back on shortly.

My dad would have been 64 today had it not been for his untimely passing 13 days ago.

I started writing this post a week or so ago and have erased the first couple of paragraphs two or three times simply because I pen a few words and then don’t know what to say, don’t like what I’ve said or just think it looks stupid as hell.

The last two weeks have been pretty difficult for me as well as the rest of my family, particularly my mother. The two of them have been together for the better part of 48 years except for his time overseas and occasional business trips. My parents, like myself (or vice versa), have never been huge social butterflies or anything along those lines. While they have friends, they are each other’s best friends. It’s pretty fucking hard to lose your best friend in life.

I suppose one of the reasons I am having a difficult time finding the right words is the fact that I haven’t really given myself time to grieve or work this out for myself and what it means for me. I’ve spent the last two weeks keeping busy and that’s it. I don’t really know how to grieve very well. I’m not a particularly emotional person, or at least I hide it well anyway. Messy emotions have no place in my little plan and tears get in the way. That makes for a pretty fucked up day when you just want to shed a few tears.

I think I’ll just ramble for a while. Stick around. Or not. I don’t really give a fuck.

…

Some of my favorite memories from my childhood were our camping trips. My dad, while not an avid outdoorsman, loved to go camping. They did it as children as well and he spent his childhood in the Boy Scouts, as did I. I can’t recall if he ever made Eagle Scout or not but if not he was pretty damned close. I think I remember him talking about the Explorers, so that would mean that he was an Eagle.

As I said, camping was a favored activity as a child. Since it was the four of us it was never serious backpacking but just having a good time at places like Stone Mountain, Amicalola Falls and Unicoi. One year we camped at Stone Mountain on Easter weekend. That was pretty fun. The park was different then than in recent years.

When I was ten my mom and dad took me to Disney World. That was my first trip there and a memory which I cherish. Back then it was only a few years old and the only park was the Magic Kingdom and you had the choice of three different places to stay unless you wanted a hotel in Orlando. We camped in the Fort Wilderness campsites, which is where I took the family in April 2009. I can remember sitting on the beach with my mom and dad watching the light show on the lake that they did at night. Utterly fantastic, particularly for a child of ten. I got the privilege of using their early 70’s Kodak Instamatic 110 during the trip and took all sorts of nonsensical pictures and maybe a few decent ones as well. I don’t have any of them but I plan on rectifying that son. I’m pretty sure my mom has some of them in photo albums I can scan.

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One thing I never understood until the last few years is how much pride my dad took in his two sons. I seem to remember doing a lot of stupid shit as a kid and once I hit high school it only got worse. The proverbial black sheep, as it were. At one point in time they thought about sending me to live with my Great Aunt who had retired in Florida, but my other relatives down there wanted no part of my acting out so they had to choose other solutions which we won’t get into here. I didn’t involve duct tape though, thank goodness.

There are people who can make the right decisions automatically all through their lives and be very successful. I’m not one of them. Until the last few years I’ve made a lot of bad choices, tend to jump to instant decisions rather than weighing the consequences, just generally didn’t care at the time how my choices would play out in the lives of other people. We are after all the center of our own universes. Being the center of my own universe hasn’t changed much but I’ve learned from doing stupid shit. Learning from our mistakes and taking a different course of action is one of the things that makes us human I guess.

All the while I was making bad choices my father was unwavering in his love for me. I realize that now and I never had the opportunity to express that to him, which is now distressing me to no end. I only recall a couple of occasions where he would get really angry and I deserved it at the time. Mostly it was just concern and love and when I would eventually work my way out of the situation my parents were still there.

….

It’s hard to type when you can’t see the fucking keyboard through the mist.

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This thing has been sitting on my computer most of the day today. I meant to finish the post but I think I’ll just put it up as is.

We’re hosting a get-together at Casa Miles the weekend of August 14th at our place. Cook-out, hang out, nothing spectacular. I’ll send out some facebook messages and emails but if I forget you shoot me an email and I’ll send you directions.

The wife is graduating with her EDS next weekend, which is part of the celebration although she doesn’t want to have a party for herself so we’re calling it a back to school thing. There will be the usual debauchery but as always kids are welcome so not too much drinking or grossness 🙂

While I am posting crime entries at an entirely different site now some of the archives remain. The images are gone but the posts are all mirrored at the other site.

My personal stuff is at yet another blog. I most likely won’t be moving them over here because it’s a big pain in the ass to export and import seven + years of entries.

Why three sites?

I figure I will continue to post in all three. This one for mostly family-safe stuff (other than the older crime-related posts that your children darn sure don’t need to see, my other personal one for NSFW type junk and general ramblings, and of course the third site for my crime-blogging exploits. I also actually own a few more domains with blogs on them and may or may not occasionally update them as well, depending on my current set of interests and time.

Anyway, see you at some point tomorrow!