random notes while on vacation

So i walk into a bar in St. Catherines Ontario and ask the bartender "what do you have on tap that has a lot of hops in it", and she looks at me and say's "what's that?"... so i dumb it down a bit and ask for an IPA and she say's "never heard of it, I have coors light, Molson Canadian, Rickards red, Rickards blond and Budweiser".

Holy ^&$^$*!

You see this is why i go on "vacation", it is just an actual exercise in reminding myself how good i have it.  Did i mention 3 Rickards Blond, because they were actually out of the red, cost $23, and came with a chance to witness an incredibly painful bar staff banter.  Mind you when you are staying in a shithole Motel your local options are perhaps not the best...  My wife and i take shifts running to the watering hole while the kids toss and turn to avoid the bed bugs (joking i hope).

I got wise today,  Ice bucket full of candy assed expensive beers, and I'll hold the fort down while my partner sucks back a few Ceasers in the clown show lounge next door.  I have a hard time looking at a bartender who doesn't know what an IPA is...

It's the problem with moving away from home and having parents and children... the good thing to do is to spent your time bringing your kids back to see the family, and all in all we have it pretty good... not too many totally insane family members with weird ideas about what we should be doing... perhaps we are getting wise... we are in a motel which gives us some control over our situation and when we wake up.

We are a sleep in family... we sleep in until we are no longer tired.  Most say we are lucky and can't believe our fortune... i believe we just trained people properly.  In fact many have commented on how good our kids are, one even mentioned "where do you buy kids like that"...  Obviously you can't buy that, you have to raise it, and i could tell you how but you would hear things you wouldn't like and make an excuse for why you can't do that and we would be back to your problems...

Perhaps i should write a book on child rearing, but i might run into the same problems i had when i tried to teach people how to teach themselves how to play guitar.  You end up talking to people who don't speak the same language as yourself and so your methods don't apply to their situation.  Me, I'm not big on sales or trying to change people and those are the two things i would have to focus on for this venture to work.  Sales pitches irritate the shit out of me... a custom designed set of words placed to start a conversation that will separate a sucker from his money.   And changing people... do people actually really want to change? or do they just say they do to get attention?  I believe more the latter, and that is a horrible belief for sure, but i have it.

Good news is kids are getting to see some cousins, and they are getting along quite well.... two sets of girl twins all cute as hell, just don't try to photograph them all together or your brain might collapse... you might have better luck filming 4 peaceful cats in a bathtub full of water.

Sometimes kids just don't give a shit about being photographed... and who can blame them?  All of these fucking idiot adults with their rules and their cameras trying to micromanage the next game you are in the middle of playing.  At some point you have to stop and say in your head screw this.... i have already stopped and smiled for thousands of pictures in the last few days... enough is enough we are going to play our game and if you can't be a good enough photographer to slip into the reeds ad get your shot then screw it.  Hell I'm with the kids on that one... isn't that why God invented Photoshop?

It must be a real disadvantage to childhood to live in the digital era... back when we were kids every picture cost money to have it developed and buy the film... nobody cared about the environmental cost of film development chemicals.... but that's another one.   But as a result there would be one moment for big staged photographs and often the person with the best camera and a little ability might take the photo and then get prints for the family.

Now everybody has a digital camera and 1 photo costs the same as 1000 unless you are a damn fool and try to print them all out. But as a result, kids are constantly being called over for staged photos... it has to be annoying as hell.

I'll tell you a story about my dad... he took great group photos, and his secret was thinking he knew hot to operate the camera  and then explaining to the posed crowd how the sequence was going to go down only to have it go wrong on him.  Usually by about the 6th time he was able to set the timer and run into the crowd and smile by the time the picture was to be taken.  Of course, by then, everybody was in hysterics over the previous failed attempts and dad's reaction of shock to what went wrong after explaining to everybody how he solved the problem.  Classic dad shot... family laughing bug smiles dad in frame smiling sweating slightly.

Good times, good times

Some of the things that happened today...

You see i received this painting, with a squirrel with it's tail on fire in the mail today addressed to "the institute for sciuridae research combustion division", and the weird mailman delivered it.  As a note I'm all for weird mailmen so long as they get the address right.  So clearly you are doing things right when people send you paintings of squirrels or "sciuridae" in Latin, that are on fire.  I am told it was a paint by number effort and the story can be found here, apparently.

Clearly it looks like the flaming squirrel is running by a mailman in official uniform, but why the mailman is not trying to stomp that fire out nobody knows.  That little vermin could run into any number of holes and set the damn house on fire, but perhaps the mailman is swinging a mallet down on the fire that we just can't see, however if that is so the mailman's feet should be in a different direction as he could hurt his back swinging down aggressively from a twisted angle.

We also went to the pool where an aggressively hyper classmate of the twins came over to play with us in the water totally unsupervised... he was having a blast you could tell and good for him, i could have done without another child screaming about me being a zombie monster who has to chase all of the children, but we weathered the storm.  Like my father before me, I'm not a huge fan of children screaming all of the time, as dad said "it violates that part of the brain that just shouldn't be violated".  As a parent you need a strict year round constant reminder system in place to let children know that screaming all the time is not acceptable.  I like to say "have fun, but don't ruin other peoples fun by subjecting them to those noises".    Of course then people will tell you that you are "lucky" that your children are well behaved and not annoying, and you may be lucky enough then to supervise their child in a pool as he screams at top volume in your face in the pool.  Nice kid however, i could see that he was just really excited and having a real good time... i was happy for him and when my clan decided to opt out of the "dunking game" i think perhaps we were too boring for him and he moved on.

I have been painting my neighbours house so i was working pretty hard and long the last week, but i have powered through most of it.  I worked a bit this morning and later at night, but i took the heat of the day off to hang with the kids, we swam and practiced our reading and i did a big kitchen clean and got on making dinner.

There was a bunch of cabbage in the fridge so i chopped it up finely to make a  coleslaw and for a moment i was stumped, i think it was about 4:15pm, and i aim for dinner to be ready around 6:00pm.   Now being a stay home parent, and taking after my mother, the dinner served on time is one of the key flows in family life.  Never did my mother not have dinner ready for her family come dinner time, so i make that priority number one.  Whatever you do don't do something that will take you off track so that you will find yourself saying "well we didn't have time to make dinner so lets do this..."  But today i felt discombobulated for a while... how am I going to do this?

Well first things first, start blasting some music... i went with Peter Tosh today, live concert i found on youtube, where music is free (more on that in another blog).    I started getting into the process and made the dinner, which really wasn't that great to be honest, but we were fed and i got into the idea that i really do love this one job i have in life.  I love being a stay home parent, and i am actually really good at it, sure there are things where i fail in on this gig, and i am aware of, but not particularly ashamed of.   But it is a great job... in this job you are rewarded by your good work, and you are punished by your deficiencies.  And i think that is the key... often in life you work a job and are not rewarded for your good work, and your are punished by others deficiencies.  It's odd how you can have spiritual moments of this sort on a day where you probably performed at about 30% of your standard.

It is what it is... doing other jobs perhaps brings you back to thinking about the process the the jobs you have, and what it is you like about them.

I remember reading something about Hunter S. Thompson saying that he felt sorry for people he knew in life were were "set" because they would never have to rely on their skills and their ability to use them to get by.  I guess i had that sort of feeling today... we need this done, i can do it, and i had fun doing it.  For the record the coleslaw was great... i think one of the early killers was that one of the recipes  i looked up on the "net" called for celery seed, and i had none, because i had pulled my celery that was going to seed from the garden a few weeks ago.  This is a hard pill for a man gardener to swallow when he could have had something he needed when he needed it but he did something to foil those plans weeks ago.  The celery was large and shading some other plants at the time but the crushing failure of what happened today was not lost on me.   The thing is i recovered with the help of some blasting reggae music and a victors attitude, and a king hell load of salted sunflower seeds.  Sure the broccoli soup had some fibrous parts in it due to my error of throwing in some broccoli that had gone to flower, lets just say we won't do that again... lesson learned.

The twins were fighting today so i separated them, and took the time to do some reading with them individually... a super rewarding experience.  I chose the book "10 Apples up on top" by Dr. Seuss and they were doing great. I need to separate them more and work on reading more... one of my earlier failures.  I need to get them reading better and biking better and we will be set. 

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" said a president of the United States of America... it could only be one, but the question if phrased properly has merit... are the children learning that a parent is there to do the things that need to be done?

It's a good gig, there are many stay home fathers in the "hood", and although my father wouldn't have done it in a month of Sundays being an "old fashioned" male i would take it any day.

I just had to play the tooth fairy... always a comedy of errors trying trying to find things in the dark in a messy room while a kid mumbles and tosses and turns in the night.  Part of your gig is lying on the floor motionless  waiting for a period of restfulness  to mount your attack.   A man with a plan and his setbacks lying motionless by the bed in fear of being caught for some lie that somebody before him made up, but he has to stick to cause it is the way it is.  Like a good old fashioned fireworks bombing in the middle of the night by a friends window, who's father owns a gun and is ill humoured about these kind of operations.  Or a late night run at camp into the girls section on a wing and a prayer that you might find a girl to kiss you... the thing is you can't get caught, and that is the real rush.  You get to the girls cabin and you are hiding underneath it and somebody put their hand in a shit that somebody took under the cabin because they were afraid to go to the outhouse and then Pete runs off a cliff into the water trying to remain avoided and after the splash you run like hell back to your cabin to get back in your sleeping bag like you were there all night... it's called living.   All of the skills you develop as a kid come in handy as an adult.

And there we are.

The day closes.