What a BuzzKill

Sherise finally resurfaced yesterday. I got 2 voicemail messages on my mobile phone. Not phone calls. Voicemails. I guess she’s figured out a way to skip the call and go directly to my voicemail.

Anyhow, as I expected, she was seeking money. Apparently she feels that I owe her child support, even though Rece lives with me more than 75% of the time — and I pay for all his living expenses (health insurance, clothing, food, entertainment, etc). After hearing from her live-in boyfriend that she’s been disappearing a lot lately, doing drugs (smoking and/or snorting crystal meth), and that 2 people showed up at their place at 2:30 am looking for her after they apparently loaned her $3500 a few weeks earlier; there’s no way in hell that I’d let Rece stay with her unsupervised.

Yes, I realize that this is all hearsay. When you’ve lived with a person for over 14 years and hear friends and relatives all saying the same thing, independent from one another, seeing patterns of behavior repeating themselves … you just have to realize that your suspicions are probably correct. If it looks like a duck …

She is claiming that she’s afraid of her boyfriend, that he’ll hurt her or worse. Yet she seems to find it perfectly suiting to leave my son alone with him after school and various other times. This doesn’t make sense. If it’s true, then she’s put Rece in harm’s way on numerous occasions. If it isn’t true, then it just reinforces my belief she’s unstable and not somebody I want Rece to be around for extended periods of time.

Back to the voicemails … she said that she wanted the money and that she’d come by my office to collect it around 3:00 pm — in cash, not a check. I didn’t get the money as I didn’t plan on giving her as much as a dime. It didn’t matter, as she didn’t show up and instead left another message stating that she’d be at my home at 6:30 pm.

Her boyfriend called shortly after I arrived at home asking if I’d heard anything new about her whereabouts. I invited him over so he could be there when she arrived. We talked for a good 2 hours about some of the things Sherise had done in our relationships and found that many of the scenarios were quite similar. 6:30 came and went and he eventually gave up, deciding to leave shortly before 8:00 pm.

At around 8:13 pm Sherise left me another voicemail telling me that she was running behind due to some “errands” (she uses that excuse more than any other) and that she would be at my place in 10 minutes. My friend Christine and I were supposed to meet up for a cup of coffee at 8:30 pm, so I called her to see if she’d be up for meeting me at my place instead. She agreed, arriving at my place at 8:35 pm.

Sherise arrived at my apartment around 8:50 pm. I invited her to have a seat and told her about her mother’s death. I told her of how her family had been trying to locate her so that they could do something about her mother’s body, which was still on life support the last I had heard. One of Sherise’s first responses to me was to ask what her family was saying about her and what I had told them.

I told her that I let them know that she had disappeared again and that she was likely using drugs. She became very defensive and demanded that I reveal the names of the person(s) who said she was on drugs.

The conversation was awkward and she requested that I step outside to continue the conversation in private. We went out and sat in her car to talk. It quickly went downhill from there. I don’t know why I let the conversation go on for so long, to be honest. It had been about an hour since she first arrived when I finally came to my senses and decided that it was going nowhere and ended the discussion, walking away. She got out of her car and followed me back towards my apartment, yelling at me from behind. She said that she had people depending on her to get the money, to which I replied, “the only person depending on you is your son.” The last thing she said as I was walking up up the stairs was “you are so going to regret this”.

I’m thankful that Christine was there. I don’t know if it would have gotten worse without a witness nearby. She did a great job of keeping Rece occupied while Sherise and I spoke. She also helped me sort through the mess that had just happened.

This morning, at 10:16 am, Sherise left another voicemail. Her tone wasn’t pleasant. She let me know that her mother had been pronounced dead on Friday. I didn’t know this, but it really didn’t matter, as Sherise was missing when she needed to be contacted about the situation. I guess she feels that somehow I’m to blame for her disappearing and stories of drug use and defaming her character and abandoning Rece without as much as a call to let us know that she wouldn’t be available this week for Rece to see after school (which was the working plan). She declared that our friendship was officially over and that “it is so on, it is not even funny”. I didn’t realize we were friends and I don’t understand why my showing my displeasure with her behavior and alleged drug use constitutes a threat of some sorts.

The drama stops now. Rece and I don’t need it in our lives. I refuse to get pulled into it or to let Rece become affected with this garbage.

This entry now knows what needs to be done.

… okay, more like I’ve got A fever.

I ended up leaving work early yesterday because I was starting to feel feverish and achy; the typical signs of a flu. I went straight home and started resting.

This morning I woke up feeling hotter — the thermometer verified this to be true — so I called in sick and decided to sweat it out. This is a tactic I’ve used to fight fever since I was a teenager: If my fever is 101° or lower, I’ll try bundling up in multiple blankets and sweating it out. If it’s higher, I’ll try Tylenol or Advil (or their generic equivalent) and/or a cold shower to bring it down, then try to sweat it out. I’ve never put much thought into it, since I only continue to do it because it has worked so well in the past.

Christine gave me a call to check on how I was feeling and I told her about my methods. It struck me as odd that I had never really investigated the reasons for a fever and why the body does what it does, so I decided to look it up. I now share this knowledge with you:

Fever – Wikipedia
A kid’s guide to fever
Fever – How Stuff Works

Seems as though the reasoning and logic behind my fever-fighting methods are pretty good!

I swear, I love this woman. I read her blog daily and find myself often agreeing with what she’s writing about. Her non-nonsense approach to dealing with the world is refreshing. With so many people filtering what they say to seem “politically correct” it’s nice to be able to read somebody’s real thoughts about things in life. Sure I might disagree with some of it, but most of the time I’m right there with her.

Today’s topic about lying made a lot of sense to me. I’ll be telling Rece the same thing her father told her. Check it out for yourself.

Do/did you like Super Mario? What about the classic FPS, Doom? If so, check this out!

They’re ugly as all get-out and they’re often killed on sight. Watch the video, as I did, and you’ll love them anyhow.

Bye-Bye to the Aye-Aye?

My last post was kinda heavy, so I decided to post something a bit more upbeat…

Well thanks to my wonderful friend Christine, I was able to go flying twice in less than a month. It was out of respect for my mom that I didn’t post about this sooner, as she had asked that I didn’t tell her about it until I was all done and safely back on the ground. Well, that time is now.

Christine had originally given these flights to her ex-husband as a gift a couple of years prior. He never used them and found them while he was getting packed to move. These flights were no cheap gift and Christine didn’t want them to go to waste, so she gave them to me, knowing that I’d definitely make the most of them.

On December 19th, 2006 I went on the first one; an aerobatic adventure flight. This was a lot of fun, as I learned how to make a plane do flips, spins, and all sorts of other maneuvers. My stomach got all queasy by the end, but I didn’t lose my lunch. That was some crazy stuff!

The second flight was on January 12th, 2007 — the dog fighting flight — where I had the opportunity to fly up against another pilot as though we were trying to shoot one another from the skies. He had a little bit of former flight experience, but years ago and I had the recent aerobatic flight as my experience to go by. As it turned out, we were both French Canadian – he was from Quebec, but living in Texas and me being born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. We found this to be an interesting coincidence.

After some practice maneuvers we went in for 6 rounds against one another. This was some intense action, I tell you! The first round I lost very quickly. I just couldn’t figure out where he was and how to react. That sudden defeat kicked me in the ass, I have to say, so I went after him with all due aggression. I managed to win all 5 remaining rounds against him!

While the action as going on, I was ignoring the effects that all the maneuvering was having on my equilibrium. What I seemed to have forgotten came back to me as we started our flight back home. Yep, I admit it: I had to make use of the air sickness bag. But I felt much better after!

I have both of these flights on tape and will be putting them together into a video as soon as I can convert the recent one from tape into a format I can edit on the computer.

Thanks again, Christine!

These guys created a very entertaining stop-motion movie. At some points you’ll wonder how they did it. Rece and I really enjoyed this one.

I found this excellent article about how messed up the diamond market is and how essentially it’s all just a fabricated and artificially controlled scam. Wake up people!