What a BuzzKill

Thanksgiving weekend has come and gone. Christine, Rece, and I made our pilgrimage (snicker) to Mimi’s Cafe for the annual stuff-your-face-with-turkey fest. As usual, Mimi’s didn’t disappoint.

Quinn flew out (who says turkeys can’t fly?) to drop off his kids after their visit. We managed to get a good amount of time to hang out during his visit. It was nice to have a chance to catch up with Quinn. I’m really looking forward to him moving back to California next year.

On Saturday the 4 of us (Christine, Quinn, Rece, & me) found ourselves in front of the TV, watching 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (skip the sequel — it sucks). There’s nothing better than hanging out with the people you care for most while watching end of the world flicks!

_{This entry is a bit more than thankful right now.}

She threw out a free fishbowl bowl of candy because “… it was mostly full of smarties and dum dums …”. I fucking love Smarties!

_{This entry just crashed from a massive sugar rush.}

I’ve got another webcam going. This one uses my existing webcam and doesn’t require IE or a username/password to view. Check it out at:

BuzzKill Cam

I’ll play with it a little more in the near future, possibly making it a new page (tab) on my site. Okay, now off to work I go!

Edit: I’ve figured out the code needed to get it working on my own website. Check out the new page tab (above)!

_{This entry likes to play with webcams!}

And too much fun can make you go blind!

In other news … Rece and I had a fantastic weekend together! It all started earlier last week when I got a call from his school. His school counselor wanted to let me know that Rece was now officially an 8th Grader.

Last year was a major struggle for Rece. Most of it could be attributed to his attitude about school. Basically he was being lazy, not doing his homework, failing to turn in what little homework he did get done, and lying about doing it. This was a lot of frustration for the both of us as I attempted to find some way of motivating him or giving him an incentive or to help him realize the importance of a good education. Nothing seemed to work.

This year, his mother and I decided to try a different approach. She was unemployed (and not looking for a job) so we figured it might work better if he went to her place after school so she could be there to help him with his homework and also to just make sure he was actually doing it. This happened up until her recent disappearance, and I was under the assumption that everything was hunkydory … the progress report I received from his school told a completely different story.

Whatever he was doing at his mother’s place wasn’t amounting to a hill of beans. It was apparent that she wasn’t following through on what we had agreed upon. Rece had numerous missing assignments and poor test scores from the very beginning of the school year. It seemed obvious to me that the plan wasn’t working at all. Sherise’s unannounced change of the arrangement due to her disappearance helped with my having to make some adjustments to how Rece handled school and his other responsibilities.

The standard privilege revocation came into play for step one. The next step was a renewed focus on ensuring that Rece was dedicating sufficient time toward homework and studying — and that my involvement in it was obvious and committed as well. I felt that it would be important to show Rece that his success was just as important to me as it should be to him. No longer would I just take his word that everything was fine, but my inquiries wouldn’t be from the assumption that he was being untruthful — they’d be from the angle of “show me that you know what you’re studying”. Since then, I’ve noticed he’s taking more initiative in making up the missing work (for partial credit, at least) and seeking extra credit work to help bring up his grade.

His counselor told me that this advancement would come with additional commitments in the form of after-school tutoring on-site at his school 3 days a week. For me this isn’t a problem as I often worry about him spending too much time alone at home between school and my arriving home after work. There are just too many temptations, too many chances for him to stray and go down the wrong path again. With tutoring, I know where he is, I know that he’s under the watchful eye of a teacher, and that he’s making a concerted effort to focus on his eduction with help on-hand from a qualified person. This is a total win-win for both of us!

In order to celebrate his achievement we went out for sushi one night, went out to breakfast both mornings, went to an arcade, went to the beach, played hours of Lord of the Rings Online, visited the library (yes, the library), and went to the movies (Dan in Real Life is a great movie, by the way). Sunday, on our way home from the movies, Rece said, “This weekend was the best ever!” I’d have to agree.

A nice side effect of changing from a negatively-based mentality to an interactive mindset focused on his success has done wonders for not only his attitude toward school, but in our relationship as well. We haven’t gotten along better than we have over the past month. We have fun and enjoy spending time together. I feel closer to Rece now than I have in a very long time. That’s a wonderful thing.

_{This entry feels especially good about being a dad right now.}

I’ll get straight to the point:

(click to view full size)

Doesn’t that look like SPAM to you? It sure looks like SPAM to me! It seems that Yahoo! can’t seem to recognize a subject line completely packed with a bunch of symbols as SPAM. This gets on my nerves. It’s almost every day that I flag these types of email as SPAM, but time and time again I see my inbox filled with it. I just don’t get it. To me it would be simple to identify any subject line — or sender name (!!!!) — with more than 3 symbols in it as probably being SPAM.

I can somewhat understand the OXFORD ONLINE LOTTERY getting through, since it’s in ENGLISH.

_{This entry wants SPAM to go away.}

Over the past week I’ve received a few emails from family members asking if we were being impacted by the fires. I suppose that with news headlines like “Southern California is Burning” from news organizations looking to grab a few more eyeballs, it may sound as though all of SoCal were a charred ember.

The fact is that the fires started around and mainly consumed open/ wilderness/ forested areas and homes within or bordering those areas. I live in the middle of a very suburban area, so it’s highly unlikely that a wildfire will overtake us. We’re probably more likely to get hit by “The Big One” earthquake and/or slide off into the ocean. Okay, probably not that remote of a chance, but I’m just saying. Fine … I don’t know what I’m saying.

The only real effect the fires had on us was from all the soot in the air, which made eyes itch and sinuses irritated. I imagine that people with allergies experienced more problems, but thankfully I’m not one of them.

Today is Halloween, in case you’re stupid and didn’t already know this, so I’ve been kicking around the idea of dressing up tonight. Either way, I’ll be accompanying Rece, Sam, and some of Sam’s friends for trick-or-treating. Maybe I’ll wear that dress again …

_{This entry uses sound scientific methodology in order to reach its opinions.}

These are real. You can buy USB drives with little dog characters on them that when inserted into a USB drive, hump your computer.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjBVyxc1EHU]

_{This entry … ah, hell … what?}

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.

All right … something a little lighter for a change.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eZBevXohCI]

_{This entry wants to look on you with its own eyes.}

Sherise’s boyfriend and one of her friends went and filed a missing person report at the police department yesterday evening. The friend called me and asked for some details they could provide the police. All I had still locked in my head was her SSN and date of birth.

Sherise’s grandmother is definitely stressed by all of this and seems more than ready to just get it over with and pull the plug. Looks like it can remain a stalemate for another 6 days while they attempt to reach Sherise.

Again, I don’t know why I feel the need to write about this here. It really doesn’t have much to do with me anymore.

_{This entry is tired from a stressful week.}