Setbacks and delays

Seems like it happened just a little bit too early.

Moving closer to the river, moving south to be in a slightly warmer climate, moving closer to the center of the business of the city... These were all shifts in the right direction. Getting the kids into a different school system, being five minutes away from work, having lots of businesses close to us for the wife to get a job... All good moves. Checks on the list, if you will.

Getting into a different state, learning new tax rules and payment laws and all the rest. It was a good idea, right? Starting the slow crawl to get out from under debt and start saving money for the big move out to a farm somewhere and be free of at least some of the rat race.

I got terminated from my job last Thursday (or was it Wednesday?), and although the reason given was something about getting a complaint from a client, I'm pretty sure that if it were something so banal as that, I'd be written up, scolded, and we'd all move on.

Regardless, here I sit, after sifting through ten job posting sites and calling a few staffing firms, feeling lonely and a little out of sorts. I have enough cash to pay for the rent and regular bills, enough food to keep my family from starving, and hell, I'm listening to Pandora and typing this from my couch in the warmth of my house. Things aren't so bad, I guess they just happened too quickly for me.

Had my debt been paid off, had I amassed some savings for some land, had I been just a bit further in the grand plan, I'd be fine with getting term'd for no good reason. But instead, I have to shift things around, ensure that bills get covered, put on the smiley face for interviews, and try to stick myself back into the rat race for a few more years.

The weird thing about the season, though, is that lots of people are getting the flu, having to reschedule interviews and sit-downs... So things get delayed even more.

Charlie Brown

I knew a guy once, he went by the name Charlie Brown.

He was a hood rat, the kind of guy that would tell you his down and out story while chomping on an eight dollar cigar. He preferred Micky's Malt Alcohol to most any kind of drink, but that was probably because it was more punk rock than PBR at the time.

Charlie knew a lot of people. He went to the right shows, made the right kind of friends, knew the right things to say. He had an easy laugh and a sharing smile. Charlie never ratted to the cops. He didn't share secrets. He probably knew more secrets than anyone.

I met Charlie Brown at a local coffee shop back in the nineties, during a time that I was doing a lot of the same stuff; I went to shows and made friends and tried to say the right things. He told me he was on the street, and I kinda took pity on him. At the time I was still living at home with my parents. They trusted the people I trusted, since they knew I knew how to read people pretty well.

I knew Charlie Brown wasn't really down on his luck. I knew he could go home any time he wanted. I knew he could make a phone call and get a few hundred bucks from an uncle or other family member. I knew he wasn't the kind of guy that didn't have nothing to lose. I knew I could probably trust Charlie Brown, but I didn't know how far I could trust him, if that makes sense.

So anyway, I took Charlie home, gave him some good meals, had some good parties. Back then, I knew how to throw a party: invite the right people together and everyone shares a little of what they have, be it smoke, drink, or whatever. And as long as nobody acted like a dick, everyone had a good time. Reflected well on me, and on everyone involved. It was what I did.

Charlie stayed with us about two months. He did dishes. He swept up the floor. He folded his clothes and didn't steal the bait money we would leave on cabinets and tables. He did all the right things.

One day Charlie decided he had fattened up enough. His winter with us was over, so he had me drop him off at a restaurant where a girl worked and said goodbye. I saw him a couple times after that, but it wasn't like seeing an old friend, more like seeing someone you went to school with a decade ago.

Sometimes I think about Charlie Brown, you know, I wonder what he's up to. Maybe he's got a beer belly and three kids and a dog that won't shut the fuck up. Maybe he's got a mortgage and a rich wife and he spends his days waxing their four cars in the garage.

I think he came up with his own street name. I think he did it because of the old saying, "You're a good man, Charlie Brown." But I don't really know if he was a good man. Or is. I think he was a way for us good men to realize we were really the good men. Not that he's a bad man, you know. He never took the twenty from the kitchen table, never stole from us. He knew we were open and honest with him, and I'm pretty sure he was smart enough to know you don't fuck with those kind of people.

Sometimes you have to roll-start

There's an odd feeling that I've done all this before. Sometimes I focus on the thing I'm doing and it feels fresh, new, inviting, and requiring bravery. Other times it feels like I'm adding another mark to the list, but it's the same mark as so many other days.

I think I get this feeling the day after payday every time. Usually it's when most of the money is accounted for and is already allocated to bills and food and etc. Truth be told, I make enough money to have shelter and food to eat and even some fun stuff on the side, but it's always so close.

I guess this is what it's like to be in near-poverty? Or maybe what it's like to just not be really rich?

We attended a wedding this weekend, sans children. It was a nice, humble, quick, non-religious wedding with a full open bar at the reception. The food was good, the people were nice, and everything felt right about it. WHY CAN'T MORE WEDDINGS BE LIKE THIS?

After the wedding we hung around for a while, listened to the toasts, ate some dinner, then rushed out to go to a drag pageant our friend was competing in. He didn't win, but was very delightful.

We pretty much slept in all Sunday, didn't get anything done that we needed to do, and now it's Monday!

Maybe that's why I feel so shitty: I didn't get to finish anything on my internal list. No check marks. And now it's back to the grind-stone and doing the same shit I always do.

A recurring check-mark that is always a positive is the kids. I think people have kids just so that they can keep track of the passage of time. Both are getting so big, so wise even though they're still so young. They say things some times that just... weird me out they're so precocious. One will be talking to the other and (in a way of teaching the other something that neither really knows about, like how the brain works) will say something so profound it just makes me wonder. But then they'll turn around and just be kids again.

Life is good, though. Fall is essentially here: the windshield of the car/truck/thing is fogged up in the mornings, jackets have to be on if you're outside for more than ten minutes, and I can almost smell cinnamon everywhere. Soon it'll be time for the sweaters and then hats. And football. And snow shovels. But then later it'll be time for digging and planting and growing.

And I like that kind of cycle.

Paul Bunyanish

Our back yard is what some would describe as completely overrun by bushes, vines, and other nefarious plants and weeds. The guy that lived in the house before we did tried his best, I think he really did, but he didn't dig deep enough. He cut the vines but he didn't pull them down from the trees. He trimmed some tree limbs, but didn't do a proper job of it. Really, he just didn't really know what he was doing.

So there's a fenced-in area, about fifteen or twenty feet deep, then behind the fence there's another six feet or so and then there's a stone wall that's around four feet tall. Then behind that there's another fifteen or twenty feet, and then what's left of an alley.

The fenced-in area is pretty clear of debris and weeds, the only issue is a huge pine tree that has had free reign over the back yard. The branches were everywhere until my wife did some proper pruning, and now it's more manageable.

The area behind the fence, the little six feet section? Yeah, it's completely filled in with old brush and cuttings from whatever pruning the dude tried to do in years past. So the whole area is about two feet deep of leaves, pine needles, and otherwise carpeting filled with spiders and bugs of all varieties. Scary.

The main source of all the vines that have been strangling the trees in the back yard seems to be coming from around some honeysuckle and mulberry trees, the two species lending themselves greatly to split branches and great highways for the vines to travel up.

One of the trees we decided to cut down yesterday.

It's weird, the amount of sunlight one tree felling can grant you when the space it occupied is no longer occupied. And now we're able to see back into the back-back-back yard, and we've seen things like baseball mitts, broken TVs, old tires, big round bouy things, and all manner of other debris from years forgotten.

We've planned some of this plant removal from before moving in, noticing how completely overrun the area back there truly is. But now that we've actually taken that first step into the great beyond, it's as if the job is just too big. There are just too many vines. The honeysuckle is just too overgrown.

But there's still the remains of the mulberry in the back yard. The eight or so big branches and the hundreds of small branches that are in piles, waiting to dry so we can then burn them all.

And then, perhaps, we can start to cut down another small tree/bush and continue the process until the back-back-back yard is reclaimed.

Tides of Change

So today is the first day of school for the kids. As a parent, I'm hopeful that they make new friends, learn new things, and generally have a good year at their new school. But for us, today is a milestone that is a little more significant than typical first days of school.

Almost a year ago, both our kids kept coming home from school in a bad mood. Not a typical bad mood, but seriously depressed. We asked both of them what was going on, and their stories were almost identical: the other kids in their classes were inappropriate, and their teachers had no idea what to do to keep everyone in line.

Granted, kids are kids, and they could have been just as much of a bother to the teacher and their own peers and could have just been giving us lip service, but we investigated and found that their teachers were relatively new to the gig and basically had no idea how to handle discipline problems.

Instead of singling out a bad student and isolating them, they would punish the entire class. Instead of rewarding good behavior and performance, they would ignore the good stuff and focus on only the bad. Instead of proactively reaching out to parents or other staff for assistance and behavior modification, they went with the status quo and treated the class as if it were an army platoon. Everyone had their collective benefits taken away (no recess, no free time, constant yelling), and everyone was shifted into the guilty category instead of seeing any sort of reward for good behavior.

Both kids were exhausted by the end of the day. They got good marks on tests and homework, and both kids always got good behavioral notes, but they acted as if they were being punished all day every day.

My son's first grade class seemed to be run by a group of three children, with the teacher doing all she could just to move the class forward by inches. My daughter's fourth grade class seemed as if it were a boat left adrift with barely a paddle amongst all thirty kids.

My wife and I tried to console the kids. We tried to advise them on things to attempt to get the other kids in line. Nothing seemed to work.

The district as a whole seemed to be flailing in failure. Test scores were at the bottom rung of the scale. Funding was being cut right and left. The public school seemed to cost more than private schools in the area, what with the uniform costs and the fees and the supply list to purchase every year. Seriously, the cleaning supplies they wanted every kid to bring in was enough to keep a whole house clean for six months... Why ask thirty kids to each bring in four large containers of Chlorox Wipes?

But we knew the thing that would help our kids quickest was to get the fuck out of there.

Now, there were other benefits to us moving, don't get me wrong. I'm a lot closer to where I work now, so my morning and afternoon commutes are a fraction of what I once had to endure. And now we're much closer to commercial areas where my wife can hopefully find a job while the kids are in school. But I believe the main meat of the move was to get the kids in a school where they wouldn't be victims of a beaten down drill sargeant trying to corral all the kids together in a boot camp.

And I understand that by moving out of the district, we could be seen as adding to the problem. Less kids in the area means less state funding. Less state funding means less money going to the kids. But really, why continue to pay for something that just isn't working? And I'm not just talking about money, I'm also talking about the future of my children. Why pay with their time for other kids who just aren't getting it? And the whole argument about public schools being a catch-all for everyone and that everyone must share the burden is bullshit. There could be classes separated by abilities and behavior. I went to public schools almost all my life and the best schools had different tracks available for high achievement kids. That district just didn't care, or was broke, or the governing parties involved just didn't get it.

I just hope our choice of venue was good, and that the kids can find peace and enjoy their quest for knowledge in this new school. If not, we can always move again.

Scary Funnels

Sometimes I turn off the wake up alarm in the mornings and drift back to sleep. Usually when I do this, I seem to drop right back into deep sleep, the kind with weird dreams. This morning was no exception.

I don't remember much at this point, but what I do recall was that my family all lived in a very old single floor house, no basement, and everything looked brown. Sorta like a black and white movie, but brown. Not sepia tone, because people were full color, and mirrors weren't brown tinged. It was as if everything was made of wood perhaps?

Anyway, I think I was cooking? Chopping veggies? Suddenly the lights went off, and I could see through a huge window that some really serious storm clouds were rolling in fast. They were dark but had accents of a weird electric blue. Like a plane went overhead and dropped some really sharp blue dye into a big body of swampy, oily dark water, and that water became a cloud with little swirlies in it.

I see the clouds and know something bad is about to happen, so I start shouting for my family. They're not in the house, they're all hanging out in and around some weird smaller building in the back yard. It's like a garage, but without cars. There's a deck on one side with a bunch of chairs and stools and so forth.

I run outside, and as I'm running to them, I see a HUGE funnel cloud come out of nowhere and churn slowly, almost softly. There was very little noise that I could remember, maybe a low hum? The churning cloud seems to be lazily mouthing the countryside and in its wake there's nothing. It's not even like it leaves behind destruction, the ground is just completely stripped, like how a very efficient vacuum cleaner leaves behind no crumbs.

I get closer to my family and I'm shouting and pointing at the cloud (like, how the fuck can you miss a big electric churning funnel cloud the size of Oklahoma coming at you?), and they're all laughing, drinking lemonade, chillin. I believe there were snacks on a table.

In a way, looking back now, this all sounds very Black Hole Sun-ey, but at the time that wasn't the feeling. It was more like the cloud was only visible to me, and no one else cared.

At any rate, I convince everyone to huddle down inside the house. We're in there for what seems like forever, then I kinda check it out to see if it's safe to come out. I look outside and there's hundreds of these tornadoes, just like the first one but with different color swirls in the cloud. A green one comes by and scoops up the house, and me, and I wake up screaming.

I get by with a little help from my friends...

My friends are awesome.

Since we moved into the new place, the wife and I have been attempting to find a way to get some sitting furniture into our living room. Our last couch was just toast, it really had to go. So the new place didn't have crap to sit on, much less feel good on the butt.

We did get a great chair from her aunt (as payment for helping HER move a weekend after our big move), but that was really just a GREAT sitting spot for one person.

Enter our friends Mike and Meghan, who also moved recently. They found that they had a chaise that just didn't quite fit into their new house, as well as a very sturdy coffee table that fit great in front of the chaise, but again, not in the new place.

For about a week I was trying to coordinate the use of someone's truck to go pick up the stuff from Mike and Meghan, but every time I got close to getting transportation, something went wrong.

Lo and behold, I get a message Thursday of last week stating that Mike and another buddy Jason would be dropping by with the furniture on Saturday! They were doing some sort of epic city-wide furniture rearrangement with multiple houses, lots of big furniture, and a rental truck.

So now we have a respectable amount of sitting space in our living room. I've yet to grab a picture, but now we don't really have anything preventing a housewarming party. I'm thinking Aug 18. With the meatfest.