Black Friday?? Whatever suckas!

So it’s Black Friday today and while millions of people are out there pushing, shoving, and trying to find the best deals, I’m at home in a warm, cozy house with the best deal of all, A Bird. Its been almost an entire month since I went back to working five eight hour days, so this is the first Friday that I have been home with A Bird since the end of October.

A Bird has been pretty excited about Christmas this year and now that Thanksgiving is out of the way, she is all about the Christmas season and that means decorating. L bird told A Bird that today when she gets home from work that she could help her put up the Christmas tree. A Bird is super stoked, so to help take her mind off the tree and get her to quit asking me “When’s Mom coming home? Is Mom here yet?” every five minutes I decided to dig deep back into my childhood and pull out some ideas for Christmas crafts. We have a pretty big craft bin full of odds and ends, so I figured I had everything, and I wouldn’t have to leave the house. Awesome! Let the fun begin….

Oh, but first a few pictures of the A Bird Rocket Ship I had to build this morning:

 

After she decorated her space ship, we moved on to crafts:

Then we moved from the snowman to Santa and Mrs. Claus’ hats:

Then we moved to a Christmas Tree:

We are also working on a star ornament made from popsicle sticks, but I didn’t want to choke down 10 popsicles at once. Lucky for me I have a supply of tongue depressors (insert dirty joke here as to why I have tongue depressors). Now get your minds out of the gutter, I only play a doctor on TV, I had bought them for other crafts, you bunch of sickos. We’ll see how that one turns out, but I figured I didn’t do half bad with her seeing as I have no artistic talent.

So enjoy the rest of your crazed shopper filled mayhem, suckers! I’ll be relaxing and peeling glue and cotton balls from my fingers in the comfort of my home.

Introspection, part 2

My second defining moment came that following fall in my seventh grade year at school. I had gym class with a real douche bag, I still dislike him to this day, but I’ll leave him nameless for his sake. It was after gym and I was one of the last ones in the locker room, as I came around the corner all I heard was “Nice playing out there, retard!” and then I got punched in the chest. Well, what he didn’t know is that I had already been fighting with kids better than him all summer, so I just quickly reacted and threw a punch. I hit him square in the mouth and he landed on his ass with a split lip. The gym teacher heard the commotion and came in and broke it up before it went further. The teacher grabbed both of us by the collars and practically dragged us both to the Principle’s office. We both got yelled at and threatened with suspension, the kid I punched started crying, the big tough guy he was, and I just sat there stunned. After a little more yelling, the principle dismissed us, but as he did he gave me a wink.


He knew what I went through and it was his way of saying “Good job!” but also let me know I had taken my one shot and anything more wouldn’t be tolerated. So that was all it took for school, was that one tiny fight, people still talked junk but none of them had the balls to say it to my face and that was something I could live with.

I think it was those two things that led me to have such a “Tough Guy Complex”. I learned that, anyone who teased me or threatened me or made me feel bad about myself could be silenced pretty easily with a fist in the mouth. After that year, not many people hassled me and I started to get a reputation, even if it was a bad one.

I used that reputation as a coping mechanism, I acted like a prick and tried to show how tough I was so I could silence anyone before they could think about teasing me and making me feel worthless. I hate to say it but I kept using it right through my 20’s and because of it I don’t have many friends. I either scared most people away or they thought I was a meat head douche bag who they just didn’t want to take the time to get to know. I still catch myself falling into that behavior now, I’ll go out in public and I’ll catch people staring at me and I am instantly on the defensive, my chest puffs all up, my face turns into a sneer, my hands ball up and I’m ready to go. Then nothing happens of course and I feel like a jackass for the rest of the night because I feel like people are laughing at me and how I act. The whole thing just sucks.

But anyway before this turns into a bigger pity party than it already has, this is just one of the things that run through my head when I’m left to my own thoughts. Maybe I’ll bore you with some of the other randomness at some other point, but right now I’m spent and I feel a little foolish for putting this out there.

Introspection

I think I have mentioned before that the winery I work for is being consolidated into another winery, so we are closing down operations and have to be out of the facility by the end of year. Well, we are getting very close to the end of the year, so the work is slowing down and there aren’t many people left at the winery. The building I work in had a total of two people all day, myself in the wine lab and the receptionist in the opposite end of the building. So other than an occasional cellar worker bringing up a sample, I was alone with my thoughts for almost the whole day. During that time I had a number of rambling thoughts and I looked at myself in a number of ways, so I figured I would let some of them spill out here and give you a little peek into my crazy. I’m a little conflicted about this post, as it is pretty personal, aw but what the hell, you all think I’m crazy already so here goes.

But before I start I first want to say something to my Mother and my Father, who occasionally read this blog, don’t feel guilty about any of this, every kid gets picked on for something at some point. None of this is your fault, I had a very good childhood and I love you both. (My parents divorced when I was young, and they both have guilt issues.)

As I was working away at different analyses, my mind drifted to my “tough guy complex”. I know I have one, and it makes me feel really stupid. It seems like I always have to prove myself, I always feel like I have to prove myself and show how tough and what a bad ass I am. Then I have days like today where I sit back and think about all of this and realize what a jackass I really am. I really don’t like being like this, but I don’t know how to be any other way. Now, let me get out my couch to lay down on and you get your pad and paper to take notes and tell me how crazy I am. I honestly think it really all stems from being picked on as a kid. I was born with mild cerebral palsy, I had a pretty substantial tremor and my hands have always been so tight and hard to use. On a side note before I go any further, I really don’t have it that bad in comparison to many people with CP, I actually got off very very easy and I am extremely thankful for that. People with CP that have overcome their obstacles are true heroes. But anyway to make matters worse growing up I was very skinny, had coke bottle glasses and a bowl haircut. I was always perceived as weak, “special”, or “different” and those were just the words that adults used.

***Another rambling side note as I was thinking about all of this I also started thinking about how mean adults can be and wondered about my step-mother’s family. When I was ten my step-mother’s brother and his family took a vacation to Colorado and they brought back gifts for my sister, brother and I, and mine was a t shirt that said “Cripple Creek”. Knowing them like I know them now, I wouldn’t put it past them to have thought this a clever little thing to give to me and they laughed to themselves about it. I wore this shirt once to school and was subsequently called cripple the whole day, I brought it home and cut it pieces and threw it in the trash.

Children are very observant and just as mean. I was called everything from retard to cripple, and it always stung. I can’t count the times I went to the park near my Grandma’s house to play football and some new kid would whisper questions to my cousins, “You sure he can play? Isn’t he retarded? He’s not going to spaz out and need his helmet, is he?” I remember all of the questions they are seared into my brain. Now those things are just the beginning, then it led to physical teasing because kids thought I was an easy target and retarded to boot, so I wouldn’t be able to defend myself or speak up. My personality let this happen over and over and I didn’t know how to deal with all of the emotions that came with this, so most of the time I came home and cried. Then I had two defining moments in my life, the first outside of school. My Grandmother had moved back into a trailer park.

***Another side note, trailer parks are a breeding ground for aggression. You have a “traditional melting pot”, white, black, puerto rican and they are all poor and pissed off about it. So “boys will be boys” and typically that means we all pound the piss out of each other to determine a pecking order.

So there I was, one of the new kids in a trailer park. I went with my cousins up to the park to play baseball, and a few of the local boys showed up. They joined in and it took all of 15 minutes before they were calling me names and trying to pick a fight to establish their dominance. I was an easy target, and this kid Jeremy L. (I’ll leave his last name out, we turned out to become  friends) came up and called me a “weak retard that can’t pitch” and punched me three times in the face. One of my best assets is that I don’t have a glass jaw, so as he wound back for a fourth shot, I grabbed him by the neck, threw him into a headlock, and let loose a fury I didn’t know I had. I blackened both of his eyes and gave him a huge fat lip, and in that act I made my bones and a name for myself. I was no longer a retard in the eyes of the trailer park, I was one of the guys. Of course I climbed my way to the top of that pack through numerous other fights, and made myself a force to reckoned with that summer. The best part of that summer was my Grandmother, she really knew me and how everything affected me and she kept everything a secret from my parents.

This is turning out to be a longer post than I thought, so I am going to break it into two parts and finish this up tomorrow.

My second defining moment…….to be continued……

So this is how it starts???

So L Bird went to Wal-Mart the other day and she brought home their Christmas toy catalog. I thought it would be fun to have A Bird sit with me and go through and pick things out that she wanted to Christmas. I have really fond memories of laying on the floor with a pen and the JC Penney catalog circling toys for my Grandparents or my Aunt Gin. It is one of my favorite memories and I wanted to share that with A Bird. Plus, she is getting old enough that she is really starting to get Christmas and the whole Santa Claus thing, so she definitely knows what she wants.

We sat next to each other, and flipped through the magazine. I could see her eyes light up about certain pages. I was teasing her a little about what she wanted and pointing out toys marketed towards boys and I got the eye roll and “No Dad! Those are for boys and I’m not a boy!”, so then I would flip to the “girl stuff” and  I would beat her to the punch and shout out “Oooooooh I want that!” and she would look at me and furrow her brow and tell me that “Dad you can’t have that, that’s for girls”. So after a few more rounds of that, we actually started marking things down. I took a sharpie and put a star next to things she pointed out.

Ever since then she has been carrying around that catalog like it was her favorite bedtime story. So yesterday I noticed it was laying on the table and this is what I saw:

She had taken a pen and written an A or some lines next to every single thing that was girly. I know I shouldn’t be surprised but I was a little impressed that she wrote and A next to most things.

So if she is only 3 now, and she is already asking for everything it can only get better, right??

Needing some new ink

Well, I have been itching to get some more ink. I know tattoos are are very polarizing subject. People either love tattoos or that hate them, there doesn’t seem to be a nice easy medium. I remember telling my Dad I wanted to get a tattoo when I was younger and he did his best to talk me out of it. He told me that they hurt, then the classic “think about what it will look like when you are old and saggy”, and when he saw that wasn’t working he turned to disease and pestilence. Tattoo artists and shops are dirty, you can catch a disease from dirty needles, and then finally “they won’t tattoo you because you’re a hemopheliac”. So needless to say I never brought it up to him again, instead a few days after I turned 18, I drove myself up to Physical Graffiti and got tattooed. It was months before my Pop saw that I had a tattoo, I was sitting at my Grandma’s house and he walked in and said I’m glad you didn’t get a tattoo, and my Grandma blew me in and told him I already had one. I remember he was irritated but he was also smiling because he knew I had to do things my own way.

Since then I have gotten a few more pieces of ink. But lately I have been feeling very sentimental about my daughter and want to get a piece that signifies her. For those of you without tattoos, its hard to explain but its fairly common to have ink that represents family members. So A bird’s name actually means bird like/graceful, so I would like to get a classic sparrow/swallow over my heart on my chest, then with her name on the wing or below it. I know it sounds very similar to L Bird’s ink, but I want the same thing but not a matching sparrow.

I want something feminine for A Bird, but not too girly, you know what I mean. So I went searching for some designs, these are just a few that are along the lines of what I would like:

  With different colors, of course. This is a classic design.

A little more masculine.

I like this one too, but it’s a little too paisley/hippie to me.

What do you think???

A Proper Home

Well, we have had Opie home for a while now. Well, sort of, we have his ashes back home. I can’t bring myself to bury anything, I don’t know if I’ll be in this house forever, so I really can’t imagine moving and leaving one of my family buried in the back yard. I know it sounds weird, but that’s just the way it is. So I had Opie cremated and got his ashes back, with plans of making him a nice little box to rest in on the mantle next to Frisco.

Well, I got his ashes back and for one reason or another I just left him in the container the vet had him in. It is seriously a paw printed cookie tin. It looks like a little tin box that you would get dog biscuits or cookies in. I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the box and transfer Opie over. The pain was still too fresh. When I did it for Frisco, it wasn’t as bad, because Frisco had lived a long life and he had some serious health issues so having him put to sleep was easing his pain. So when I got his ashes back it wasn’t as painful. I guess with Opie it’s just because he was still so young and his life was cut short because of some idiot.

But anyway I finally decided it was time to put Opie in his rightful spot. So I stained the box that I had for him and developed a few pictures to place on the box. This is how it turned out:

I thought it turned out pretty nice, but either way. Opie is sitting in his rightful place on the mantle next to Shrimpboat a.k.a Frisco.

A full day of explanations

Yesterday was a tough day for A Bird, she was playing at daycare and got poked in the eye with a toy. She cried a little bit but then seemed fine, so the daycare went on with their day. So she had lunch and then went down for a nap, but after her nap she would start crying hysterically off and on and complaining about her eye. Daycare called L Bird, L Bird then called the doctor and then me. I left work, picked A Bird up and headed to the doctors.

On the ride to the doctor’s office, in between sobs A Bird would ask a question. Her first question, which I assume is all little kids’ first question when going to the doctor, “Am I going to get a shot?” I explained to her that no she wasn’t going to get a shot, that she probably just had a small scratch on her eye and the doctor would give us drops or an ointment to put in it to help it heal. Even while in pain, A Bird’s inquisitive nature kicked in:

A Bird: Dad, what’s an oinkment?

Me: Its called OIN-T-MENT, and its like a thick cream or lotion that you put on your eye.

A Bird: Oh ok, but Dad, what does heal mean?

Me: Heal means to get better.

A Bird: But it’s a piece of bread too, right Dad?

Me: Yes, there is Heal which means to get better, and then there is heel which is a piece of bread. They are two words that sound the same but are spelled different.

A Bird: Oh OK, Dad.

We went in to the doctor’s office and yep, she has a small scratch on her eye, nothing serious but the Doctor was going to prescribe an ointment to put on just to prevent infection. He called it into Wegmans and me and A Bird were off and rolling for Weggies.

On to explanation number two. We get to Wegman’s and we still have a couple of minutes to wait before the prescription is filled so A Bird had a cookie and we waited right there at the pharmacy. While waiting a mentally challenged young man was in line with his mother and he was grunting and starting to scream. First it was low but progressively got louder and louder. Every time he would scream A Bird would look at me and I could see that she was very terrified, Then eventually she would cover her ears and just look at me, so I would reassure her that he was just upset and everything was ok.

A Bird: Dad, why is that guy screaming?

Me: Well, he is upset and doesn’t really want to wait in line.

A Bird: Yeah, but he’s different than us, right Dad?

Me: What do you mean different?

A Bird: I don’t know, he’s different.

Me: Yes he is a little different, he is upset and he doesn’t know how to tell his Mom he is upset any other way than to scream. His brain works a little different than yours and mine, but I’m sure he is a real nice guy when he is not upset.

A Bird: Ok Dad.

I mean I’m not the most politically correct, but I couldn’t get mentally challenged across to A Bird to help her understand and I really don’t like the words Mentally Retarded or or any variations of the second word, because I was called that many times as a kid because of my CP, so I did the best I could but she is too smart to be happy with the answer above for long.

But anyway we were on our way home finally, but wouldn’t you know it, we walk out of Wegman’s and there are two cop cars and two police officers loosely restraining an enraged older gentleman. He is bright red in the face, waving his arms, cursing and speaking gibberish. His buddy is talking to the cops, and trying to calm his friend down enough to talk to them too and A Bird and I walked right out into the middle of it.

A Bird: Dad, look police cars!!! Are those guys in the black pants policemen?

Me: Yes I see the police cars and yes those are policemen.

A Bird: Why are they holding that man like that?

Me: Well, they want to talk to him and he wants to walk away so they are holding his arm so he won’t walk away while they are talking to him.

A Bird: But they’ll let him go when they are done talking right?

Me: Yes, they will let him go or they’ll give him a ride in the police car. But look they let him go and that guy and his friend are going home.

A Bird: Oh that’s good, I think he was a little different too Dad.

Me: I think so too.

So luckily for me, the police didn’t have to cuff this guy and take him away. They realized that he was just an angry, slightly crazy old man and just sent him on his way. The two police that were there were good cops and used their common sense. I was very relieved because that would have been a very different explanation to make.

Yep, yesterday was a full day for A Bird and I.

A Very Happy Halloween

Well yesterday was Halloween and A Bird had been very patient waiting for it to come, even though she asked just about every day if it was Halloween yet. It also helped that she got a lot of use out of her costume. She wore it in ten minutes spurts just about every day. She took it to Grandma Pat’s, to daycare, she tried wearing it to the store one day until she sat down in her car seat and threw a complete hissy because “it made her seat too tight and was too scratchy”. Seriously, we got our twelve bucks worth out of this thing.

She was a fairy/princess. It started out as a fairy costume but the wings that velcro’d onto the back irritated the hell out of her so she ripped them off and found a tiara and made herself a princess, which we all know is what she really wants to be anyway.

Last year my Pop and Step Mom came down to see A Bird in her costume, well they one up’d themselves this year. They came down and went out with us Trick or Treating. So I pulled out the wagon, dusted her off, then tricked it out with two heavy blankets and some glow in the dark bracelets. That’s right, we were big pimpin’ in the little red wagon.

 

A Bird testing one of her treats. She looks pretty cozy right?

Waiting patiently for someone to answer the door with Grandma.

After we made our way around the two grand blocks of our little village, A Bird had made a pretty decent haul in her bag, so we turned the wagon towards home and parked it like it’s hot. We quickly turned on our light to get some of the later trick or treaters to come and raid our candy dish, it didn’t take long until our candy was gone. So we turned out the lights, settled A Bird down and reflected on a great Halloween. Then A Bird finally drifted off into a deep a sleep, I’m still not sure if it was pure exhaustion/bliss or just a sugar induced coma, just kidding. IT was a combination of the two!