crazy day

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of a day that thankfully does not happen very often, but when it does you are glad it is over by the end of the day. I woke up at 5:20 AM to a sound in the kitchen below us. When I reached downstairs I saw my oldest son finishing off his cooking of eggs for breakfast and was sitting down to eat them. He told me he wanted to get back to his Army schedule. I went back upstairs and fell back asleep. I got up at 7:30 and started working on my autobiography, which continued all morning long. I am now writing about my experiences while in Belgium before I went to India. My writing has slowed down the past couple of days as I kept a detailed journal while in Belgium, so I am trying to summarize a few stories from my journal instead of writing from memory or duplicating my journal. My oldest son decided to go back to sleep so besides my wife I did not see any children all morning long.

For a couple of days our refrigerator was not working properly. The freezer part was as cold as the non-freezer part normally should be. We took it as an opportunity to clean the inside of the refrigerator and threw about half of the contents away. The very first thing on Monday, I called M & H Appliance which had helped us in the past with our dryer. The technician finally showed up yesterday around noon. He took off the inside wall of the freezer to reveal the coils which were completely covered with ice crystals. He got out his trusty commercial hair dryer and after fifteen minutes had the coils completely deiced. He popped off the heater part under the coils and found it was broken. Since he had a spare part in his truck, we had a working refrigerator in under an hour and it only cost me $150.

Then the children all started waking up around noon. Our oldest came down and complained about his throat being sore and his ear hurting. He asked me what he should do about it. Then after my great advice of taking proper rest with plenty of fluids, he wanted to know where his mother was as he wanted a ride to his friends to celebrate New Years's Day. He repeated the same set of questions about his sickness and needing a ride, which to both of us parents were mutually exclusive requests. Kids.

Then I get a call from a friend of one of our sons who was suspecting pot smoking and wanted to know if we suspected the same thing. Of course you want to believe the best of your kids but having lived through many teenagers, we knew that could hazardous to our mental health to completely trust teenagers in this day and time. I went to search the music shed for a missing cell phone and I found a glass bong hidden in one of the guitar amps! My day was not getting better over time. When I approached one of my other son's about it as I told him I was going to break it, he told me not to as it was his friend's. Kids.

On Monday I had taken my middle son to get his driver's license as he had lost it due to his poor grades in school. That is a good thing about the North Carolina under eighteen driver policies that if you fail any classes in school you loose your driver privileges. As a parent you don't have to argue with your children, it is the law. Well your kids can still argue of course, but we have the written law in our favor. We went to the local DMV and found out that to get your driver's license you have to have proof of insurance. I called our car insurance and of course they took him of our policy since he lost his license. I had him reinstated so we could get his license only to learn that by doing so he double our existing cost of car insurance by $100 per month. My wife and I decided that he would have to pay for that in order to get his license. Without a job he cannot pay for it. Without a license it may be hard to get a job. Round and round it goes. Then I told my son all of this and he said he needed a cell phone before he could get a job to pay his part of the insurance in order to get his driver's license. At least he had Christmas money to pay for his own cell phone. Kids.

The only good news for the day was that during this week for the first time in many years all of the kids have been in our bonus room playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band and lifting weights together. It was a shock to see them all together, but definitely a good thing. SO they can enjoy each other after all.

My wife and I ended the day trying to watch an Indian movie that was pretty bad so we shut of the movie after thirty minutes and called it a day. Life in the fast lane with kids can be tiring!

jail time

I have mentioned this before, but just have to say something more on this topic today. My oldest son got out of jail yesterday. It was his third trip to have some down time in jail and hopefully his last. All three were short stints, but for me it demonstrates how the world is changing. I did many stupid things when I was a young out of control teenager, but I only visited jail once and that was on a school field trip. I think it would be a good idea to re-introduce this kind of a field trip into public schools again today as there is way too much glory in going to jail. Of course it does not help that I am writing about it, but I have to blow of some steam. Jail up until recently was not a merit badge and had a derogatory aspect to it. For some odd reason that was lost somewhere along the way in the last few years. My son has been three times. The first time occurred when he was caught by police on a NC beach as a drunk underage 18 year old. Since he ran his mouth to the policeman and got out of control, they put him in jail for 36 hours. I remember talking to him about later on and he said that he never wanted to do that again as it was not a good experience at all. I guess that can be explained from massive alcohol consumption causing his good and bad brain cells to be lost. His second time was when he drove drunk after loosing his license last summer. They compounded his friend's car which he was driving and decided a little jail time was in order overnight to sober him up. The last time ended yesterday as it was a follow up visit to the previous time, and I have blogged about that already. I pick him up today, so will find out the details later as to whether it will be his last. He is joining the Navy finally and maybe all of this will be the final straw to teaching him a permanent life lesson. Hopefully jail will be a history lesson he does not want to repeat.

wasted weekend

Our lives changed this week yet again, except this time it was not by our choice. Our son was removed from his house, but it was not a polite goodbye. The owners had enough of late payments or not payment at all. Of course it did not help that the previous month they did without water as they did not pay their bill. This month they did without electricity as they "forgot" to pay that bill as well. Then they did not pay their monthly rent and that was the end of the house for them all. My wife found out this last Tuesday that they all had to be out of the house immediately. We rented a truck from Home Depot in the evening and drove over to pick up all of his stuff from the house. The woman who oversees the rent told me when I dropped off the keys to the house that she would file a civil lawsuit against everyone who signed the leave to pay for the damages done to the house. I offered to do the repairs myself to save everyone from loosing even more money. Maybe I should have put more thought into it before saying such a thing. So for nine hours yesterday and seven hours today I worked on the house while my wife cleaned everything in the house. Yesterday I moved the lawn, picked up leaves and cleaned the gutters. By the end of the day I had around 30 trash bags and many pieces of old worthless furniture to be thrown away. I then proceeded into the house to start patching the five huge holes that one of my son's roommates had caused by his endless rage. Of course I had two broken windows and three messed up doors to fix also. Plus paint two rooms that had been poorly decorated with random painting techniques. After a full day of work I was so tired it was hard to fall asleep last night. Today we returned to finish off the unfinished tasks and to carry all of the trash away. One of my other sons helped with as he borrowed a friends truck. We had one load of nothing but trash bags. The other load was fun for him as he got to break up tons of furniture. I think he really enjoyed that a lot. So much for a weekend of rest around the house. I hope it was worth it somehow; even though I did talk to the owner of the house today and she told me they were going to redo the whole house. I feel liked a lost a weekend that I can never get back.

adrenaline rush

Only twice in recent memory has my heart raced so fast I thought it was unhealthy. This past week was one such occasion. At around 3am one night my wife sits up with her back absolutely straight and says "What's that?" loudly. That obviously woke me up and I start to think what she could have possibly heard. Was there a fire she smelled? Was one of the kids coming home in the middle of the night hurt? Was it her woman's intuition kicking in or just a bad dream? It turned out to be a mild anxiety attack, but my heart had already picked up the pace as if I was running for my life as the adrenaline rushed through my heart. That is such a crazy feeling.

The last time my heart saw massive amounts of adrenaline, we lived in San Antonio. At about the same time in the middle of the night, I saw lights in the living room being turned on and off. Our master bedroom was on the first floor and it was right next to the pool on the outside and the living room on the inside. At first I thought it was a bit odd as the kids typically turn them on to get something to eat but don't turn them on and off. I initially woke up as I thought I heard someone walk by our window and brush up against the bushes and make some noise. So when the lights kept being switched on and off, I immediately thought a thief had broke into our house. Off to the races went my heart beating much faster than normal. I kept wondering whether I should get up and check on it or not. One of my middle son's friends was beat up by a local gang down the road from our house, so I also knew there were bad elements around that I did not want to see. If only I had a metal baseball bat under our bed I would feel better about going to see who was testing our lights. By the time my heart calmed down the phone rang. Now that was odd turn of events. I was so happy as I hoped that would scare away the burglar. Sure enough the lights stopped flashing. After waiting a couple more minutes I went out to see what was going on. As I entered the living room I saw police car lights flashing in front of our house. Now I was saved as the cop must have caught the intruder who was wasting my electricity! He came to the front door and rang the doorbell. I look out and I see one of my sons in the back seat of the car with handcuffs on. I was so confused my head was spinning. Such harsh treatment for switching the lights on and off! Turns out the story was just beginning to get complex. I asked the policeman if he saw anyone turning lights on and off in our house. He said he did not. I asked him how long he had been there and he said a few minutes. That was odd. He then said he was writing my son up with a warning for being out after the 11pm curfew, which existed for everyone under 18 in San Antonio. They do this since there is so much gang activity at night that they don't want good kids getting involved I suppose. He goes and gets my son and after unlocking the handcuffs brings him to the front door. As I close the door I learn even more facts.

Sometimes life is much stranger than fiction as I have learned from our two years in San Antonio. I was very angry at my son but glad he was safe. I asked him if he saw the lights being turned on and off and he said the policeman handcuffed him to the car so he did not run away. He then went around the back of the house and somehow entered the back door. For 30 minutes he was going through our house! He told our son that he was checking for a photo of him to prove this was his house. I had read many stories in the San Antonio newspaper of dirty policeman, because of all of the drugs and gangs. I guess I had just met one. He had no right to come into our house, but he had denied being in it to my face. Just one of many extremely odd things that happened to use when we lived there.

Of course the real story as to why my son was out that time of the night was only amusing looking back at it. A mutual "friend" of two of my sons was, as I would find out later a drug dealer and generally a very weird person. He had come by to get my son since he knew he played the guitar. He knew where a bunch of skateboarders hung out at night and wanted to have a rock concert for them. He broke into an abandoned grocery store, let all of the skateboarders in so they could skate around on the floor while being entertained by music. The was all premeditated as for weeks he had smuggled in sound equipment. My son was like the rock star, showing up for the concert with everything ready to go. The problem was they turned the amps up so loud that a policeman getting gas at a nearby gas station heard the noise and investigated. All of the skateboarders fled by running into a nearby field. My son and another one jumped into the car belonging to the bad "friend" and turned on the car and tried to escape. By then a bunch of cops were there and they could not escape the parking lot, so they got caught. This bad "friend" showed up at our house a couple of nights later and I asked him about what happened and banned him from our house in the future. He said he crawled up into the air vents and stayed there until the next morning. The police confiscated his car and all of his sound equipment. I did not feel sorry for him in any way. That was not the last we heard of this bad "friend" as my oldest son attached himself to him for some strange reason, but that story will have to wait for another day.

When it rains it pours

The last couple of weeks have been crazy as I have documented in previous posts. This week is keeping the trend going strong. We had problem with the heat not working in the van on Friday. I told my wife to keep calm and not come up with ridiculous excuses to get a new vehicle. Yesterday I had to work from home since an A/C man was coming to check our heat pump system as something was not right. At 2:30pm my wife called me to tell me stream was pouring out from under the front of the van. That was odd since a friend had the weekend before "fixed" the van. At least he is a friend I can trust. When I arrived all of the kids were peacefully sitting in the van for the father-hero to show up. I checked the coolant since our friend had replaced the radiator and it was as dry as the desert. Fortunately, I had bought an extra jug of coolant an left it in the van a couple of weeks ago, so I poured what I had into the radiator. The nice thing about living in such a small town is that my mechanic friend's shop was less than a mile away! Then the A/C man said there was a problem with the humidifier as you are supposed to service them every year and it had not been done in the last 5 years. Wow, what else could go wrong?

Turns out a lot could, but only one other thing affected us the past weekend. We found out that our oldest son has been having all kinds of problems with his other three roommates. Two had been fired from their jobs and no one paid the utilities, so he paid for them all. He does not have enough money to pay for rent next month. He hates his job as he works long hours at Lonestar Steakhouse and gets few tips. Sounds like a fun life he has chosen! He called yesterday to tell us he quit his job, but thank goodness he found another job and started that one today at Walgreens.

So far all disasters have been diverted - we just keep loosing money in the meantime. Maybe we are building character to make us better people. At least I hope so.