Bleah.

It's been a pretty crappy day today.  Not actually a bad day just not a good one.  Something got me to thinking of my mother and that linked to missing my mother and my father.  That turned into thinking about how the next funeral I go to will probably be my brother's.

I'm going to watch a funny movie and go to bed.  Tomorrow will be better.

Ouch.

I've been working this week, physical labor actually.  And tomorrow I'm off so I had absolutely nothing planned.

Then my wife said that her friend wanted to go on a bike ride and I could go with her.  WOOHOO, RIDING TIME!

After a week of physical labor and tonight a 7.5 mile bike ride I'm tired and sore.  It's shower time and then I'm out.

A story of my father.

My parents owned a furniture refinishing business and the first thing in that business is to strip off the old finish.  Coincidentally enough that is known as both stripping and the most painful part of the business.

The chemical used to remove the old finish is this painful clear liquid that eats away at rubber, plastic and your flesh.  This stuff was clear (at first) and had a slight soapy feel, before the pain that is.  It was expensive so it was filtered and reused.  The filtering was easy, it drained into a strainer and then into the recycle bucket.    Once it had been filtered and reused the consistency changed, it went from being light and airy like gasoline to thin petroleum jelly; in other words it would stick to you even if you shook it off.

My parents were recycling before it was cool.

The standard procedure when stripping was to put on the rubber apron, face mask, rubber gloves, and rubber sleeve gaiters.  The stripper would eat through the rubber gloves first.  When you started to feel the burn in your fingers you would get your assistant to spray water into the gloves.  If you got the stripper in your eyes then you yelled eyes, lifted the mask and turn to your right so you could get some water splashed in your face.  You would be amazed how sensitive some parts of your body are; armpits are just as sensitive as your eyes with this stuff.

One day my father is stripping with my mother helping him.  He gets the stripper in his eyes so he hollers out and lifts his mask.  He also took a step off the platform.  My mother is spraying him down and he's still hollering and then he starts to take off his pants.  He stepped into the bucket of stripper and had stripper about two feet up his left leg.  He was trying to tell my mother what happened but she was spraying water into face and couldn't understand him.

They eventually got him rinsed off and that is one of the handful of times that my father left work early.

A competition.

Apparently my wife and I are in a competition.  She took the kids out for a bike ride today and the middle child was telling her that "Daddy goes faster".  And "Daddy's bike rides are more fun".

My wife tried to defend herself with the fact that my legs are bigger.  Same kid said that "Mommy is smaller, she should go faster."

The logic of a six year old.

An Ephiphany.

I had a realization at work today.  Very profound but I'm still working on it.  Nope, I'm not going to tell you what it is.  So there.

New job.

I said job and not career.  I can do it and I think that once I learn what the hell I'm doing I could even do it well.  But it's not something I want to do for the next couple of decades.  I think that is; today was a paperwork and video kind of day.  

I say that I don't see myself doing it for the next couple of decades but I had a bartending job once where I thought I would work there for a year and then get a "real" bartending job...I tended bar there for six years.

Five hours in front of a video screen has tuckered me out though.  It's damn close to bedtime for me.

New.

I'm starting a new adventure in the morning.  That means that I've been trying to clean so when the new nanny comes by tomorrow she won't be disgusted, I think it's standard procedure to clean before a maid comes also.

A new job so I can get out of the house and yell at my kids less.  The extra income will go towards marketing for my real job.  Should be interesting; I've never done this kind of work before so at the least I will learn something,