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,

More insanity.

Yesterday was a kid's birthday so one of the guests did a sleepover with us.  Today was first Monday at Canton so we loaded up the four kids (three of ours plus the extra) and went.  We also took a new neighbor and her four kids.  She had never been before and thought it sounded like fun.

Fun.

Eight kids ranging from three up to ten.  Four are brats, three can be pretty damned bratty and the last one was pretty much perfect the entire day.  What kind of crackhead idea of fun is this?

Yes, going to Canton and seeing all of the weird and wonderful signs of capitalism are great but kids can really make it a stretch.  Nothing really caught my eye but it was fun seeing the "antique" furniture and being told how old it was.

July 4th.

I live out in the country now so fireworks are a go out in the street and light them up kind of thing.  To get to our house you have to pass three fireworks stands; so the opportunity is there.  We bought some and a little before it got dark we started lighting up the sparklers for the kids.  When it got a bit darker we lit up the other stuff.  We didn't go crazy with the fireworks because why should we when our neighbors will spend the big bucks for the professional stuff?  Yes, our neighbors went a little crazy and shot off I don't know how much.  So much that I'm glad that we had a little rain shower this afternoon.  I walked down to the end of the street so I could how much the neighbors were shooting off; they were shooting off so much that I'm going to take a shower to get the ash off of me.

Noise.

We have a police dog.  He's retired now but after breaking two teeth during a bite and getting hit by a car (dislocated knee) he still loves to bite.  He really does love to bite, he's a German Shepherd and people say he bites like a Malinois.  For those of you not into working dogs that's a great compliment.  Gunfire doesn't even bother him.

Every year around this time he goes crazy because of the fireworks.  He'll jump into the middle of a group criminals if ordered to bite one of them but that popping sound from fireworks makes him into the biggest lapdog in the world.

Refreshing.

I had a phone interview today.  It was refreshing in it's simplicity.  She called at the agreed upon time asked me a few questions and told me the pay, the scheduling information, and the payroll standards.  Then she told me a little bit about the background check process and she was done.

None of this crap about useless trivia or philosophical crap that have nothing to do with the job.  And for some jobs that is how I would interview but this is a job to sell wine.  Do you know basic wine knowledge?  Can you pass a background check?  Good, the rest is a needless waste of time.

She didn't waste my time or hers, it was very refreshing.  Why can't more companies do this?

5 Minutes.

Five freaking minutes.  Every five freaking minutes my computer loses its internet capability.  Every five minutes.

How my mother came to be her.

My mother was raised in the 30's and they were pretty damn poor; but oddly enough they had so much money compared to my fathers side of the family.  Her mother was the "typical' Italian Catholic lady and my grandfather was from what I've been told a very "typical" Italian Catholic gentleman.

And from what I've been told a "typical" Italian husband would throw his plate of dinner against the wall if it wasn't up to his standards, or at least my grandfather did.  When I first heard about this I laughed because I could just imagine what would happen if my father had tried to do that.  Picture this:  The plate goes flying across the room and hits the wall and my father is close behind the plate starting to clean it up.  "Hey Baby, when I get this cleaned up could you bring me to the hospital because it has this strange twitch and I think a doctor needs to see it...before I go to work tomorrow with you and the table saw.   Please?"

He also had a problem with girlfriends; from what I was told he had a lot of them and my grandmother would find out about them.  I don't know how long this went on but they were married for over 20 years at least.

And then my Italian Catholic grandparents got a divorce in the 50's.  How often did that happen?  My grandfather remarried and then after decades with this lady he got divorced again.  From what I heard this 80 something year old man had more girlfriends than his wife could handle.  After the divorce he moved in with my parents and proceeded to take the dog out for walks.  A black Afgan, aka the chick magnet.  An 83 year old guy going to bridge games to flirt with the ladies.  That's where he died from a heart attack, I bet he died happy flirting with those ladies.

Once my grandparents got divorced my grandmother kept her married name and from what I could infer she also kept the in-laws.  She went to their reunions and they loved her, didn't really care if he showed or not.

My grandmother was the matriarch of her side of the family as well as her ex husbands side and everyone treated her with respect.  At the only family reunion I went to she would just sit in the shade and everyone would bring everything to her.  I cracked a joke how they treated her like a mobster godfather and she "tsk'd" and said "Don't talk to those boys, they're not people you talk to."  Rumour is that some of my distant cousins are connected but I don't believe it.  At least not until I see better suits at the family reunions.