two dolla

where i gush about a kid

So, today, I realized I’m pretty much in love with a boy. He happens to be turning 13 at the end of this month, but over the last week, I’ve realized that I don’t just love him like he’s my better half’s kid. I love him like he’s my own. I’m not his mom. He already has an absolutely fantastic one of those. I’m not his dad. One, I don’t have the parts to be a dad, but two, he also has a very incredible one of those, too. I’m just his Wendy and I’m cool with that. So very cool with that.
 
We met when he was just a shade under 11 years old. The first time we met was at the dog park. Less than 10 minutes later, he was using his metal detector to search the pockets of my cargo shorts. About a week later, the three of us were at the dog park again. He didn’t want me to leave, so he hid in my car and refused to get out eventually wedging himself on the floorboard between the driver’s seat and the back seat. He was stuck for a good 15 minutes.
 
He was not at all into sports before we met. In the past two years, he’s gotten into basketball and loves going to WNBA games. He waffles between Yao Ming and Shaquille O’Neal has his favorite NBA player. Over the last month or so, we’ve been playing catch with a baseball mitt I got him a while ago. He’s got a heck of an arm!
 
I wasn’t at all into sci-fi and, well, reading before I met him. I’ve read the entire Twilight series (save the last half of the 4th book, because C’MON, IT’S GETTING HORRIBLE) and can tell you things about Dr. Who that I’d never even heard of prior to that. I’m also still very capable of doing middle school math, if you can believe that.
 
Over the past couple of months, this kid has grown from a squeaky little boy to this young man whose voice is dropping and who grows out of jeans every two months. He’s abandoned most of his arguing when he screws up and gotten into the habit of doing his hair every morning. I’m still fighting the Axe Body Spray thing, but that’s a battle that’s probably not going anywhere.
 
Point is, I’m pretty much in love with this kid. He’s as much a part of me as any kid could ever be.

already planning for christmas ’10

For Christmas, I got my brother a twin pack of Nutella, three used belt buckles and an 8×10 photograph of George Brett. Don’t worry, it was framed. He got me three fantastic watches that I kind of want to wear all at the same time, if it weren’t for looking like I was trying to hawk stolen watches. I think next year, I might make an attempt at trying a little harder.

I’d like to find him a watch (to go with his collection of probably at least 30 different watches) that he doesn’t already have, maybe something like that casio g-shock variety. He’s an alright kid, and picking his Christmas present out at some place other than Costco and eBay would probably be nice of me.

family night at the (not really a) bar

Tonight, mi familia and I had a date involving dropping off Christmas donations and hamburgers full of molten lava cheese, thanks to the fine folks at Matt’s Bar.

Jenni, Matt, Stephanie and I had adopted a family via The Aliveness Project. Since Jenni and Matt are somewhere in the Southern Caribbean right now, I volunteered to drop it off tonight. The General and I decided to take The Kid with and just give him a chance to see what happens when a ton of people get together to help others. He’s so damn hard to read sometimes, I have no idea what he really thought about the whole thing. Seeing a back room that’s stacked to the ceiling full of donated Christmas gifts is always a feel-good type of vision, so I hope he was able to at least take a little bit away from it.

Following the do-good portion of the evening, we decided to have dinner at Matt’s Bar. We figured taking a 12 year old to a bar was the appropriate thing to do after exposing him to charity, right? (FYI, it’s not really a bar. It’s a restaurant that has bar in the name.) Dinner was just like it always is at Matt’s — greasy and delicious.

And then, before he went to bed, I gave him ten minutes to write what he liked or didn’t like at Matt’s Bar. I present to you a 12 year old’s review on his dining experience tonight. (Keep in mind, he probably would have went on and on had I not limited his time.)

I liked the Juicy Lucy because it had the cheese inside like a volcano!!! The fries were kinda boring and flavorless. The cheese was AWESOMAZINGLY DELICOUS!!!!! I wonder what kind it was. I always forget how little amount of sprite is in the can. This often leads me to drinking it all right away. The restaurant was very nice and small. This was cool because it made me feel more comfortable and relaxed.

Clearly, you should all go visit. And, since it was his first time jumping on the Jucy (Juicy) Lucy bandwagon, so we took pictures.

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best advice today

Were you to encounter a ninja, they would kick your everlovin’ ass.

I love The General. A lot. And I love the reasoning that it takes to get The Kid to understand things. Especially how he’s not a ninja. Clearly dressing as Chuck Norris/Walker Texas, Ranger for Halloween has gone to his head.

pictures from pride

Pride was like, two weeks ago, so I’m a little behind. We’ve been out of town and stuff!

Here are my favorite photos from the weekend:

And, for the finale:

a 12 year old with a phone

The Boy turned 12 at the end of May. After many, many in depth conversations between The General and I, we ended up getting him a cell phone for his birthday. The biggest pro for me was that we don’t have a landline, so anytime we leave The Boy at home alone, we have no way to get in touch with him and, really, he has no way to get in touch with us if there’s an emergency. I don’t know how much a landline costs, but I know that we got his phone for free and we’re only paying $5 more per month to have him on our cell phone plan. And, we can see everyone he calls and texts, which is pretty much safer than a landline anyway.

We wound up getting him the Samsung Gravity, which comes complete with a camera and a QWERTY keyboard. He’s already taken full advantage of our unlimited text and photo package. On Friday, I got six different messages while at work ranging anywhere from “Wassup dog” to “What are you doing”. For the most part, he keeps busy texting me, The General and his dad. He also has a Flickr account (which I can give to you if you want to email me and you’re not a psycho), which has proven to be quite interesting. Most of his pictures turn out something like this:

Why, yes, that is a picture taken of his TV while he was in the midst of playing Kingdom Hearts. Or maybe Kingdom Hearts 2 – I can’t keep track, but I do know they’re releasing a Kingdom Hearts 1.5 in a little while and he’s dying to get his hands on a copy of it because his favorite character is in it… Seriously.

And, then, every once in a while I’ll get a surprise picture message from him that will be something as adorable as this:

And then I don’t get so irritated about the text messages that tell me what episode of Roseanne he’s watching while I’m on my way home from work.

at least i can sleep in the middle

When you’re with someone for over a year and haven’t really spent a single night apart (as least that I can remember), it’s pretty weird when you have to see the person off for the night and then have to figure out what to do with your time until you go to sleep.

The General has a sleep study tonight. I’ve just been informed via text message that there are snacks (granola bars and apple juice) and Sleep Number beds. My bedtime snack’s gonna be some cheese balls and a watered down Dr. Pepper, and I’m gonna go to sleep on a bed full of animals. I don’t think I’m winning this one.

As luck would have it, I have The Boy tonight, so he’s taking a bath. When you’re 12, you get some awesome hair grease action going on and it doesn’t help matters that he’s always trying to use my hair product to give himself a mohawk. He asked if he could take a “long bath”. His defintion was an hour; I bargained him down to 40 minutes. Do I have this pseudo-parent thing down cold, or what?

Of course, he’s been running around the apartment for the 20 minutes prior to his bath in his boxers trying to take pictures of everything he could find in the house with his new cell phone. I hate when he walks around in his boxers, because I really don’t want little boy weenis to become accidentally exposed. Am I wrong for thinking that?

I’m headed to Missouri tomorrow after work for a few days. It’s just Riley and I this time around, which will be sort of nice… but probably feel just as weird as tonight.

so domesticated it’s scary

Ever since I started taking Ritalin, I’ve been a kitchen cleaning machine on Saturday mornings. I get up at 8 or so, pop in my 20mg of Ritalin, get dressed (shoes included!) and start cleaning my fingers to the bone. Nobody made me start doing it – I just did it a few weeks ago. And now I’m seriously in love with doing it. Once The General has downed the first cup or two of coffee, we kind of tag team the whole place, and usually some time before 11 a.m., our place is clean from front to back and we’re wondering what we’re going to do for the rest of the weekend.

Last weekend was the first time we had The Boy since we’d started doing this cleaning frenzy mornings and I think it kind of scared him. He ended up joining in thanks to a game I made up called “Pick a number between 1 and 3 and then you have to do the chore associated with it”, and getting things done like filling up all of our water bottles, taking out trash, sweeping all the floors, and cleaning his room (including making his bed!). And today, I couldn’t stop thinking of how we had to keep that going on a regular basis.

So, tonight, while The General was making dinner, the three of us set around the table and figured out how we were gonna spread our cleaning throughout the week instead of wasting the only free day I get with The Boy and the start of the weekend by doing a bunch of chores. Our plan involves a list of chores, with them all broken down into things that an 11 year old can do without any problem at all. It also involves drawing random chores from a yet to be appointed box/bowl/jar at least once a day to make sure we’re always working on cleaning instead of leaving it to Saturday morning.

This whole shebang is gonna start up tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes. I may need to find something else to put my Ritalin-induced focus on this weekend, which would not at all be a bad thing.

meet peeka

This is Peeka! She’s a six (or so) year old Pekignese. And, no, she’s not winking at you. She only has one eye.

A few weeks ago, The General and I were at the St. Anthony Park Dog Park letting Kentucky and Riley chase each other around a gigantic fenced area. Kentucky was happily chasing other dogs’ tennis balls and Riley was doing what he’s best at – peeing on other dogs and sometimes their owners’ legs. The General started up a conversation with a couple and, as it turns out, they run a rescue organization in Minneapolis. We’d been mulling over the idea of fostering a dog or a cat. The General works from home and our dogs are pretty mellow when it comes to meeting new dogs. Plus, there’s just something about helping a dog out that’s had a crappy go of things that kinda makes me feel good.

We filled out the application and were approved right away. It probably helps that our dogs weren’t douches at the dog park. The rescue folks let us know they’d be dropping off our first foster dog Saturday afternoon. They told us her name, what kind of dog she was, and that her owner was surrendering her, because they couldn’t afford her anymore.

Around 12:30pm, the rescue people got here. Matt, one of the founders of the rescue organization, was carrying Peeka, but what I saw when looking out our bedroom window was a guy carrying a small bear. And as I got closer, I realized it was a small one-eyed bear. Named Peeka. Short for Peeka-boo.

There’s a lot going on with Peeka that needs to be taken care of before she finds her forever home. She weighs 19.6 pounds (according to the Wii Fit) and she’s supposed to be around 14. There’s a bump the size of a golf ball on her stomach that looks like it’s already been looked into, since we can see a needle mark going into it. Her mouth smells like horse poop and moldy chicken. The poor dog’s teeth are pointing in every direction and she can’t even keep her tongue in her mouth most of the time. When we take her outside, she pees about every 5 minutes the entire time she’s out there. The socket of her missing eye still moves around like she’s trying to open in it and like maybe there’s still an eyeball shoved in there somewhere. And, finally, her butt bothers her so bad that we’ve caught her on multiple occasions scooting herself across our bedroom floor by the butt. She has a vet appointment on Thursday, so keep your fingers crossed that it’s all things they can take care of. I’d hate for something like that to prevent her from having an awesome home from here on out.

The story we heard on why she was placed in rescue goes like this… She was a puppy mill dog, which is where it’s believed that she lost her right eye. She was rescued and placed with a family. Peeka’s family had two other dogs and a couple of cats. Recently, one of the dogs died from cancer. Then, Peeka’s family called the rescue organization and said they couldn’t afford to keep her anymore. Kind of suspicious. But whatever.

She’s a really sweet dog. I’m having a hard time getting used to the fact that it takes her three times as long to get from one end of the house to the other. She has to be carried up our stairs, because they’re either too steep or she’s too fat – I haven’t decided yet.

But, if you’re looking for a dog, how can you say no to this face:

a large and awesome update

Me: I’m awesome. My work is awesome (I’m still not sure how I landed the perfect role for me) and this coming week will mark 1 year being there for me. I’m seeing a therapist weekly and my desire to smash my face against restaurant windows while happy hour patrons are happily munching away on overpriced mini tacos has completely diminished. Almost. I’ve still only lost 7 pounds, thanks to the Wii Fit and 2.5 weeks of no caffeine.

The General: Our entire apartment (duplex, whatever) is completely clean now, thanks to some ridiculous power cleaning by that one. And it’s going on two months of no smoking, which is incredibly awesome. We just celebrated 11 months of being together. (How crazy is that?)

The Boy: We do Wii Fit every day that he’s here. And he’s turning out to not only be a pretty fantastic kid to have around, but we’re just developing this bond that I can’t even describe. I’m not his parent, because he already has two awesome ones. I’m just his Wendy and he’s just my Cracken.

Riley: We’re going on three whole months where there hasn’t been a single health issue! He loves the dog park by our house and actually runs there instead of wandering around aimlessly like at previous dog parks we’d taken him. Riley’s been on a boner-fever-run lately and red rockets mainly make me want to puke.

Kentucky: He’s over his ridiculous leash aggression. Kentucky’s the most love-seeking dog I’ve ever met. I cracked him in the head with the Wii remote the other day and he just stood there wagging his tail, when he probably should have been completely concussed. I really want to teach him how to chase and catch the frisbee.

Our Fish: We bought 8 guppies and a Plecostomus about a month ago. Now we have 18 guppies, a Plecostomus, and part of a guppy carcas floating around in the tank. Those crazy fucking things ate Angelina Jolie. (I named the female ones and Angelina was pregnant at the time!) Our only two females left, Octo-Mom and Michelle Duggar, have to fight off the dude fish like they’re at a frat party. It’s disturbing.

And then there’s Peeka. More about Peeka tomorrow, but at least I’ll give you an introduction: