My split personalities have split personalities.

There are lots of things I do not believe in like- Superman and Robin Hood are still alive in Hollywood, that gasolines in short supply, the rising cost of getting by, but I believe in love- , I also don't believe in astrology. It's ridiculous on a grand scale considering the light from the stars we see in the sky have been traveling toward earth for millions of years but scoff as I may you'd be hard pressed to find a more true Gemini. To say I have a dual personality would be putting it mildly. As Kattie Perry put it, I'm hot and I'm cold, I'm yes and I'm no... I pms like a bitch and she should know. I'm country, folk, pop and rock and most everything in between. I'm a cultural luve a, and a beer swilling bubba. I'm blue collar meat and potatoes with a love of bohemia. I'm a bleeding heart liberal with a conservative slant. I'm alternatively a health nut and a glutton, which leaves me soft in the middle. I love knowledge for knowledge's sake but believe the only good brains cells are the ones you kill. I believe Socrates was sadly mistaken when he said the unexamined life isn't worth living, to examine life and death and the meaning there of is to rob yourself of happiness. So think of ball games (go Panthers!) and movies and t.v too, think of women and beer and contemplate a new tatto, or think of books and stories and theater like I do. Fill your mind with deep meditative yet empty thoughts, or become a specialist in some field of astrophysics or history. Think up ideas or if you must think on ideologies, but please keep your dogma to yourself. But don't give life itself to much attention. Mostly in life I have, like electricity, followed the path of least resistance and like water always found my on level. I go from happy to miserable and back again at mach speed. I can be such a joy to live with. It has been suggested on a few occasions that I seek medicinal help, but I hold off and hope for the best. To be honest, and let's face it that seems to have become my m.o. on this blog, I'm scared to take happy pills because I want to be able to feel, to empathize, I may not like the lows but I do adore the highs. I think I'd rather live a sine wave than to live a flat line, because a flat line sounds like dying - and dying to me don't sound like that much fun... I fight authority, authority always winning- of course, I'm also the authority too. So when my wife says, "I love you, I just wish you were better," don't judge her, I know what she means.

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse

Alright so there's this guy and he inhales a pea and it buries itself in his lung and then sprouts. So like there's not enough to worry about in this world already, now the vegetables are fighting back. My question is if the pea was cooked how did it sprout? I thought cooking killed the enzymes. Maybe it was an assassin pea in a boil proof pod sent to take out the vegetable eaters of the world. Or an alien pea that would slowly turn the people of the world into pod people. This really sucks for parents. I mean it was already hard to get the kids to eat vegetables but now they're liable to be scared to death that if they eat a pea then late one night their chest will itch and when they scratch... there will be a curly little green stalk poking out! Oh the humanity. I can hear it now- 'Mom! Help I think I swallowed a pea wrong call 911', 'Don't worry son, just drink a little Round-Up that ought to do the trick'. A pea? I've eaten bean sprouts before. What are they doing to my body? Am I slowly turning into a vegetable? There are some serious moral issues that need to be addressed before this goes further. If a person turns into a vegetable is it okay to eat them? Would they be meat or vegetable or some combination there of? Could a vegan eat a vegetable person? Would they be better steamed, fried or sauteed in a nice cream sauce? I don't believe the world is ready for this. But all bullshitting aside, well mostly anyway, if this happened to this guy isn't safe to say that it's happening to others? Look around you today as your out, look at the people beside you in line at the dmv, in the car behind you at the red light, the cashier at the adult book store and think that any one of them may be incubating a plant... in their lungs.

The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

I don't watch the news, well I very rarely watch the news. I just don't like it. It's very depressing, you never hear good things on the news it's always murder, decay, corruption, society atrophying into a state of hedonistic barbarism. Those that are obsessed with the news I think would be the same ones that thrilled at the gladiator matches in the Coliseum, kind of a thirst for the blood and misery of others but in a way that doesn't leave them wringing their hands yelling at a damned spot. Or they could just want to be well informed citizens. What do I know? Nothing, because as previously stated, I very rarely watch the news. So where do I get the news? One of four places- 1. My wife tells me, 2. I hear it on the radio before I turn the station to find some music, 3. One of those little blurbs on the Road Runner home page catches my eye before I can click on the facebook link, or (and this is a new one)4. I can go to work and have everyone ask if I'm okay, they heard I had a seizure and got robbed at Wal-Mart and then come home bewildered and look up 'the news' on the Star website. So I look up the article and while I feel terrible for the guy I'm very glad it wasn't me and I can see how the mix up may have occurred. My first name is Jeremy, this guys name, and because thats whats on my check a lot of folks at work know that it is, his last name was Sperling with an e and mine of course is with a u but I don't know how to spell everyone's name I work with and so I don't expect them to know mine. So what happened is one guy heard or saw what he thought was my name (if he had read the article I don't think he would have thought it was me) and went to work and started asking people if they heard what had happened to me. lol. Now the plot thickens. It just so happens that Wednesday the day this happened I called into work so that we could go and trade Raineys van. So you got a guy thinking I've had a seizure and had my money stolen and then you have me not coming to work and by the time I got there they had started a prayer chain and were thinking of taking up a collection to help me buy the kids school clothes. OMG! It's nice to know people care about you though. I thanked them and then told them I did have to take on a car payment which I've not had in quite awhile so if they wanted to go ahead and take up a collection for me, I'd be okay with that.

www Wendesday

Without any ado, I recently finished reading Christopher Moore's hilarious Island of the Sequined Love Nun, I loved it. I am currently reading Clive Cussler's Flood Tide, a Dirk Pitt adventure, it's like the literary version of a summer action flick. Next up? Who knows, possibly American Gods by Neil Gaiman or maybe Brida by Paulo Coelho.

Almost time to take that Holiday Road

"I think you're all f'd in the head. We're ten hours from the f'ing fun park and you want to bail out. Well I'll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun. I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much f'ing fun we'll need plastic surgeory to remove our gd smiles. You'll be whistling 'Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah' out of you're assholes! I gotta be crazy! I'm on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Holy Shit!" Clark W. Griswold, Vacation.
In just a few long days the fam and I will be loading up the wagon(van)and heading out, not on a vacation as Clark so eloquently put it but on a quest for fun. We've got reservations made and we're ready to swim, slide, shop and ride. All we really have to worry about for those four days and three nights is not killing each other, other wise will be worry free. Nothing is as great as making memories with your family and lets face it nothing can drive you as Griswoldingly batshit as the same exact thing. I think all us dads have a little Clark W. in us that builds up expectations of what our vacations should be, ideals drawn up from to many travel brochures and board game commercials. I mean look at the back of a board game there's usually a picture of a family gathered around a game board laughing and having fun. Have any of you ever done that? I've played games with friends and loved it, Rainey and I use to love to play games and you can even play a game with one kid and have fun. But a whole family enjoying a board game? Those pictures on the back are taken right when the game starts and everyone is thinking- yeah I'm going to win this, if it were taken a few minutes later barbs would be flying and tears a streaming. And the travel commercials where everyone is still and quiet and the dad says- I can go 300 more miles. Give me a break. That's why we have so many melt downs and disappointments because we fantasize and plan our family fun in advance and then it never goes that way. Why? Because children aren't personality free little beings doing whatever you think is fun. They have strong, infuriating, wonderful personality's and they don't always mesh. On top of that they're siblings, and siblings are life's way of teaching us how to argue. I remember once my sister and I were playing Monopoly (this was before Nintendo) and after we had played for awhile she decided she was done, and who can blame her the game goes on forever. Well, I for one blamed her. I remember I got all perturbed and slung the game across the room yelling at her for, I don't know, ruining the game or something. My children are the same they can play for a little while and then it breaks down into a royal rumble. There are many vacations I can remember when everything just went to hell in a hand basket but even in those times there were still some great moments. For example one year we didn't get the room we thought we were going to get and we all ended up crammed into one room and it was terribly hot and some one stole one of our beach towels and we had an overall horrible time but that was also the year Maddie and I went to the waterpark together and we had an incredible time, made some memories I hope will both always keep.
So if driving 5 plus hours packed in a van like sardines to try and eek out a little fun sounds like something only insane people would do, well your wrong. Yes we are insane but we've learned some things over the years. Little tips that help us to have a good time, every year we try to go over our list and add to it if we can. It's work for several years now and here's hoping it works some more. So while not set in stone or even all encompassing here are the tips.

Tips for having a fun family vacation
1. Have more than one room. You've got to be able to spread out and have a little alone time.

2. Don't insist everyone do everything. You can't go off and leave a 4 year old in the room by himself but he doesn't have to play putt-putt.

3. Divide and conquer. This goes along with number 2, I'll take the ones that want to do this, you take the ones that want to do that.

4. You don't have to be busy the whole time. Yes I know they can watch Spongebob and play video games at home but it's okay to do it on vacation too.

5. Don't try to play board games with everyone. See the above paragraphs for more info.

6. You don't have to be in a hurry to get there. If you need to stop every hour and let someone pee, or get a drink it's okay, it's not a race.

7. Don't plan to much ahead of time. Take a more organic approach to building the fun things you do.

and last but certainly not least

8. Don't get upset when things don't go according to plan. Someone is, not may but is, going to get sleepy and cranky and it might even be someone besides me.


So there you have it folks my 8 simple rules for not having a Clark W. Griswold melt down in the middle of vacation, the answer isn't to leave the kids at home, you can't build fond memories with them that way. The answer is to not put expectations on the trip. So while I hope we get lucky and have a really good time, I'm not expecting anything, just going to sort of go with the flow. Kinda like the lazy river.

"Poor little guy. Probably kept up with you for a mile or so.
[tearing up]
Tough little mutt... "

www Wednesday

I've been doing this for several weeks now and eventually I will learn how to spell Wednesday, such a weird word. What did I read last? Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie, who has become one of my favorite authors, it's a good story. It's told in memoir form in which our unnamed narrator tells the story of how as an French student in China she falls in love with a man named Tumchooq who bears the name of a forgotten country and language. This man's father and then himself and then finally our narrator spend their lives looking for half a lost Buddhist sutra written in Tumchooq. The story gives us not only our protagonists story but also the story of the missing sutra. My only complaint with the story is that it's at times pretty slow, but it's worth the reading.
What am I reading now? Loving Che by Ana Menendez, bet you can guess what it's about. It starts off as a story of a woman raised by her grandfather in Miami looking for the mother she never new and then becomes the story of the mother living in revolutionary Cuba, meeting Che and... well that's about as far as I've gotten so far. I like the way the story is being told in snippets of the mothers memories as she tries to relate to her daughter the story of her life.
What am I going to read next? Probably Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I had planned to read it after the Dai Sijie book but my daughter has stolen it and hasn't finished it yet.

Kids!

There's a joke I heard once that I've always liked and often repeated the comedian says 'My wife and I have been fighting over having kids. I don't want any but she says we can't give them away'. Ba da bing. This morning I've been baby sitting, although according to Rainey I'm not 'sitting' because there mine, and it's been a little crazy. Well mostly it's been the wee one that's causing all the trouble. I phoned Rainey and asked her why she didn't take that one with her, she said that's why she needed a break. She also told me she might just stay gone until tomorrow, she was kidding. I told her that was fine she could pick the kids up at the fire department tomorrow, I was kidding, I guess. Then she informed me that the fire department only takes kids up to like 90 days old and I just thought that was terribly unfair. I mean up till 90 days old they still have that new baby smell to them and everything, just lying there being all cute and everything. It's when they get mobile that you want to drop em off somewhere. That brings me to another old joke- you spend the first few years of a kids life teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their life telling them to shut-up and sit down. Sometimes when Rain gets aggravated with the kids she'll hold them up to the wall and ask me to put a hook up there for to hang them on. That would be alright, hang a kid up until your ready for them and then take them down to play. They could even take your coat and hat like the hands on the wall in Willy Wonka. Of course, please note, this is all in jest after a day that started with me being beaned in the head with a sippy cup and then spending the next several hours, with a headache, picking up all the stuff a one year old can drag out. What can a one year old drag out? Anything it can get it's grubby little paws on, that's what. Sometimes when my humor is not as well adjusted as it is this morning I think life would be much simpler without kids are with just one or two. But I can't imagine life, nor would I ever wish for a life, without all of my children in it. As nerve racking as they can be, they also can bring lots of laughter and joy. I can't look into one of their smiling faces and not feel incredibly happy to be a part of their lives, even if I do sometimes threaten to send them to military school or a nunnery. Or maybe a cannery? They could earn some wages, start paying their way around here. Is child labor still illegal?