The Red Glow in the Sky (part 2)

I left her to do the research on what was actually going on while I took the dog out. The dog, too, was up early and wanting to go out hours before she usually wants to do that. Agitated, I guess.

We, the dog and I, went out the door into the pre-dawn darkness and made our way to the end of the driveway and turned north to go up the sidewalk…

…and the sky glowed red against the black of night.

You can find the rest of this piece here:

The Smell of Smoke (part 1)

The smell of smoke was in the air. Strong, like sitting around a campfire, but the smoke haze in the air had no obvious source. I thought back to the plume of smoke we’d seen from the highway on the way home from the south Bay earlier in the day. Not that we’d agreed that it was smoke, but I’d thought it was smoke.

Still, as far as I could tell, there was nothing to see...



You can find the rest of this piece here:

Trinity 2015: Part Three -- Other Stuff

Trinity this year was a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, because I was going to be away from the Demon Cat for a week (also known as Jack (here's a picture of him feeling ashamed of himself

(I'm lying; he's never ashamed))), I thought that I would actually take advantage of that by getting, you know, some sleep. Now, previously, when we've been, I've gotten up earlier than everyone else and sat on the deck with my mocha and used the time to write, but, no, this year, I slept in. I was under the false... um, no... I just had some bad logic that told me that I would somehow be able to write during the day when everyone wanted to do things. Yeah, that didn't happen. I didn't wise up and get up early to write until the last two days. Next year, I'll know better than to take the sleeping in option. I do think I came back slightly more rested than I went, though.

Here are some other pictures I took while there that I really like.

We found it this way, but I thought it was cool that someone took the time to make that.

Unless, of course, this is some kind of weird, naturally occurring formation.

We found one other before we left, not as tall as the first, but, see, maybe they are naturally occurring, and this one just hadn't grown as big yet.

The Truth About Kids and Dogs

Okay, I don't really have a truth... unless it's that kids and dogs are a lot of work. Sometimes more so than others. This is one of those times where they're being a lot of work.
And don't get me started on the cat. The cat that has decided that I'm not allowed to be in my bed past 4:00am. I can be asleep; I just can't be doing it in my bed. Yeah, I'm not going to explain that, right now.

So everything has changed this year.

My oldest, who is 18, graduated last spring and is taking classes at the local junior college. We're trying to allow him to be as adult as he can be... Um, no, wait. We're trying to teach him to fly, not that we're not letting him stay in the nest, but grown up birds fly. Which means he gets to make his own decisions, something he really doesn't like to do in a general sense. So far, the one he's mastered is "the decision to stay out late." And he wakes me every time he comes in. And over and over again for the half hour to hour after he comes in as he goes in and out of the bathroom and takes a shower and whatever else it is that's he's doing at 2:00am. Probably eating.

Yeah, between him and the cat, sleep is beginning to wonder why I don't hang out with it anymore.

The middle kid, my younger boy, has started high school. This is a big change for him, of course, which is compounded by the fact that he's only 13. He has to get up earlier than he ever has before which, I think, has turned out to be more difficult than he thought it would be. For me, too, because I'm not used to having to get him up. He's always been really good about that, but having to get up before 6:00am is proving to be impossible without my help. And that's okay. His brother was a junior before I stopped having to get him up.

Are you getting the time frame, here? For me, that is.
In bed and asleep some time around 11:00pm.
Awoken at 2:00am and repeatedly for the next 30 minutes to an hour.
Awoken again at 4:00am and repeatedly until I move to the couch where I sleep for about 30 minutes until I have to get up at 5:15am.
That's on a good night.

But, anyway...

My younger son is also taking the city bus to school, this year. This is also a big change for him, his first really big foray out into the world on his own, but his brother took the bus for four years, so it's his turn, now. At any rate, his mother and I were very trepidatious about him taking the bus in ways that we never were when his brother was a freshman. If you knew him, you'd understand. But he has done a great job with the bus; he hasn't missed it; and he hasn't done what his older brother did a few weeks into his freshman year and forgotten to get off at the right stop and ended up in a place that might as well have been the moon for all he knew. Except for the lack of cheese.

My daughter's now in middle school. The big thing for her is that she's biking to school this year. Alone. Because biking to school is not new to her (or any of my kids), but she's never biked alone. Probably, we would not have made that choice except that she was desperate to exercise some independence and go it alone. She hounded (mostly) my wife about it all summer and whittled pieces and chunks off of her until she broke and said yes. Yes, that's how my daughter does it. She has inexhaustible persistence.

She's also discovering homework. heh

All of this has changed our morning routine. My oldest used to get up first (well, before everyone other than me) and be out the door before anyone other than me was awake; now, he's the last out. Usually, he's not even up before everyone else (but me, and sometimes me) is gone. The younger boy and the girl used to go at the same time (with me), but, now, the younger boy is the first out, sometimes before anyone other than me is up, and the girl is last.

And this is where the dog comes in.

It used to be the younger boy's job to take the dog out in the morning before we left for school, but he doesn't have time for that anymore, especially with having difficulty at getting up before 6:00am. The oldest can't be roused due to his late nights. Actually, we're not sure he actually lives here anymore; we're more like a... flop house. Or something. So that just leaves my daughter.

Actually, my first idea was that I would do it; the only problem with that is that I can't do it until after everyone is gone (except for eldest son who isn't conscious) and, two mornings a week, I actually have to go into school to read, so I'm not home and able to take her out until 9:00am. She's been up for three hours by that point and, I don't know about you, but going to the bathroom is the first thing I do when I got up every morning. The dog has been handling it okay for the most part.

Until a few days ago.

I was busy trying to get everyone's stuff together. Okay, mostly, once my son is gone, that's my wife's stuff I'm getting together. At any rate, I was working on getting stuff together and pushing people out the door and all of that and the dog came up and poked me with her nose. That's dog for, "Hey, I need to go out." A moment later, she did it again. Since I was not at a point where I could take her out, including not being completely dresses. I hollered at the girl, who was completely ready to go except for her cereal (which takes her about two minutes to eat) and still had more than 20 minutes till she needed to leave, "Hey, come take the dog out to go pee."

Now, my daughter loves the dog. Probably not as much as son-the-younger, but she does love her and, actually, plays with her more than anyone else (plays with her more, not spends more time with her; that would be son-the-younger). However, when I asked her to take the dog out, the response I got was, "That's not my job!"

We are currently ignoring the fact that my daughter is currently the only one of the children who consistently asks for "help" with her chores. By "help," I mean she asks someone else to do it for her, basically, because she doesn't want to (and there's a whole other story involved in that that I'll consider for another time). So we argued about it, her contention being that I could just take the dog out after everyone was gone. So the dog peed.

When you have to go, you have to go, even if you're a dog.

And I got to clean it up, because, by that time, my daughter had to leave for school.

On the other hand, she didn't argue with me when I officially made it her job to take the dog out to pee before she leaves for school every morning.

But what I really want to know is, "Can I go back to sleep, now?"

"...one of -those- weekends."

Softball update as we approach the end of the season:
They did lose the game I thought they'd lose (which makes us 9-4, at the moment), but the coach of the other team (the undefeated team, I should add) said we were their toughest competition all season (both times we played them).

And here's a new one I heard at Saturday's game (spoken by the opposing coach to one of his batters as she was getting struck out):
"I can't come and swing it for you."

So, yeah, Saturday started bright and early with a softball game. Prior to the softball game was gassing the car and retrieving coffee. After the softball game was the end-of-season party even though the season isn't quite over yet. Evidently, you can't actually have the end-of-season party after the season ends because no one will show up, because, you know, the season is over. [Let me clarify, this was the end-of-season party for just my daughter's team (yes, there's a reason I'm clarifying).]

Then it was rush home and get the final cleaning in on the house before my daughter's 10th birthday slumber party. [Are you seeing a theme here, yet?] It was a small one this year, because we inadvertently planned the party for the same night as a school fundraiser which involved going to an A's game. [See, not being a baseball fan, I had completely dismissed the fundraiser in my mind so didn't realize we were planning my daughter's party for the same time slot.] She lost several of her friends to the game, so, on the one hand, I felt  bad for my daughter (and for her friends that were upset that they were going to miss the party), but, on the other hand, it was kind of "yeah! we'll only have nine girls!" (instead of 15). Still, nine girls make a lot of noise. [Seriously, the girls never stop talking and I can't hear any one of them over the constant chatter, and there's always at least one of  them trying to talk to me. Parties for my son (the younger one) are never like that.]

And one of them climbed a tree and got "stuck" and, then, went home because I didn't cause a drama over the situation. Basically, I told her she could stay in the tree or I could go get her parents (she actually lives next door, so that was an option (and also why she could just go home)), but she didn't like those options, so she came down (I watched her climb back out of the tree) and, upon arriving back at our house, announced that she had decided she would go home to sleep, which was fine with me. And, while I was dealing with TreeGirl, two of the other girls chased my cat down the street. When I say street, I mean, they chased the cat down the middle of the street to almost a block away. This was after I had told one of the two, specifically, to leave the cat alone, because he wouldn't come to her anyway. And he didn't, so they chased him. Then I had to go fetch him back which was also a bit of a chase, because he was freaked out by all the girls to begin with and, then, by being chased by two of them.

And the night just got better and better as they achieved a kind of synthetic agreement to not sleep. They've never done this before. At previous sleepovers my daughter has had, by the end of the movie, most of them have been asleep. That happens when you start the movie around 10:00 p.m. But not this time. No, at the end of the movie, they were all still awake. So I had to put in another movie. I do plan ahead, though, so I already had one set out. However, I wasn't able to make it through the second movie. The girls had mostly calmed down (after another incident of going off and doing what she was told not to do by the girl that had been told not to go after the cat), and my eyes were melting out of my skull, so I went to bed. I want to say that was around 1:30 a.m., but I'm not really sure.

And I say I went to bed, because I never really went to sleep. There was talking and some amount of moving around and such once I went off to go to bed, which elevated when I heard The Goonies being over. I just waited it out hoping they'd go to sleep, and, eventually, I nodded off sometime after 3:00 a.m., which I know because I got up to go to the bathroom just prior to the nodding and checked the time while I was up. It was short lived. At around 4:00 a.m., I was awakened by one of the girls doing her best Lionel Richie impression, by which I mean that she was dancing on the ceiling. Or something. Maybe galloping through the house on her ghost steed. I'm not sure if she was alone in the cavorting that was going on or if she was the only one brave enough to respond to my shout down the hall that no one was supposed to be up:
"But I'm not sleepy!"
"I don't care. Be in your spot."
"Someone took my spot!"
"I don't care! Find a place to be!"
"But I can't find my blanket!"
"Go to sleep!"
And she did. I know because, 20 minutes later, the cat started scratching on the door that he needed to go out. I've learned that scratching on the door means, "I have to go potty!" Also, he was probably just trying to get away from the girls and only came out at that moment because he figured it was the first time all night that it was safe for him to do so. "Finally! They're all asleep! I can escape!"

But here's the thing with that. The cat has recently switched his eating schedule to eating in the morning before he goes outside from eating in the evening when he comes in. And, normally, I wouldn't let him out so early (so wouldn't be up feeding him so early), but I felt bad for him, because the girls just would not leave him alone when he had been trying to go to sleep after the whole being chased down the block incident. Every time he laid down, someone would put her hands on him, and he'd have to move. It was like a compulsion with them; it didn't matter that I kept saying "leave the cat alone." I mean, he would have been happy to lay down next to one or two of them (which he tried to do) if they would have just quit trying to pet him.

So, anyway, the cat wanted out, and I figured I should feed him, first, so I got up, turned on the lights in the kitchen (basically 10 feet away from where all the girls were sleeping), and banged around to feed the cat. The girls were completely zonked out and didn't stir at all, including the one that had just said to me, "But I'm not sleepy!" After the cat ate, I walked over all of the girls, as did the cat, so that I could let him out. I halfway expected never to see him again. I'm not sure I would have ever come back if I had been the cat. I'd have been all, "Meesa outta here!"

The funny thing with that is that when the girls did get up, about half of them tried to claim that they had never been asleep, including Miss "But I'm Not Sleepy!" One of them tried to claim that she had only been pretending to sleep, but none of them remembered me being in the kitchen or turning on the lights or letting the cat out. heh

I gave up on sleep at that point. Or I tried to. It was only an hour or so before I was supposed to get up and start working on breakfast, and, by the time I was finished with the cat, I was awake. Or so I thought. At any rate, I sat down at my computer to work, but I couldn't focus enough to do that, so I mostly just stared at the screen until I decided I'd go do some more work in the garage because that required standing and some movement. I managed that until sometime after 6, when I thought I'd try to get in a 20 minute nap before the alarm went off at 7, my new time for starting on breakfast since all the girls were still asleep. So I laid back down in bed and had just dozed off... when my daughter's alarm clock went off. 6:30 a.m. I sighed and got back up. [Oh, and there was some stuff with the dog in there after the stuff with the cat, and it was the dog that kept me from going back to sleep after the cat went out (because she had to go see if the cat had left any food, and wouldn't stop bothering me until I took her to see that it was gone).]

Then there was the morning drama, which I won't really go into except to say that it's hard to cook when you have to round up a gaggle of girls and yell at them for the misbehavior. It got the day off to a great start, let me tell you.

Eventually, though, all of the girls did leave, including my daughter, because she had to go to her end-of-season league party. Which, again, had to happen before the season actually ended. The boys had gone off to other places so as not to be home during the sleepover (a wise decision), and they weren't home, yet, so I thought, finally!, I could get some sleep, but that pretty much wasn't to be, because the dog decided to spend the afternoon barking at stuff.

There's more stuff to include, but that stuff will come in other posts, because, really, this one is long enough, and I haven't even gotten to the BIG thing, yet, which is that in between all of this I finished getting all of the last things accomplished for Charter Shorts, Too, and that is now available!

This is the collection of short stories from my creative writing class for this year, and there is some really good stuff in there. Some I was surprised by. There are more students represented this year, since I had some many more, so that's nice. Still, I wish I had more stories from them for it. Maybe, next year, with the changes I'm hoping to get for the program, the book will be longer and won't need anything from me to fill it out. Still, there is only one from me this, year, so that's good. I hope some of you will pick it up and support these kids and the work they're doing.