End of year updates and random other stuff

Here's something really nifty that I found on YouTube.


(If that doesn't play, check it out here.)

The mid December turkey dinner was a success. We used the fancy china. Twitch and a friend came, and also another couple, C&A, friends of ours, who are about a decade older than we are. After dinner we played Cards Against Humanity and it was hilarious! I have told C about CAH but she hadn't had a chance to play. Oh, we had fun! C's husband, A, is in the early to mid stage of Alzheimer's: still looks mostly functional but conversation can get a bit odd. He played with us but didn't really understand what was going on. When it was his turn to choose the best answer card he was pretty random about it, but that's OK. It worked. And he felt included, which is important. He's such a sweet fellow.

Christmas was a quiet affair. Twitch came over for gifts. I bought three pairs of jeans for Superman because his midsection has expanded a bit since he last bought jeans. Oops. I'm tired of seeing him in sweatpants all the time. For Twitch I got a handful of smaller possibly useful things, a couple of things he'd mentioned he wanted over the past year. An 18 inch steel straight edge ruler, a flexible whisk (those things are awesome!).

If you don't have one and cook often enough, you should get one. They are particularly good for mixing eggs and for stirring sauces. 

Did I get distracted again? I was telling you about Christmas. Nobody got me anything to open on Christmas Day, but I'm OK with that. Superman bought me a fancy new KitchenAid stand mixer plus a couple of attachments which I got a couple of weeks before Christmas. It's aqua blue and SO pretty!! Works great, too. 

Christmas dinner was lasagna and garlic bread. We  made two; one with Italian sausage for the guys and one without meat for me. Both included spinach. Quite yummy. More pumpkin pie for dessert because I love my pumpkin pie. Had considered making a lemon meringue, one of Twitch's favorites, but he seemed to like the pumpkin well enough. 

Superman has been off work since the Wednesday before Christmas. It's wonderful! I (mostly) love having him around. He goes back to work on the 3rd day of 2018. (Trying to practice writing/typing the new year) His Christmas break project is a cabinet for my sewing/craft supplies. I'll need at least 2. He's got a lot done on the first one and so far it looks fabulous! I need to take some pictures. 

I bought myself a journal notebook. Two, actually, because I couldn't decide which one to choose. The spiral bound one, 6 by 8.5 inches, has three sections: 160 pages each of lined paper, grid/graph paper, and blank paper. I get so excited about new office supplies!!  The cover is plastic, pink and white horizontal stripes, and says "Express Yourself". You betcha I will! 

The other is a faux leather bound - oh, it says "Leatherette Journal" on the wrapping. Ruled paper, with date options at the top of each page. By "date options" I mean it has the numbers 1-31 across the top, and Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, ... Dec below the numbers. My plan with this journal is to make a 5 year journal kinda like this but more personalized. It's 7.5 by 10 inches, big enough theoretically to use for 10 years. For me, though, five is probably more realistic. Parsimony isn't my strength. Some of the specific five year journals say One Line a Day. Like I can write about a day in one short sentence. Most days, nope. Anyhow, the leatherette cover is debossed (opposite of embossed*) with the phrase "The Best Way to Predict the Future Is to Create It". I think that's a pretty good phrase for a journal that has five years of potential future. 

And speaking of office supplies, we got ourselves a new printer. Finally! We'd had the other one for probably 10 years. It doesn't like to print the first few letters of each line in the first paragraph (or comparable area of graphics). It had been wireless, but didn't know how to talk to these contemporary computers. The new one does, though. Fancy thing, all-in-one print, scan, fax (if I had a land line to link it to, which I don't), and something else. Craziest of all, the printer HAS ITS OWN EMAIL ADDRESS!! I'm blown away by this modern technology. 

That's all I can think to say right now. I need to go bake a cherry pie. My friend C brought a pie to our mid December dinner, so I'm going to return the pie pan with a cherry pie in it. :-)

*I thought the opposite of emboss was etch. But Dictionary.com doesn't agree. Also, etching might be slightly different. This thing is kinda like stamped. 

Ten days after Sproing returns, plus other places my brain goes

Yeah, sorry it took so long to update the whole Sproing returns thing. It's been a busy week and a half.

Things are not, unfortunately, very different from before he left. We've had a few good days in a row here, but the first week was hell. He's arguing about almost everything. I try to have a discussion, a conversation, and he thinks I'm attacking him and responds accordingly. Yelling ensues. He has a problem with authority.

I took him to get his driver's license this week. That helped. Before he left he had a traffic ticket that he didn't pay. While he was in jail he got (delivered here, of course) a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) saying that he had to pay the ticket ($100) before stated date or turn over his license to the DMV. Of course he didn't pay it, being as he was in jail. And I sure as hell didn't pay it. Actually, I took his license to the DMV and turned it in. So Sproing had to pay the $100 ticket, then had to pay a $100 fee to get his license reinstated (or something like that) PLUS a $25 fee for the actual physical license. I helped him a little bit with those second fees, but not much. The $25 was a surprise to both of us.

Anyway, since getting his license he's been generally satisfied with life. Superman allows him to drive the truck. Sproing has so far been pretty good about keeping gas in the truck.

OK, here's another concern I have. Where is he getting this money? I asked. He said one of his friends has been giving him money for gas, but I have doubts about his story. If I press him for more details, I suspect he will go all ape-wild mad again. Perhaps I'll suggest to Superman that he question the boy.

In other news, Twitch is doing very well at Arby's. It isn't the job he wants, but it is the job he has and he's doing it well. The good news is that he's been promoted to manager. The bad news is he's being transferred to a store an hour away. That's actually good news in the long run, but problematic for the immediate. The idiot hasn't been saving money like he should have so he doesn't have enough money to move. And he doesn't have a car. He doesn't even have a driver's license. So far he's been able to hitch rides with coworkers. Next week there are two days when he has no ride to work. This is not cool. Mama doesn't like it. Mama doesn't want to drive two hours round trip twice a day. NOT the hip gig.

I got Sproing enrolled in school finally. He starts Monday. He's been assigned to the alternative school, but he's come in at an inopportune time. Standardized testing for his grade starts Tuesday, and he has to take the tests at the zoned school, his regular high school. He doesn't have any assigned classes there. He goes in Monday at 10:00 for about 1.5 hours for some kind of pre-testing thingie, then Tuesday and Wednesday he'll be there at 9:00 for a few hours. Possibly all day, I'm not sure. Getting him to and from school is going to interfere with Twitch's transportation needs, not to mention that I have to get Diva to and from her Adult Ed program from 8:30 to 11:30. And I can't just leave Sproing at the high school since he doesn't have any classes there. If the testing last long enough on Tuesday and Wednesday he can take the bus home. I hope that works.

Fortunately Sproing and Diva will be going to the same location once he's at the alternative school. Oh, they call that program "Refocus Academy." Doncha' love it? Anyhoo, the GED classes, though not affiliated with the school district, are held at the same campus as the alternative public school programs. They'll both start school at 8:30, then Diva leaves at 11:30. Sproing stays until 2:something. Maybe 2:30, I don't rightly recall.

In the intervening weeks since my last significant post, baseball season started. YAY!! My Braves have won some and lost some. Right now we're in the bottom of the 9th in Philadelphia (hi Denise) and we're up 5-2. We've lost our last five, maybe six games, so a win here will be especially nice. And we won! Lest you feel too bad for the Phillies, they won last night. We play the Phillies again tomorrow afternoon. I don't know who wins that game yet, you know, time being what it is.

I don't know. Perhaps my brain is finished with this post. There are other things I have thought about writing recently whilst doing something else, but I get here and they flee my mind.

Here's something. I've been fascinated with New Zealand. It's going on winter there. I have Dunedin, NZ programmed into my phone's weather app so I can trace winter's progress. I'm sad that our summer is approaching, as the heat really gets to me. And why New Zealand, you ask? Because of Anyta Sunday. She writes gay romance stories, and I read a lot of gay romance stories. I read other things, too, but I read a lot of gay romance. She is from New Zealand and a lot of her stories are set there. Why Dunedin, NZ you ask? That's the location of University of Otago, the setting of one of the stories I read recently. So, New Zealand. I'd like to go. Perhaps I'd like to study at the UofO. I like going to school. I'm not fond of some of the shit going on in my life here, and I'm not in school right now. I could run away to New Zealand and study at University of Otago. It's a fun thing to think about when I'm lying in bed not going to sleep at 3am.

Also, insomnia. But I don't want to talk about that right now.

Here's a video I just watched. I like this guy's educational videos.

I don't know, but oh my!

More information: this time a sex-positive message

As if you didn't know by now, I have a sex-positive philosophy.



I could expound on my philosophy of sex, and maybe one day I will. But not today. I'm too tired and distracted.

An informative piece

How in the hell did he keep a straight face while saying this??

Whilst wandering around YouTube

It started with a video in an email from my mother, of all people. One that she sent to me and my two brothers.

My grandfather on my daddy's side was proud of his Scottish heritage. He had not only a kilt, genuine made in Scotland, genuine family tartan, but also had the formal shirt and vest/coat thingie to go with it. He cut a dashing figure. I'm not sure if he'd be proud or scandalized by this video. With him, it could go either way. He had a healthy and somewhat perverse sense of humor along with fierce Scottish loyalty.

And you know how YouTube leads you on with suggested videos. So, speaking of kilts...

I especially like the sweet fella in the shorty kilt. Also, my grandfather told me that a woman's kilt is called a kilty. I looked it up and found this:

which looks like a woman's shoe to me, so perhaps Grandpapa was blowing smoke up my kilt. Or maybe the definition has changed, or is different by location. 

Anyway, once we had sexy men in sexy kilts, it was a logical leap to this:

which, I mean, wow.

There's another suggested video at the end of this one showcasing the Tom of Finland Spring line from 1999. Haven't watched that one yet, but it's queued up.

Funny, or in poor taste?

The horror!

Safety Tips

Thoughts of summer

I woke up with this song playing in my head. I like it, and I'm going to put it in your head now. Just click on that triangle right there.

I want one just like this

This you have got to see!

Check out the making of video, too. Very interesting.

Directions

Go here immediately and watch the video clip. Seriously. I mean it.

So far, so good

I'm feeling a bit better. Saw the therapist today, told her about my Do Not Disturb sign and my visiting hours. She especially liked the visiting hours. I mentioned something about the time frame for all of this, and she said it's OK with her if I stay "insulated" like this until she gets back from vacation! I didn't realize she was going on vacation. Today was her last day of work pre-vacay. She'll be back in a week and a half. I don't know that I'll need that long, but it's nice to know she approves.

The visiting hours are going well. Sproing is the one who mostly needs Mama. We do lots of snuggling and back scratching during visiting hours. Sometimes he needs a Mama back-scratch fix mid day. But it's a quick verification, and he's on to bigger and badder things.

He and Diva have actually been very well behaved these last two days. Light took them to a movie yesterday morning. Today she took them to the park for a picnic. They have both spent a lot of time in the back yard swimming in the wading pool I got the other day.

As for me, I'm hanging on. I went to Wal-Mart after my visit with the therapist. I may have overdone it a bit, but not too bad. I was tired and uncomfortable (restless? nervous? cranky?) when I got home. I rested, blogged, read the newspaper, chatted with a friend. I feel better. As far as I know I don't need to go anywhere tomorrow. I'm going to try to just stay at home and chill.

My Mama sent this to me via email. She says this is the next hobby she's going to try. Hmm. I don't predict much success for the old gal. (Don't tell her I called her old. She's ONLY 71!)



Wouldn't you just love to have an outfit like that? Either one. Both are fabulous.

For your entertainment today...

Now for a little bit of culture, Java style.