Category Archive: Life

General ramblings about life

May 14

Here We Go Again

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Life, My Kids

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November 28th. That was my last blog post on “The Mommy Daddy”. I stopped writing for a long time after that. Now I’m starting up again. Why? I don’t know. That’s not true. I do know.

I write because I feel like that if I don’t I’ll explode! I want my blog to be popular, sure I do. I’m just like anyone else who blogs. But I got caught up in the gimmicky stuff about trying to make it successful. I even signed up for a stupid blog class through “Writer’s Digest” and it analyzed everything that made a blog “successful”.

It talked about identifying my audience, establishing goals, picking successful keywords to weed into my content for better search engine optimization. That last one really pissed me off. I’m writing to please a computer algorithm? Really? Is that why I’m writing?

Here’s another good one from the course. “Create a short online bio that positions your brand online.”

Talk about sucking the joy out of writing anything. My brand online? I’m a Stay At Home Dad that was writing about his kids just like hundreds of other Stay At Home Dads do. My “brand” is me writing about the stupid, dumb or cute things that they do or say over the years. And because I got soooo caught up in all of the stupid bullshit of trying to outsmart the world into liking my stuff, I missed out on writing about really great things. My Matthew joining a Karate class. My daughter Rose just being the wonderful little girl that she is and doing cute things every day. Joseph and his reading problems at school. Michael and his new braces.

I missed a lot even though it was only five or six months. If I was a dying man and only had that short amount of time left to live, how precious my time would’ve been to me. Instead I wasted it.

Not anymore.

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Nov 27

HOW I ENDED UP IN RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA

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Life

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Riverside California isn’t a place you aspire to live, it’s a place you end up.  That’s what happened to me over twenty years ago.

I never woke up thinking to myself, “You know!  Today I’m gonna move to Riverside, California!”

No one in their right mind would think that.  I only came to Riverside because I needed a break from Hollywood, and my brother suggested I come for a visit and see his family.  I didn’t have any gigs lined up, my music career was taking a nose dive at the time, and I knew I’d have fun and be very well fed.  So I packed up my Toyota Tercel for a weekend visit and took off.

If you look at a map of Southern California and draw a line from LA to Palm Springs, Riverside is exactly halfway between the two.  If the map has any color to it, the green that represented the beautiful California coastline would suddenly turn brown because you drive into a desert.  The name Riverside is a misnomer.  Actually it’s an outright lie!

Once there was a river and a thriving agricultural community that was the envy of the nation.  Riverside was one of the richest places to live in the whole country.  What happened was Los Angeles.  They greedily sucked up all the water,  diverting it for their use.

I drove up the 91 on a hot summer day with no air conditioning  so I got to appreciate the 110 degree heat blasting me through open windows.  My brother was a welder at the time and had just started a new family.  Money was tight for them so they lived in a trailer park up in the foothills just outside of Riverside.

I got off the freeway and drove up Cajolco, a two lane road that wound like a huge dead snake flung across a landscape of dusty hills.  As I drove it amazed me that patches of green property appeared with actual grass and beautiful plants then abruptly at the property line, everything would turn crispy brown and dead again.   That happened regularly as I drove down the road;  a classic example of how mankind did daily battle to establish a foothold in that God forsaken environment.  If the water that Riverside pumped in was ever  turned off everything would be dead in a week and tumbleweeds would roll down Main Street and up to the doors of city hall.

About five miles short of my brother’s place my car made a noise, quit working and rolled to a stop on the side of the road.  Smoke started to waft up from the engine.  I jumped out, lifted the hood and used an old shirt from my backseat to beat down a small engine fire.  That was it.  God was pointing a finger at me saying that my life needed to change.   I had no money to fix the car.

I walked the rest of the way to my brothers and spent the night on his couch.  The next morning he drove me to where I left the car.

It had been stripped.


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Jun 27

Our Dancing Dogs

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Humor, Life, My Kids

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Beauty

Our dog Beauty

Our family grew about six months ago. We added another member. She’s a foundling. We found her at a baseball field, in a park where we were attending a birthday party for a friend of one of our kids. My kids fell in love with her the minute they saw her and I gave in almost immediately when the topic of taking her home came up.

When I first took her to the vet to get her shots and chipped I was shocked when the vet said that finding animals in baseball fields was the latest thing. Ever since the economy nose dived and local governments in California went crazy trying to squeeze every nickel they could out of the public, people have stopped taking their unwanted pets to the pound. The pound now charges you anywhere from $50 to $80 dollars to drop off an unwanted dog. So people aren’t paying it.

Instead they go to a baseball field or soccer field, anywhere that is public and enclosed by a fence and chuck them over. They know that, because it’s a public park, people will be there the next day or the grounds keeper will find it. And since it’s enclosed they don’t worry that the pups will wander off into the street and get run over by a car.

So that’s how we ended up with “Beauty” our newest dog. Sonny, our older dog liked her right away and now has a companion to play with. To say that she’s had an invigorating effect on the old boy would be an understatement. She’s lit fires in that dog that he hasn’t experienced since I don’t know when.

The kids were watching a movie on T.V. when I heard my daughter Rose yell out,

“Look! Sonny is hugging Beauty!”

“No!”, said Joseph, “He’s trying to dance with her!”

I had to get up and drag him off of Beauty. He wasn’t too pleased and is very persistent. We catch him all the time trying to “dance”  with Beauty; we stuck with that description for the kid’s sake. He’s a good dancer too. He leads her around the room like a pro. Or maybe that’s her trying to get away. I don’t know.

Thank God he’s fixed.

 

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May 21

LITTLE LEAGUE

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Life, My Kids

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Little LeagueLittle League is over. Thank God! Having one kid in Little League is enough of a time suck by itself. Having four kids in it is ridiculous.

My triplets graduated to Farm League and were all put on the same team so that they could play together. At first the coach thought this was a good thing because they would work well together as a team, which they did. It became a bad thing when, because of family events, we had to pull them from a couple of games.  All of a sudden he was three players short and had to forfeit a couple of games.

Farm League is also when the playing gets a lot more serious. It’s no longer, “It’s just a game!”, or “The kids should just have fun!”.

Now the coaches and the parents get in the kid’s faces with, “You should’ve got that one!”

Coaches are also stacking their teams. There was one team this year, the Dodgers, that I swear had kids who were shaving and they were put in the 7 to 9 year old category. Those kids were hitting the ball out of the park.

The good times are there too. The thrills of hitting a double, tagging someone out, or scoring a run are very real now.  The innocence  is gone though.

But, we still had Tee Ball.

When we told Matthew he was old enough to play baseball he jumped up and down and yelled, “I’m not a mascot now, I’m a player!”

For the past two years we told him he was the team mascot so that he could feel involved. When the kids were on the Pirates he would come to the games dressed in his little Halloween pirate outfit and yell “AAARRRGGHH” a lot during the game.

Now he’s a Yankee. This made him the villain for a short period of time because the triplets were on the Mets. There were a couple of early arguments in the house on who was the bad guy until I told them all that the best team was really the Chicago Cubs. My wife and I are from the Midwest.

Tee Ball is a trip. If you’ve ever watched a Tee Ball game it’s like herding cats. Sometimes the batter runs to third instead of first. An excited fielder jumping up and down might not be a motivated player. He might  have to go potty and will simply run off of the field if nature calls. Throwing the ball usually involves some kind of floppy hand gesture that gets it about three feet. After multiple attempts the player just picks up the ball and walks it to where he wants it to go.

The funniest experience was when Matthew put on his athletic protector for the first time. He stood proudly in a Superman stance and yelled, “Go ahead! Hit me in the penis! It doesn’t hurt!”

During the games, when he was bored in the outfield he was seen by everyone smacking his fist into his cup, just pounding away.

Tee Ball has no losers, every game is a tie. Boy , if life was that simple…

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May 18

Another One Bites the Dust

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Life, Technology

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Another One Bites the Dust

The latest casualty of the internet revolution is the business card.   The little 2 by 3.5 inch pieces of cardboard are seen as quaint relics of a bygone age.  Once a staple in briefcases and wallets around the world, they are viewed with derision by the young uber techies in society. People who use them are viewed as dinosaurs and out of touch with the latest technology.

U.S. sales of business cards have fallen consistently since the late 1990s with the slide accelerating significantly since the advent of smart phone technology. Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the “Bump App”, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information.

You can read the story online at the LA Times: “Passing out business cards is quickly becoming passé“.

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