Road Rage Averted

I drove to work and thought of a story idea I had that I'll almost certainly never start. Kind of a chain reaction thing centered around road rage. I'll give you TMI for a minute...our AC is out, and Sears won't send someone until Friday to look at it.

Sidebar - Sears initially told us we couldn't have someone until July 16th. JULY 16TH!!! Our AC is new. I actually, for once in my life...because it was thousands and thousands of dollars, spent an extra thousand on a Master Service Agreement. For five years Sears gives me free maintenance and repair. We called them every day (my wife joined the fray yesterday) and got it bumped to July 12th...then July 5th...which is MUCH better, but it took 12 calls. TWELVE. For THIS...I paid those fuckers a thousand dollars. I'm so pissed off at Sears right now (this is not the first issue we've had) Anyway...

So it's hot and sticky (because we opened all the windows in the house) and I'm irritable, and the girls who come to watch Lily until the bus picks her up were late, and a friend of a friend came over to look at the AC just to see if there was anything he could do to fix it without Sears noticing and voiding the warranty. And so he said..."Come outside I want to show you something" and I hate leaving Lily alone for many reasons, not the least of which is related to THIS (click link if you wish), but I walked outside because this guy was doing me a favor and for no charge, so he showed me the thing that wasn't working that he could do nothing to fix and I thanked him and went inside.

Lily had taken my absence as tacit approval to have a potty accident on the couch...and it was the messy kind...and it's hot...and I'm frustrated...and so at the end of all that shit (literally) I'm finally in the car and the girls (just one today) are watching Lily and I'm driving to work and listening to Scars on Broadway and being at home in my anger...and I just think again about this story idea...the concept of which is that everyone is the hero from their own viewpoint and everyone else is the villain. And the idea was to take a very black and white 'incident' like a traffic accident...or something...and follow the story from different angles. 

And I thought of myself in the role of "victim" and then I thought of myself in the role of "villain"...and I could easily imagine in the frame of mind I was in...cutting someone off...or getting pissed off at BEING cut off, and driving to catch up...and flipping that person off...and things escalating (previous road rage link). And I realized...none of that shit has ANYTHING to do with me. The accident wasn't my fault (or Lily's, truth be told)...the AC wasn't the guy's fault...it's all unrelated. The only thing tying all that crap together is ME because I'm the one experiencing it, and if the story is told from MY point of view then the reader maybe understands why I was so pissed that I did something stupid...but if the story is told from the point of view of the other guy...who KNOWS what's going on in his life...same shit? Maybe. Maybe worse.


And somehow through that whole process of rationalizing it and recognizing the uselessness of it, I just...let it go. And I'm in a much better frame of mind.

Summer is Coming.

A lot of ground to cover...but I'll still make it relatively brief.

Since the last post...well, the post BEFORE the last post...the post about the walk, lots has happened.

Okay...yesterday when I was writing this post, I also had the story about the pool included in it.  THAT story ended up being so long that I just made it its own post so this one would still be relatively brief (as previously promised).

School's out for summer, for starters, which presents a whole new set of scheduling challenges to work out, Father's Day happened, which we hosted, and we took the kids to Kennywood again. 

Summer Schedule:
Lily is struggling a little bit with the new routine.  She's still pretty happy go lucky, but there's been a little more biting, a bit more screaming and slapping, and more overall...what?  Stubbornness, I guess...foot-dragging, shouted "No" responses...then compliance.  So her accidents are up, her behaviors are up, and we're not doing her any favors with new TSS support for the summer who she has never met.

We're just sorta playing it by ear, trying to always keep in the back of our minds:  She needs time to adjust to this new 'routine', whenever she struggles.  And she does struggle BUT...she's also still very much "Lily"...happy spinny dancey giggly Lily.  So no biggie so far.  This made me think of the troubles that many of our kids have when Summer arrives with its chaos and freedom from the structure of the school routine...which tends to manifest itself in...behavior/anxiety/issues.  This in turn led me to think about The Game of Thrones, and House Stark and the doomy "Winter is Coming", which finally led me to THIS meme...which is a little on the late side in terms of being a timely meme that people will find funny, but I'll trot it out next Summer...

And before I continue with my two week look back, I want to toss in a couple caveats...
1)  Probably someone will find this offensive, but I chose the cat as the sigil of House Autism because there have been lots of comparisons in writing about the similarities, but also because there is a perception that autistic people like cats, and in my heart of hearts, I really hope that nobody feels like this is a hateful stereotype or that I think autistic people ARE cats, or that ALL autistic people like cats or whatever...but the puzzle piece is out, and a rainbow didn't really suit the meme.
2)  Because the "Winter is Coming" sigil for House Stark is a wolf, I wanted the House Autism sigil to be an animal of some kind, but not anything scary or savage or whatever.  And because of the above-referenced cat stuff...I thought...KITTY CAT!!
3)  Shout out to my niece (she thinks she's people) Pamook.  Lauren, if you're reading this, I stole a picture of Pamook off your instagram and turned her into a silouette and then added eyes a nose and whiskers to make my sigil.  So...famous kitty!
4)  The idea of the meme is that, like House Stark, who preaches being prepared for the coming of winter and all its terrors (white walkers and 100 years of shit weather), autism families need to prepare for the coming of summer and ITS aforementioned terrors.

Sorry...but past memes have been misunderstood because I sometimes think people know what I intend in my brain when I put stuff down on "paper".  It's a fault of mine.


So on the first day of Summer break, we took the kids to...

Kennywood:
I feel like we learned some lessons from the first trip, and even more from this one, and hopefully we can apply it to "the big dance" amusement park-wise in August when we go to Orlando.  But the kids had a blast.

Some lessons:
1)  Take a friend for Emma.  She can ride on the fun rides while we take Lily on the Kiddyland rides.
2)  Take two cars so that if Lily gets overstimulated, we can leave if needed, or just leave when it's bedtime, and let Emma stay and ride with her mom (since I don't (not that I'm scared or anything)).
3)  Identify a quiet uncrowded area to just let Lily walk without hand holding or pushing or pulling or carrying...to let her unwind and recharge.
4)  Find a McDonald's either to eat before we go to the park...or after we leave it.

Father's Day:
Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there who are active participants in their kids' lives.  Fuck you to the dads who aren't.  Fathers' day isn't FOR you.

Anyway, LOVELY Father's day in the backyard of our house.  We got ribs and cornbread and I drank Moscow mules and we opened a couple gifts (one of which was a graphics tablet for my PC and another of which was marshmallow skewers for when we have fires in the back).  And the baby Jesus made it stop raining so that we could enjoy.

Holes in Summer Coverage (and pools)

One negative result of being a dual income family is that when school is out you have to get 'coverage' for your kids.  A couple weeks ago we sat down to figure out what that would look like with our parents and got the majority of the schedule hashed out.  There were a couple days where we couldn't get anyone in, and one of those days happened to be the second day of their summer vacation:  This past Monday.

So Monday afternoon, after Lily and I went for a nice walk through the neighborhood,  I decided to get the pool fired up.  The "pool" is one of those $50 - 60 Toys 'r' Us jobbies where you inflate the rings.  It's maybe 6' in diameter.  I pulled it out of the bag and inspected it for damage.

Two weeks prior I'd driven Emma to the bus stop and heard this bizarre "Whooshing" noise.  It sounded like nothing so much as a strong gale force wind blowing right outside my window.  But it disappeared whenever I stopped the car.  So I got out to look.

Under the front bumper, wedged beneath the front of my car, was the plastic bag with the pool inside it.  I stuffed it in the trunk of my car and knew there'd be issues.

So I inspected the pool for damage and there, at the bottom, were three pea sized holes.  Dammit.  I used to have a patch kit, but I must have thrown it away.  I looked for anything that might fix the hole and eventually settled on packing tape.  Because of course that will work.

But the GENIUS idea I came up with was to fill the even smaller baby pool (we take it to the beach so Lily has water to play in that won't drag her out to see if we turn our backs) on top of the tape, then fill the bigger pool and hope that the weight of the little pool on top of the tape would seal it.

And it sorta did...at least until the bigger pool got SO full that the baby pool started to float.  

So then I had the genius idea of filling the baby pool even MORE because then it would be weighted down and not float.  The stress of the extra weight strained the seams of the baby pool which sprung a leak and began slowly losing air.

It was a goddamned disaster at the amusement park...BUT...Lily came out and played in it anyway, and if the leak was slow enough to make the sides sag...at least it stayed together until the end of the day, because...

...Emma was doing volunteer work at Leslie's company.  This involved lots of work with animals.  Collecting eggs, milking chickens, shearing the horses, etc.  I'm a little unclear on the details, but she's doing it all summer, and loving it.

BUT...day 1 (that very same Monday) she came home with very sore feet because we had wanted her to try the first day with her tennis shoes and then tell us what sort of work boots she might want.  (We'd gotten wind that the other kids were wearing duck boots and Emma was skeptical.)


So she wore her shoes (which were apparently too tight) all day and ended up with very sore little tiny feet.

And at the end of her long day, I told her to take off her shoes and her socks and just dip them into the cold water of the slowly slumping husk of the concentric fun zone I'd stupidly constructed for Lily.

We'll buy a new pool for Lily.

And Emma had seen her fellow volunteers wearing their duck boots and decided she too would get duck boots...and in her size...and so we went to LLBean and bought her duck boots...no more foot soaking required, perhaps.

Also...GENIUS!

The End.