Single parent and child care

Look at the picture below. That to me is a face of someone discouraged and hurt. Her name is Debra Harrell and because of her situation I had trouble sleeping. Some will look at her picture and only see color and already make assumptions. But please just hear me out before you judge.

On June 30th, 2014 Debra Hall had to go to work as a shift manager at McDonald's. It's summer time so her daughter Regina is out of school. Debra is a single mom and had no friends that could watch Regina while she went to work so Debra made a difficult decision. Instead of calling in she left her daughter at Summerfield Park in North Augusta, South Carolina alone. This is not any ordinary park. There are other children left in the park while their parents go to work or wherever else they may spend their time. During the day at Summerfield Park kids can get wet on the splash pad, play on the playground, or basketball courts. Volunteers also come by the park and hold the feed-a-child program. This program provides the children at the park free breakfast and lunch. Looking in Debra's eyes I see something deep that I don't see in everyone's eyes so I can only imagine how tough it must have been for her to kiss Regina's forehead and tell her she had to go to work. I'm not condoning what Debra did because there are too many child predator's out there to leave children alone anywhere. But if she was going to leave her anywhere this park would be the best spot. Someone spotted Regina alone at the park and called the police. Debra was arrested and spent 17 days in jail and lost temporary custody of Regina.

I do believe this story will have a happy ending and I can't say I believe that about all of these situations. You see Debra is what we root for in our society. When she was younger she was arrested several times but her last brush with the law was a traffic violation in 2006. Since then it seems as though she's tried to turn her life around. The last thing we need to do is prosecute her in this situation and set her and Regina back years. Regina is on the honor roll at her school and Debra was welcomed back to her job as a shift manager at McDonalds. On top of that people have donated over 40k dollars to a trust fund for Regina's education. I don't know Debra and I could be completely wrong but I have to believe in a woman who chooses to work at McDonald's instead of relying on others to take care of her. My only point in this is can't we as a country provide some kind of child care for parents in these situations? We send money all over the world but we sometimes ignore our own in order to do that. Look in Debra's eyes and tell me you don't see hurt and shame. Please just give people a chance in life before  you judge them. Kids like Regina are counting on us to help ensure she becomes the next generation of successful individuals.

I'm not a judge so all I'm going to do is remember how lucky I am and think all positive thoughts for Debra and Regina. I'll hope that their future is filled with smiles and love and that Debra never again has the look on her face like she does in her mugshot.

Orange County to Santa Barbara

On Friday, June 27th 2014 a group of us decided to go camping at Lake Cachuma outside of Buellton a little bit beyond Santa Barbara. We left at 4:45 in the morning but we ended up running into some traffic on the 405 because of a SIG alert. Some unfortunate man ran into the median and then got out of his car. He was then struck by another vehicle. It took an hour and fifteen minutes to get 3 miles but I spent most of the time empathizing with the man who lost his life that morning.

    If you have not had the opportunity to drive up the 101 through Ventura along the coast I suggest you do it. We stopped in a town called Summerland, where we ate at the Summerland Beach cafe. I had the steak and eggs but felt the steak was a little bland. The best plate looked to be Crabby Bill's Benedict, which is two poached eggs with hollandaise sauce on crab cakes. I wanted to trade for sure. Anyways, we went through Santa Barbara which has some of the best coastline I've ever seen. A few islands and scenery that's breathtaking. We drove into Santa Maria which is a very important area in California. This is where the Santa Maria bbq style started. It's a type of smoking where you use red oak to bbq beef. I've had the tri-tip and if done right is absolutely amazing. We then headed back to a town called Buellton where we headed out to Lake Cachuma to camp for the weekend.

Friday night we bbq'd terryaki chicken with homemade sauce made from our Japanese family members. We then used the Santa Maria style merged with the Japanese sauce creating some sort of fusion. Anyways, we were camping but add some coconut milk steamed rice with cilantro and we had a dinner that I would have paid for. The music then started and vodka and tequila were flowing as we told stories and laughed the night away. The only issue of the night was when I went to sleep and got locked out of the camper because everyone was passed out! I know right. Well, since I'm a chameleon and can sleep anywhere I laid the seats back in my Lexus RX350 and passed out. Woke up early Saturday morning but wasn't completely hungover because at some point we ran out of cranberry juice and switched to gatorade. Since I replenished plenty of electrolytes I was good to go. Which was good because we had a day of wine tasting and a dinner to die for coming up so I had to be ready to soak in the experience.

We started the morning with Frittatas and coffee brewed in a press. Seriously, coffee was top notch as was the egg frittatas and we were now ready to hit the Sun Stone winery for some foo foo time. We entered Sun Stone winery and immediately began some tasting of some wines like Grenache blanc, Grenache Rose, chardonnay, merlot, Pinot noir, Syrah, and others. The chardonnay was my favorite white while the Pinot Noir was my favorite red. I'm biased though because I'm not a big fan of white wines and I tend to like merlots and pinots the most. It's just funny to me how many descriptive words people find for wine. For me it's all about what fits. I might not be a wine connoisseur because I think it's an individual preference I go more for smooth taste with a light aroma. Wines were not too expensive so we picked up some for a night at home.

Since I had never been wine tasting at a vineyard before I really enjoyed the experience and then it was time to cruise through some small towns like Solvang which is a Danish farming community. Went to a few specialty stores and then back to the campsite. Before returning to the campsite we visited the grave site of our friend's mother Barbara. I always get a little somber when I visit places like that but I also try to picture the lives and stories off all the people laid to rest there. He put flowers on the site and cleaned around it. Very touching and I was honored to be a part of the moment. Of course like all good campers do we sampled some wine and cheese preparing for my favorite part of the entire trip a visit to the restaurant the Hitching Post II.

Our reservations were at 5:30pm and immediately we were a little bummed out because they were out of their best appetizer the Grilled Artichoke that is seasoned with their special Magic Dust. Instead we had the BBQ sauteed mushrooms and steamed mussels. Both were amazing and I don't even like Mussels. The appetizers were followed by shrimp cocktails (that were also delicious), garlic bread, veggie sample, sweat potato soup, garden salad, before we even got to the main course. One of us had the Grilled Texas quail, one had the filet, 2 had the Flat Iron steak, and one had the chicken. The two specials were swordfish and ribeye but I went with the suggested item. That was the Flat iron steak. Oh my lord! This was the tastiest steak I've ever had. It came sliced and I ordered it rare. The Santa Maria style of bbq sprinkled with magic dust made it to where I did not even need the cherry-peppercorn sauce. It not only fell apart in your mouth it was like a party of flavors that I did not want to finish. I'm already planning on practicing this style of cooking because I'm hooked. I had the fries because I had read about them and I did think they were pretty damn good. It was a two and a half hour experience I believe everyone should try at least once.

We continued our night back at the site late into the night until they had to come to our site and ask us to turn our music down because of quiet time. We continued by the campsite and ate some smores while telling stories. I have a big mouth so my wife told me she couldnt get her stories in. I'll have to work on that for sure but overall when we left the next morning after pancakes and bacon the weekend felt complete. We then jumped back on the 101 for our drive back down to Mission Viejo. We'll be back many more times.