Parents and parenting

My 16 year old son failed his driver's test today. I was hard on him last night because he hit a curb on a turn in a parking lot and again this morning because he didn't turn when I told him to. But I might have been too hard on him and in fact I know I was. The hardest part of parenting is not letting day to day events alter how you treat them. So I get him all worked up when he's already nervous and by the time we get to the DMV he's struggling. I tried to pep talk him into letting it go and relaxing but it was too late. He ended up failing his test and as I walk up to him I see the tears welling up in his eyes and I instantly feel so horrible. You never want to see your child struggle or hurt and I helped cause it. So now I sit here at work feeling shitty about myself but the same way I told him he has to shake it off and move on I have to do the same thing. But it's not easy because they're an extension of you and the last thing you want to have them do is struggle. Life lesson for the both of us. I have to back off now that he'll be 17 in 3 months and I have to start letting him live. I wish I would have realized that yesterday instead of today after he failed his test.

Also, I get a call from my mom's husband Greg. Super nice guy and a big part of why my mother is still alive. I was going to say alive and well but on that phone call Greg told me that she's in ICU with tubes down her throat. I just started talking to my mom again after 25 years last November. Am I going to lose her again already? She might not have been the most nurturing mom but when she was there when I was a child she was loving. I remember one time we were driving down the road and she had to stop real quick in her car Betsy and she put her arm across my chest to protect me. I remember thinking man would that even help but at the same time thinking my mom loves me! That's what I always felt was that she loved me. Unfortunately the guy Paul that she was with didn't know what love was and used to beat her and us. So we had to go live with my mom's brother. So in 4th grade we moved to Whittier with our uncle and only saw my mom once more in 7th grade at my grandmother's funeral. When I talked to her last November she told me the last thing I ever told her was that I hated her. It was so nice to be able to tell her I never hated her and kept loving her all of those years. We both cried and moved on. But FUCK, I'm not ready to lose her again I haven't even had a chance to go see her. I'm just trying to think positive thoughts for her and part of this stress may have got to me as I was taking my son to the DMV. I'm very sorry.:(

Of less importance but still a big deal to me since I am a suffering Oakland Raider fan is the fact they fired another coach last night. Tupac taught me that after every dark night there's a bright day after that. That saying has helped me so much in my life believe it or not. You have to suffer through the bad times to truly enjoy the good times and that's why I stay calm. Of course I didn't stay calm last night and possibly caused my son to fail. But I guess my point is that it's not always easy being a parent but I'll always be there and hopefully I'll figure it out at some point. I really write this for myself so I can remember the lessons later.

It's my birthday!

It's my 38th birthday today! Woohoo! I had a freaking wonderful day. I worked all day but even when I work I have a good time. My day started off with my mom calling me at 7am to say happy birthday. It was the first time that happened in over 26 years. It's all good though. Her and I great! We don't dwell on the past we just look forward to the future and enjoy the moment! That's how I live. Of course we all have our moments of weakness and sadness but like I heard from Tupac one time. After a dark night there's a bright day after that! So then on Facebook had a bunch of friends say happy birthday . Then, at about 4pm my brother-in-law, his wife, my neice, and my nephew all sang happy birthday to me on the phone. I almost cried. But you see early in life I was all insecure, naive, tough, sensitive, and a bunch of other things. I'm still those things today but I've learned a lot about myself. I'm mushy these days like I'm growing a Vagina. lol, whatever though. I just know I feel love. Like the song by Ziggy Marley "Love is my Religion". I feel that way. The older I get the more that love is my religion. I don't care if people think I'm weird for telling my friends I love them. Or for giving people hugs. Or for loving the cashier at the grocery store. They're my friends! So when my brother-in-law calls me (yeah who has a brother-in-law that's one of their best friends?) and sings to me that shit makes me want to weep like a little baby. I'm sappy like that but I don't care.

  So Friday we go to Oceanside and play board games, a card game called golf, and crazy 8s. We drink beer and Tequila and bbq chicken and potatoes. The next day we started again. Went to the pool and had some pizza and more beer and tequila. Helped another friend move and then Sunday was my sister-in-law's (my brother-in-law's wife) birthday. We threw a surprise party and had a keg of Corona and had the taco guy come and cook. We all went swimming and had a pinata with the little single shots of vodka and others. Then at like 1am my son and I went swimming and played one on one in some pool basketball. He kicked my ass 7-5 but I was blessed just to be doing that. Next day woke up sore but that was Labor day so it was time to relax. had a turkey burger from Carl's Jr.while one son had ranch bacon swiss, the other son had a grilled Cod sandwich. Went home and slept on the couch while NFL network played on the tv over and over. Had Directv turned off for a few months so had to soak it in. 

 

    I have to enjoy these moments. What a freaking wonderful day it was today. I am so appreciative of how lucky I am. I know one day I'll be handed a tough time and I will face it knowing that all of these other times I was extremely lucky. But today Love is my religion and I'm just extremely thankful!

This is not funny anymore

Comedy comes from seeing the funniness in tragedy and life. Nothing is funny though. After hearing about Robin Williams death yesterday I realized this. We can only joke so much and then the joke is on us. Game over.


I wont start with the President but I will say that his arrogance and pompous attitude are part of whats wrong. How is he supposed to know what's wrong with society when he doesn't live in it?


Ever since he sold out? Lights are on and he's a brilliant exaggerator, but he doesn't even believe his own rhetoric. The American dream is collapsing under the extreme pressure that it takes to support the entire planet!


Ok, so maybe not the entire planet but a lot of it. But while he takes months of vacation and plans his retirement in Hollywood, CA? Us Americans will have to endure and find ways to be hopeful for the next puppet to be elected. Did he really care? 

Is bringing a Republican President back into office an answer? Yeah, continue to think that there's a difference. They get you distracted with gay marriage, abortion, and welfare, while they completely sell out our future as a country. 

17 trillion dollar debt? 

If this is where we are in surplus where will we be when we're not the Gold (dollar) standard? 

When we ask the question from a candidate about what they'll do to fix these problems? 

Mitt Romney's answer was "I'll do it better than Barack Obama did". Really? I hope so! 

Why should I believe a corporate businessman will fix the economy? Simply because he's a businessman? I used to love KB Toy Stores as a kid, they declared bankruptcy after Mitt was done. I'm supposed to believe he'll treat the country like KB Toy Store?

 Or like his company Bain Capital? People like Mitt Romney care about themselves not the collective society. He was the Republican and Obama was the democrat. Who's an American supposed to vote for? 

Yeah, I was confused too!

 I want a guy more like Elon Musk or even Bill Gates. Warren Buffet? I don't know because I dont really know those guys. Women? Don't get me started on Hillary! What are her qualifications and how can I trust her? She went through the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal without ever flinching. Strength? Or is it political correctness that we should be scared of? Has anyone ever seen Hillary be sincere or real? What has she done that makes me want to trust her? She lived 8 years for free while collecting huge paychecks but classifies her and Bill's situation as "broke"? Why should I be hopeful she can run our country? Because the perception was that Bill did?

 In history it will be proven that he was lucky to be president at the beginning of the computer age. But the National debt still doubled in his 8 years. He also allowed home loans without proof of income. Which means people could finance whatever home they wanted no matter the price without having to prove they could afford the payment. I'm not a genius but I can see some flaws in that bill. What? 

It caused a huge housing collapse and for millions of people to lose their homes? Wait, didn't the government bail out the banks after the collapse? Wait a minute. You're telling me that the entity that gave the loan and made money off of the loan also was given money to rectify the loan? 

Who bailed out the man that had to go home and tell his wife they lost their dream home to the bank that the Government would then bail out after giving a loan that never made sense? 

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.

The path of the US Government

It's unfortunate that entertainment and perception rule our society. Politicians stand up and smile and wave and everyone thinks it's all great. I was disturbed that we traded 5 high ranking Al Qaeda generals for Bergdahl when he got captured because he deserted his post. The White House announced that we had little chance to convict those generals so they were going to be released anyways. Fact is that the Taliban will now be working a lot harder to capture Americans in order to force trades. The position of the US for hundreds of years has been that we do not negotiate with terrorists. What changed? Now who knows if Bergdahl was actually a deserter because both the military and the government have grown fond of lying. But this situation in Iraq is building quick and we're once again at the mercy of what our government tells us and allows the media to broadcast. I do know that the second largest city in Iraq is once again under the control of Al Qaeda insurgents and we'll once again get involved because of natural resources but the message will be that it was because we care and we're humanitarians. If that's true why did we not help the Ukraine when Russia invaded? The system is corrupt. There is little doubt that The basis of what the United States of America is built is the most modern and successful of any in recent history. Unfortunately, in several hundreds of years the lawyers and policy makers have found a way to bypass all of it's laws in order to benefit. In the original Constitution Congress was paid only for time they were in session. When they returned to their home they would fill out a expense report and submit it to be reimbursed. This was because they were originally civil servants. This changed in I believe the Taft administration where he decided to make them all full time employees of the government. They were then enabled to vote on their own raises. Now, they not only receive their pay of almost 200k a year but they also receive about another half a million a year to pay for staff, travel, and misc expenses. They're basically living the good life while telling the rest of us that we need to pay for their lifestyle. When did this change and how to we change it back and hold these people accountable?

Lost in perception

I consider myself to be a patient person that does not judge and I try to mind my own business. But at what point does our society realize we're living in an age of perception and political correctness?

 The saying "perception is reality" drives me crazy. That tells me that what people think about you is more important then what reality is. Or that being nice and telling people what they want to hear is more important than being honest. I can't live in that world. 

To me that's the biggest problem with politics. We're voting for the guy that tells us what we want to hear and who we think is the best guy. Instead of doing that, why don't we take a little extra time to find the truth and reality? 

Our country (US) is filled with over 300 million people how can we be so naive to think we only need a 2 party system? How can the Republican and Democratic parties represent the population? I'll even be more cynical. How can people still believe that either one of these parties represents the population? Both these parties are sponsored by super pacs that donate hundreds of millions of dollars. Does anyone think they donate that much money without the assurance that they'll get some back room deal? 

I know people like to think everyone is honest but come on! Things are beyond corrupt now. So instead of people acknowledging it they just pretend everything is fine. The reason people do this is because we're all comfortable. Even though we're getting squeezed and things are getting tougher we continue to coast along cause the alternative is to admit that we have to change things and nobody wants to do that. 

So the politicians continue to smile and wave and we continue to pretend that a Republican is better than a democrat or the other way around. These guys only disagree on the things that have nothing to do with government. 

Those things are gay marriage, abortion, and a few others. 

A Republican will tell you he is pro life and does not believe in abortion. A Democrat will tell you he believes in Pro Choice but won't tell you whether he believes one way or the other. That's why democrats have been more successful lately. They play the fence and tell everyone what they want to hear. Then, they get into office and nothing happens. 

While the national debt is at 17 trillion and climbing. Who is going to fix that? 

But we continue to tell each other what we want to hear and the perception is that everything will get better if only we can get a republican in office.

What do you think?