Tonight's Outing

Another Monday

There's nothing like a rainy and gloomy Monday, after a bright and sunny weekend, to get you back to reality.

Happy Easter

Deflated

It's always bothered me that some gas stations would charge you for air. Now, apparently, air has gotten so expensive, you to have to use your credit card.

Our Brief Outing

Sam and I made a trip to the grocery store tonight - unusual for us only because it’s a weeknight and not a part of our Saturday errands. This was inspired by Sam’s reading the newspaper at school.

Over the last year and a half or so, Sam has taken to reading the weather and maybe an article or two in the local paper during his homeroom class period. As a result, he is often more educated than I am about some of the events going on around town - which is not necessarily saying a lot, but in this case, it is.

On his afternoon “I’m Home From School” phone call, he was excited to tell me that the day’s paper had a weekly sale flyer for a local grocery store that he likes to visit. He told me about a few of the sale items that might be of interest to us, so I told him we could check it out after I got home.

This particular grocery store carries a lot of the usual grocery store type of stuff, but they also carry a lot of local items along with some unique fruits and vegetables. Sam seems to particularly enjoy looking at the fruits and vegetables and commenting on them. The weirder, the better. He has no interest in trying any of them, just checking them out. It’s a little bit like being at a poor man’s museum or some strange art gallery - except it’s fun.

When I got home, I helped Sam with his dinner, and we went through the flyer and decided to take a trip over to the store - as if there would be any other outcome.

We got to the store and checked out their usual assortment of the unusual, and I came across a bin filled with some of the largest papayas I’ve ever seen. I called Sam over and asked him if knew what they were. He didn’t, so I told him, and he smiled and I said, “You know, “I don’t know what they’re doing with the papayas!””

And he smiled even more and he said, “No, you mean, “I don’t know what’s going on with the papayas!”

He was right, of course.

We wandered the store, laughing about it, before finally wrapping up our shopping visit by getting a few essentials, things like stuffing and some of those wheat rolls Sam likes - but we didn't get any fruit - papayas or otherwise.

Back at home, we put away the groceries and decided to watch an episode of "Seinfeld" and play a few games of “Connect Four”.

Sam beat me four games to two.

More Baking With Sam

For this weekend’s baking project, Sam and I decided to make pancakes for Saturday morning breakfast. The idea for this started when Sam called me on his usual afternoon home-from-school check-in. When Sam calls me on Fridays, I not only ask him about his day, but I ask him what he would like to do for dinner.

On Fridays, he has the choice of leftovers (again), or fast food (which he seems to outgrown) or going to the grocery store and picking out something Fromm there. This week he chose the grocery store. 

Normally, when we go to the grocery store on a Friday evening I ask him if he wants to pick out something for Saturday morning breakfast and I usually remind him of this when we talk on the phone. This week though, I asked him if would he like to help make some pancakes instead. I was kind of surprised, but happy, when he seemed pretty excited about the idea. 

I told him that if he wanted, we could also make some pancakes with fruit in them. I suggested blueberries, he suggested bananas, so bananas it was. 

When I got home from work, we pulled out the recipe book to see what we needed. We made a list of what we didn’t have, and then we headed over to the grocery store. When we got home he ate while I got out the mixing bowl and griddle. When Sam finished his dinner, he helped me get out the ingredients that we would need for the morning. When the whole family is home, I take the base recipe and multiply it by six. Since it’s mostly just Sam, we decided to cut back a little and only multiply it by five.

In the morning, we went to work.

Sam, like usual, was responsible for figuring out how much we need of each of the different ingredients - as well as doing his usual job of cracking the eggs, helping with measuring and running the mixer. 

Today, I also had him practice pouring some of the batter onto the griddle and then flipping some of the pancakes. And he did pretty well. 

We finished the morning with several large stacks of pancakes - some were plain, some with bananas and some with bananas and chocolate chips. 

Now all that's left is to think of our next baking project.

Time to Celebrate!

I bought and registered a new refrigerator at some point last year. I like this new refrigerator well enough - though not as much as my last one. It works fine - other than a poorly designed handle that keeps breaking. And it does everything I need it to do, which is keeping the cold food cold and the frozen food frozen.

Ever since I registered it, I've been getting occasional emails from the good people at Frigidaire. I usually glance at them before deleting them, and then I usually forget about them. But I got this email from them at the beginning of the week, and I’ve been kind of thinking about it ever since.

The subject line for the email read, “It's Frozen Food Month!” This means nothing to me, but I've been wondering, is this a real thing? Who came up with this? Why have I not seen anything about this in the news? Is this like some kind of national holiday or something?

I wonder how something like this comes about. Does it go through Congress? Does the President have to sign off on it? If Congress is spending their time on stuff like this, what else are they spending their time on? No wonder nothing ever gets done.

If the Congress isn’t involved in this, what does this mean? Does this mean that anybody can go off willy-nilly, declaring holidays for any reason at all? Isn’t this kind of thing regulated? It seems to me that we are setting ourselves up for another free market fiasco.

Maybe all of this seems kind of harmless. "After all", you're probably asking, "Who would it hurt?" Well, for one, I'm guessing it would hurt that clearly over stimulated kid pictured in my email. Imagine what will happen when Mom tells him to put that ice cream back in the freezer and get his rear end to school? I'm guessing that he's not going to take it well.

Real or not, none of this makes any sense to me - and I haven't even covered the fact that wouldn't freezing food for a solid month be more of a "fall-time harvest" kind of thing, instead of a "we're a week away from the first day of spring" kind of thing?

Other than making no sense, it doesn't really bother me. The only thing that really bothers me is that I am thinking about this at all.

Little by Little

As you can see by my ongoing lack of posting, I continue to be occupied by Most Things Sam. Last Thursday was his IEP meeting- a meeting that was more crowded than usual.

Along with the usual players, there were several other people attending, including his summertime job coach, his liaison from the MRC , the director of his (hopefully) fall program, and the doctor who had done testing with him last fall. And Sam.

Since Sam is an adult, he participated for part of the meeting. He was there at the beginning during introductions, and then he was excused while we all covered some of the nuts and bolts of the various reports. After we got through all of that, we had Sam come back in for the setting of goals, etc. He did very well but when I rested my arm on the back of his chair and patted his back, I could feel the sweat coming through his shirt. I patted him and gently rubbed his back for the rest of the meeting.

I'm always hesitant to say how meetings like this go. Or at least I am when they seem to go well. I have a tendency to be wrong, and these kinds of comments come back to bite me. But at the risk of being bitten, I think it went fairly well.

There was a lot of input, a lot of note taking and no blatant obfuscation of issues. But the IEP still needs to be written and then it needs to be reviewed. Until then, we'll see.

This week, we having someone from the DDS coming to our house to interview him (and me). I don't know what to expect from this, since I don't really know all of what they do. I'm hoping I'll figure it out as we go along.

I have signed up for an evening workshop that has to do with the DDS and, I'm assuming, what they have to offer. But it isn't being put on by the DDS and it doesn't take place until a week after our meeting. I figure this should work out well, so that I can find out everything that I shouldn't have said and shouldn't have done.

Somewhere in all of this, I need to finish up on everyone's taxes and also get back on the pursuit of guardianship.

It's all on my list- my long, long list.

Tales From the Hood

Four Reasons Why I Had a Great Weekend

I was going to write more, but really, it all boils down to this.

Old Shavings

I have this pencil sharpener on our kitchen wall. It's at least 40 years old, probably closer to 50. I got this pencil sharpener for a gift many years ago when I was a kid, and it hung on my bedroom wall in the house where I grew up. I used to quite a bit back then, and over the years it got used quite a bit here at home. But it doesn't get used a whole lot anymore even though it still works great.

Several days ago, I went to use it for the first time in I don’t know how long, and I found it was packed with shavings. I don't know how long it's been since it was last emptied, but I'm guessing it's been at least several years. After all, it has sat idle more often than not, for longer than I can remember.

I think the hay day for this thing was probably about 15 years or so ago. That would have been about the time that my three older kids were in elementary school. It got quite a workout back then. There were reports that were written and math problems to be solved- just about every night. And maybe more than anything, there were art projects. Sometimes these projects were school assignments, but more often than not, they were just for fun. Castles and landscapes and invading armies and so much more, all sprung to life from the tip of a pencil.

Over the years, as the kids got older, the sharpener was used less and less. Pencils faded to pens, and pens faded to computers. Home faded to college and college faded to life.

When I went to use it for the first time, in I don’t know how long, I found that the sharpener was packed solid with shavings. And as I opened it up, I stared at the tangled bird’s nest of colors and graphite - and I started to shake them into the trash. I thought about each of the shavings and how they were a product of some long ago creation, some distant memory - and for a brief moment I wondered if maybe I should stop, if maybe I should hang onto those shavings.

I decided that it would be foolish to save some old pencil shavings, and I continued to shake them away into the trash.

Ever since then, whenever I’m in the kitchen, I often catch myself glancing over at the pencil sharpener, and I catch myself thinking about those old shavings and how strange it is that I find myself missing them.

Today's Lunch Tip

Do not, under any circumstances, eat half a jar of pickles followed by a can of Hormel Chili (No Beans), for lunch.