Turkey Butt's First Double & the Electric House

So I have been a little bit behind on anything that requires electric this week.  My house is electrically charged right now, thanks to the previous tenant who is hereby official called The Moron.  He used 1 1/2" nails to put up the siding and somewhere along the way must have caught one of the electric wires because the house is "charged up" anywhere there is metal.  So I have to wait for electrician guy to come back on Saturday and re-wire everything one by one until he can find the bad wire (it's the only way he can think to fix the problem short of tearing all the siding off).  In the meantime I have to be careful which plugs I use because we can't be certain which one's are affected.

On a slightly more humorous note, can you guess how many times I kept touching the door to see if I would still get shocked after detecting the initial problem.  Seriously, sometimes I am worse than a child when it comes to not touching things that will do bodily harm.  But I just HAD TO keep testing it!!!

On a positive note:  TB had his first T-Ball practice today and got his first double.  Of course I was proud and so was he.

TB & MB

Turkey Butt's little buddy Monkey Boy came to stay with us for the weekend.  They are having tons of fun so far.  Me, I am just slaving away in the yard moving a bunch of rocks and maybe making a little garden (I still haven't fully committed to it yet).

The new light, the present and the neighbor guy's new name.

So neighbor guy came over and put up the security light in the back of the house yesterday.  Boy is it bright!  It has two settings, one mild setting if it senses something far away and then another brighten up the whole back yard and scare anyone away if you come to close setting.  So all is well, especially considering that ever since I moved the dogs away from Harley man and his queens, the gnomes have coincidentally left.

Anyway, so when neighbor guy finished he left me a note on the front door telling me that if I had any questions to call him and signed it Anytime Mike.  So of course, as I was storing his phone number into my phone I had to save it as Anytime Mike.  He will probably kill me and never ever help me again if he finds out, but what they heck, he did it to himself . . .

So that left me with one last thing to do, figure out an appropriate thank you for Anytime Mike.  I have only talked to him 3 times and it was all about my light etc so I had no idea if he would appreciate his favorite beverage (the typical thank you for most of my family) if he even had one, and he did mention a girlfriend in passing so cooking him dinner would not be appropriate.  In the end I decided to get him a gift certificate to BD's Mongolian Barbecue.  He was happy, it worked for me.

I am just mostly happy that he appointed his own nickname, because sometimes it's so hard to come up with them.

Not a good week for cats.

As I was checking out the news this morning I first came upon a story of a kitten being rescued from a very bad experience with a microwave.  Poor Stouffer, she gets stuck with a humiliating name based on an experience that happened when she was just a child . . .

Then I saw this one.  All I thought, was oh how cute and funny.  The firemen rescued the cat from the tree.  It was a refreshing thing to see after all the politics, war, and economic news stories.  It was a cute, funny feel good kind of story that you don't see too often in the news anymore.

Then I read the comments section . . . apparently I am not in the majority in my thinking that sometimes life gets a little too serious and a happy feel good story is refreshing.

Although I do gotta say that I love the comment about the skeletons.

The Gnomes have gone.

I know I failed to update but last week was really busy and I wasn't online all that much.  Anyway, so the weird happenings around here continued.  Finally I started noticing that they were happening even when I was home.  Most prominent was someone taking the dog tie outs and dragging them as far away from the door as they possibly could and sometimes even wrapping them around the pole on the other side of the yard.  Again, I was getting really creeped out by it all, whoever it was was coming right up to my house to do these things.  A friend of mine decided that it had to have been gnomes and that I should leave out milk for them according to some tradition.  I didn't do that because it would have attracted Bob.  

In the meantime I talked to next door neighbor guy again and he said he would keep on watching.  His wife and grown daughter living with him would not say a word and had a pretty nice glare for me the whole time I was over there.

Anyway, I talked to the two neighbor guys across the street and we all agreed that I needed a light in the backyard and that they would install.  So landlord okay's the purchase and we got that done.  We also, well they agreed that I should also tell the police just in case it was not indeed next door neighbor guy's wife and daughter like we suspected.  I did.  That all went well, they drive by all the time now and basically said even if it is the neighbors they still want to keep and eye on my house given that I am a social worker and work with the population I do in the areas that I do.  I was fine with that, at least they didn't get on my case for not being more cautious and safe.

So finally Dad comes out here Friday and we move the dog runs to the side of the house by the patio.  Two reasons, one I think the neighbors were messing with me and didn't want the dogs in the back yard by there house and two the patio's over there and it was silly having the dogs in the back when I was always out on the patio.

Anyway, day 4 of moving the dogs and not one thing has happened since.  I am pretty sure it was the neighbor "ladies" at this point-but oh well what are you gonna do???

End of the Year Programs

Thursday was Turkey Butt's end of the year program at school.  I would have posted pictures etc but it was not exactly a joyous occasion, but rather a chore that had to be done and now he is glad it's over.

All week long he kept saying that he didn't want to do it.  This is par for the course, TB is in no way a performer.  I definitely do not see any American Idol auditions in his future.  I made him do it anyway and I am not sure that was for the best, but he muddled through it and it's done.

Basically they had 100 kindergartners up there on the big stage in the high school auditorium that was jam packed for 45 minutes under those blaring stage lights singing.  It was very much an exercise is excess.  None of the 5 and 6 year old's sang for the whole entire time and about halfway through they all started getting fidgety and wanted to leave.  Once a kid got off the stage and started running around.  The teacher tried to reign him in but he kept it up until she put him in timeout and finally the mom came up and got him off the stage.

After that it was downhill.  TB and another child started crying and proceeded to cry for the entire 20 minutes til the end of the show.  He wanted to be done, he wanted it to be over.  He never got off the stage or ran from it, rather he just sat there absolutely miserable and cried until it was over.

It was heartbreaking.  I wanted to go up there and get him off that stage and tell the teacher that this was too much for him, but I didn't.  The worse part was that he was in the end row standing right next to the teacher crying his heart out and she did nothing.  When I couldn't find him after the show I mentioned it to her and she blew me off with a comment that he was probably just "hot".

So anyway I was off to the choir room to get him as soon as it was over because I knew he had had too much.  Finally found him (that's another story) and we got his pictures that he had made (and was intensely proud of) and left.  In the car he was bragging about the pictures he had made and the shirt he had made and at the same time apologizing for crying.  I told him no big deal, I was proud of him for getting through it.  At that point he matter of factly said, "I NEVER want to do that again".  I said ok.

Here's where I have takes some flak.  A couple of parents have insisted that he must go through this stuff, because isn't it cute and special and all of that.  A couple of others said, he's tried it, he doesn't like it, don't make him do it unless he wants to.  My vote's for the second camp of course.

No, I am not worried about missing out on these "special" moments.  We have plenty of "special" moments of our own and our happy memories can be built around them.  I know my son well enough to know what he enjoys and what he does not, and I am not going to force him into something he does not enjoy.  To me, his ability to say to me that he does not want to do something and tell me why is way more important than actually doing it.  Yes sometimes he had to learn that he has to do it whether he likes it or not, but a school musical is not one of those times.

On a side note, I remember back to when I was in elementary school this stuff was not mandatory or the teachers would hand pick the students based on their personalities to do different jobs.  Back then, TB would probably have been signaled out to be the "prop man" or something .  Back then, it was more about the child than about the program.

Fuzzy has hatched!!!!

I had been checking on him the last few days and noticed that his cocoon was getting thinner on the top.  This morning Turkey Butt wanted to look at him and look what we found.  Fuzzy is now a moth.  We took the lid off of the container and took him outside underneath the picnic table.  I am not sure what he needs to eat but I imagine he will be hungry after the transformation.  You can tell that he is still damp from coming out of the cocoon, so I imagine he will wait til his wings are dry and then take off.  Hopefully we are done with the rain.

He's the yellowish looking thing in the corner.