Tag: step father

Happy Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day here in the United States. Is it Father’s Day anywhere else? I don’t know.

Are you a father? A dad? Are you, like me, a step father or someone who fills the roll of a father? Are you a single mother who takes on a father’s responsibilities? Well then, today is your day.

May your kids shower you with love and affection today. We are going to have lunch with my father, which should be lovely. My step kids are having lunch with their father, as it absolutely should be, and then they are coming to our house for dinner. I am touched.

I always feel conflicted on Father’s Day. I don’t want to be the kind of person who tries to take attention away from my step kids’ actual father, but at the same time they always make a point to make me feel loved on Father’s Day and I absolutely love that they do that for me. I am overwhelmed by how much I love my step kids. I call them my kids because to my eyes I couldn’t love them more if they were my biological children. I think if I loved them more I would literally explode. So while I do feel conflicted today, my step kids ignore that and treat me like the real deal and I cannot thank them enough.

I say it all the time, I am stunned that they keep me around at all never mind treat me like an actual parent that they care about. They are amazing. It’s that simple. I can’t put it any other way. My step kids, Bellana and Harry, are utterly, unequivocally, objectively, amazing people.

May your Father’s Day be a happy one. Fathers, love your kids. Kids, love your fathers. If it is not Father’s Day in your neighborhood you have my permission to act like it is and have yourself a merry little unofficial Father’s Day.

My Step Son is the Best Person on Earth

My step son is literally the best person on Earth. Holy crap is he amazing!

Just as I was about to start my lunch break he called me. He asked if I was busy and I said no. He asked if I could come out to my car. What? Sure! I went outside and there he was. He brought lunch for both of us. Five Guys, to be exact. Can you believe that? Can you believe how amazing that was?

I love my step son so much I just don’t have the words. That was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. Ever. I am so happy. I honestly think I might cry.

Mondays Suck

Hello and welcome to the start of Quarantine Work Week #15. I have been working from home for roughly 27.4% of a calendar year and I still for the life of me cannot keep my damn glasses clean.

(Pause to clean glasses, once again)

I’m tired, both literally and figuratively. I had two excellent nights sleep in a row followed by a less than stellar night last night. I’m probably going to need to pack it in early tonight. I’m starting to really feel like I need a get away. In a normal, non-COVID universe, I would pack up the wife and the kids and go spend a day or two in New York, or hiding in the mountains, or something. That’s not happening now. We tried driving over to the ocean this weekend but didn’t make it. We got detoured. We weren’t planning to get out of the car, but at least we were going to see it, you know? It was still great to go for a drive with all four of us.

Massachusetts is supposed to be opening up restaurants today. What phase is that? Two? Three? Whatever. New Hampshire was already there so it’s not a big change to those of us who live on the state line. We talked about it yesterday. None of us feel comfortable going out to eat. We don’t even feel comfortable picking up take out. Even ice cream stands are out. This sucks.

Yesterday was Fathers Day. I have a tough time with that. I find it uncomfortable celebrating a day like that when the kids I’m celebrating with are some other guy’s kids. I feel like I am stealing from him. I know that’s not really how it works, but in my gut that’s how it feels. I did better than most years though. I called my dad in the morning and after that felt really depressed. Like… I just laid down on the bed and didn’t want to get up. Patches came over to see if I was okay, but all she did was show me her butt and smack me with her tail. It didn’t help.

Then my wife and the kids made me breakfast and that helped. I did spend some time alone bashing on the guitar and that helps, but not quite in the same way. That’s therapy for something else, and I can’t even put my finger on what. I checked with the kids to make sure they wished their father a happy Fathers Day. They did. That made me feel better too. They are really excellent people, those step kids of mine. I don’t think I screwed them up too much. At least whatever ways I screwed them up they were able to outgrow it and recover.

For the record, Step Parents Day is September 16th. I’m all in favor of celebrating that one, even though I share it with their step mother. That’s 100% A-Okay with me.

For the first few months of lock down we did a really good job not blowing money. It seemed very important to be ridiculously frugal. In the last week and a half, Jen and I both bought something. Neither was too expensive, but still expensive enough to take note of. It was easy. Too easy. It made us both temporarily feel good. Again, it was too easy. We need to get back to being frugal. I should be able to distract myself with the new guitar amplifier that is being delivered today. See what I mean? Way too easy.

It’s Monday. The first day of week #15. Wash your hands. Wear your mask. Black Lives Matter. Keep your head down and do the right thing.

Good luck.

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.