Tuesday, January 27, 2009

been in a funk

Yesterday morning I woke up and upon checking messages on my cell phone was greeted by a message that caused me to be a little disgruntled. No need to rehash the message itself. Sometimes things get to me, after all I am pretty sensitive. The message was from a "friend", and well it said something that hurt my feelings. For the past 36 hours or so it's grated on my being, my every last nerve.

Time heals all wounds, and so now the pain has passed.

When I let myself end up in these situations I seek out ways to alleviate the hurt or frustration. Usually a walk down memory lane does the trick.

This time proved as cathartic as any other and I would like to share my journey.

There is no specific order that these photos are in, no chronology. It's apparent to me what could make a person smile when viewing them. Most of them are taken with a Minolta Dimage that maybe wasn't the best quality of cameras, but it preserved memories for me that may not have otherwise been.


















Their expressions are worth a thousand words, and make me bubble up with laughter!

mary jane and her birthday suit

Discussion of a recent teenager related incident brought the following blog I had previously posted on another forum back to memory:


Mary Jane and her birthday suit, June 2008.

She's not one and the same, two separate incidents in my life actually.

I try to make the best of "things" and put a positive spin on everything.

First, I'll tell you about Mary Jane. She's also known as weed, pot, grass, wacky-tabacky, and so forth. Her counterparts are commonly called joints, doobies, bongs, roaches...you get the picture.

Just when you think you just might stay away from this issue, at least until the youngest starts his rampage on the substance abuse world, your world gets turned upside down. We wouldn't know a thing about this except for the snooping habit of a dad. In this case the means is condoned, because the end brought a big problem sharply into everyone's focus.

Last weekend AW came up to me and asked if I knew something about LB and whatever. ?? He had been listening to a conversation his older brother was having, and it peaked his curiosity. I had no idea what he was talking about, so went straight to the original source and inquired. Of course, this irritates LB and he starts telling us to mind our own business. Because he reacted harshly my curiosity also peaked. I went and texted a friend who might know what was going on. See, the kids, her 15 year old daughter, and my 15 year old son, had both been at a party the night before. Her daughter often shares gossip with her so I was hoping she had the scoop.

She too was baffled, and asked her daughter. Later on I was able to bribe LB and he responded telling me that the dad, mentioned above, had wanted him to tell me anyway. (Yeah, I wondered why he hadn't told me prior to then.) The story I got was that this dad was accusing his son of smoking weed. As horrifying as it was it didn't directly affect me so I was somewhat relieved, although saddened for our friends. You might be wondering why this dad was talking to my son about it.

I thought my family wasn't directly involved...wrong!!!

Evidently, as the story has come out it was not only the one boy, but about 7 of them...who I had agreed to let crash at our house the night of our town carnival a few weeks ago. Two stayed back, claiming fatigue. LB was one of the two. He knew what the others were headed out to do, but thank heavens he was "tired". Nonetheless, these idiots went out, on our watch, and smoked pot!

To end this frustrating story, we let the original parents handle the brunt of the situation since it was their discovery. As far as our end? The boys involved, many of whom I love like they're my own, are no longer welcome. It doesn't help that a couple of them have been party to other incidents--but nothing that could end us all up in prison!

Her birthday suit....not Mary Jane's, silly!

Once again, the family 15 year old is involved in this one.

So we drop LB off at his game. He has to be there an hour early, so Big B and I will drop him off and then run to the store for drinks, and snacks....especially needed watching a championship game. It was a good one too! Anyway, back to the story. While driving back to the ballpark we notice he has left his cell phone on the backseat....uh, do we want Mom to look at it? For those of you who think we do a lot of privacy invasion around here, well, if you don't have children, don't judge it's none of your beeswax, if you don't have teenage children--just you wait, if you do and still find it appaling, well aren't you the lucky one to have raised completely perfect angels? Yeah, right.

For one thing when you're paying the bill, you have rights! For another, if they're so worried about their privacy being invaded then maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't leave a picture of a naked girl, whom they know, and is their age, on their phones! Yeah, you read it right. Full frontal nudity! 15! Can we say child pornography?

So let's do the philosphical math...Mary Jane + her birthday suit= teenage hell.