Category: Family
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WITAT?: Gender Reveals
Since moving to the U.S., I’ve learned that there are many things that Americans unnecessarily over-celebrate. From football players trotting on to the pitch at the start of a game (which is apparently deserving of smoke bombs, fireworks, and inflatable tunnels, even though they do this a couple of times a week during the season – and get paid a fuck-ton of money to do so), to high school graduations (“Well congratulations for managing do what 85% of the population does…and sure, let’s have a 4-hour ceremony to celebrate it!”) – hell there are even kindergarten ‘graduations’. Draft picks…nominations for… Read more
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Spring Break Road Trip
Thanks to the impending global apocalypse, Daughter’s college is extending Spring Break (which starts Monday) by a week or two, and then moving to all-online classes “until further notice”. Which meant that instead of having a nice, relaxing weekend at home, I had to drive up to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, and bring her and all of her stuff back home. Yes, it is in-State, but the State being Texas, it is 500+ miles away, which makes it a weekend trip. Usually, this would irritate the pants off me, especially as it was only decided on Thursday, and… Read more
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Live and let Live keep charging you
Several years ago, I bought my son an Xbox 360 for his birthday. Along with this, I got him a subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Because he was a minor at the time, getting him an account set up on Xbox was a complete pain in the ass, involving me providing a credit card to prove I was over 18 and could ‘vouch for’ him, then a bunch of iterations of logging in and out and providing various approvals/confirmations, and so on, which took the best part of an hour to do (all the while, the boy pacing around anxiously… Read more
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Falling foul of liable laws
A month or so back, my 16-year-old daughter had another car accident. This was her second within a six month period, as a consequence of which I tool her car away (for the second time) and this time also took her off my insurance (before the insurance company likely dropped her themselves) – which really did not go down well. The damage wasn’t actually too bad (compared to the first accident, where she totalled the other car – a BMW Z3), but as I only have basic insurance and my insurance company determined the accident was 100% my daughter’s fault,… Read more
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Death At One’s Elbow
A year ago today, my ex wife killed herself. At the time, we had been divorced for five or six years and I had custody of our three kids, so aside from the shock, there was little practical impact on our daily life – just a lot of mental goings on. Although I had a lot of conflicting feelings, grief was not one of them. I had grieved the loss of our relationship long before, and after a fairly bitter divorce that almost bankrupted me there was certainly no love lost. Most of what I felt was anger. Anger that… Read more