In Memory, Uncle Bob

I’ve come to realize that I truly miss blogging at work. When I was at work blogging, I’d have time to sit down in a quiet environment, type up a long blog, and think about what I was writing long before I’d hit the ‘publish’ button. When I blog from home, I generally only have a little bit of time – or there is so much going on in the house that I am distracted and I just try to give quick updates.

*********************************************

Tomorrow morning at 5am we get up to take Jonathan to the airport. Originally Chris was going to bring him, but he’s been working nights changing out store signs at local malls – so I get to take him. Chris is MUCH more of a morning person than I am. Additionally he does better on only a little sleep than I do. If I don’t get at least 7 hours… I’m a walking zombie throughout the day. You can never tell how much sleep Chris has had… he’s just built different I suppose. Anyways, I’ll get home tonight – get him packed – go to bed early – then get up at the crack of dawn and see him off at the airport.

I have to admit I’m terrified of my son being in New York City. It’s SUCH a big place… and he has time nearly every day to go out and explore the city on his own (or rather in small groups with a chaperone). What if he gets lost? What if he loses his money? What if he doesn’t have enough money? What if he’s too cold? What if I forget to pack something?
ARGH!

I know… I shouldn’t worry about him – he’ll be fine. Yeah… I get that. But he’s still my baby, and I’m going to worry about him!

*********************************************************

Speaking of worries – Kayla got a letter in the mail last week. Apparently she applied for a phone with T-Mobile and denied her because of her credit. The reasons given were 1) too many recent inquiries 2) types of credit she had and 3) delinquent credit accounts. Well, she just turned 18 a couple weeks ago… she doesn’t HAVE any delinquent accounts, nor does she have any credit!

My mind immediately remembered when the kids first moved in. We filed their tax return (something Julie never did) and – low and behold – the IRS came back and said someone else was claiming them as dependents. I immediately called Julie who just told me that someone had stolen their social security cards some time ago. Great.

Can I just tell you how HARD it is to get credit information on minors? I tried to get Kayte and Justin’s credit reports for ‘free’ – that once a year thing – but you can’t do that for minors. Then I tried to put them on the fraud notification system, but for some reason they won’t go through and I have to mail all the info into them. So… we’ll see what happens with the two of them. For Kayla, we just requested a copy of her credit report from the free hole-in-the-wall place that denied her. I suppose she will have to pull it from Equifax and the other big-name places… but I haven’t done that yet… I mean – I haven’t helped her with that yet. LOL

I am quite certain that some skuz-bucket that Julie used to hang out with took those social security cards and is using them illegally. Without question. Hell, I know at the very least this person was illegally claiming them as dependents on their tax return.
It just makes me so mad that here these kids are… turned around… doing well… about to enter the adult stage of their life… and their credit is now messed up ALREADY.

********************************************************************

I’m so torn as to what to do with Kayla right now. I want to treat her as a mature young adult. I want to start teaching her the things she’s going to need to know to make it out in the world – such as cooking, balancing her checkbook, etc. But – she is never home.

Every day after school, she hangs out with friends. On Friday she goes to a friend’s house for the entire weekend. I rarely see her, unless it’s on the stairs as she is making her way up to her room. Which… if she was doing great might be one thing. But she’s not.

She’s skipping classes in school. A lot of classes. Get this… I looked at the handbook and you would need to have 5 absences recorded for your parents to be sent a letter. 10 absences and they have a meeting with your parents and the principal to discuss what’s going on. 15 absences and it’s considered “truancy” where legal action can be taken. However… if you show up LATE to class 3 times – you are on in school suspension. After that, it’s out of school suspension for 5 days.

Does that many ANY sense to you? It doesn’t to me either.

Then she got suspended from work for giving away free food. She’s darn lucky she wasn’t fired given the times and how many people would be lined up for her job! Kayla said she cried a lot and told them she’d never do it again, so they just suspended her until this next Monday.

Course, I still need to see her to help teach her to drive as well. Which – the car thing is another problem. Last time she talked to me about it, she said she was getting a car over spring break. But Gwen said she needed $2,000 to get a car. Additionally Kayla isn’t saving enough right now to even pay for gas for a car, never mind insurance or anything else. She now has $100 less in the bank than she had last month at this time. Sigh…

Her not having a car is “not my monkey” as Chris always says. However, her mood swings because she’s miserable for not having one really does become my monkey.

*****************************************************************

Julie finally sold her house. The closing is on Friday. The funny thing about this is that – when I asked her how much it sold for, she had NO idea. How do you sell your home, the home that you and your deceased husband had built for your family, and not have any clue how much it sold for? I totally get it that she is happy to be out from under that obligation (they are not going to ask her for any more money), but seriously… how can you not have any idea how much money they are selling the house for?

******************************************************************

Tomorrow morning, after I take Jonathan to the airport at the crack of dawn, I have my first dental appointment in YEARS. I’m talking… a lot of years. I take very good care of my teeth, so I’m not worried about cavities. Maybe I’ll have one, especially since I haven’t been in 10 years or so… but I’m much more concerned about my gums. I brush twice a day. I floss. And yet my gums seem to be receding. I think they are… I know my mom has that same problem, and I’m pretty sure mine are as well. I’ve looked it up online and there are only a couple of options for this… one is surgery. I can’t afford gum surgery. I mean… I don’t WANT it either – but I can’t imagine dumping money into my stupid gums. ARGH. Wish me luck… and I’ll let you know how it goes.

***************************************************************************

Remember when I used to tell you that we kept losing all the cordless phones? Well, they are all gone now. The only phones left in the house are the four that have cords. Kitchen, living room, office and our bedroom. The kids use our bedroom phone all the time… it’s easy to lay in our bed and chat all night long. I get that… really I do.

The other night I go to bed. I pulled up the covers and *smack* something hits my knee. Followed by a sprinkle of what felt like little plastic sprinkles all over my legs. I get up to see what on earth it was… toenail clippers. Oh. My. Goodness. That means that the sprinkle was… yeah… toenails. All over my legs and now inside my sheets. YUCK YUCK YUCK.

I remember thinking to myself at the time “Does this kind of thing really happen to other people?” Yeah… I suppose it does.

**********************************************************************

It’s now Thursday morning. The plan was to get up at 5am and get ready. At 5:30 I was to drive Jonathan to the airport and hang out with him until his whole group arrived; We were supposed to be there at 6am. I have a dentist appointment at 9… so depending on how long I was at the airport was whether I was going to come home or go straight to the dentist from there.

Well… I had a HORRIBLE night sleep. I was up packing Jon last night, and he was clearly excited. We discussed wake-up time. Usually Jonathan needs a whole hour to get ready but since we were leaving at 5:30, he thought 30 min would do just fine. I went to bed – without Chris who is working at night for the next week or so – about 11:30pm. As I said… I didn’t sleep well. It was one of those nights when you just keep waking up and looking at the clock. 1:30am. 4:00am. 4:20am. 4:35am. The next time I saw the time it read: 5:23am.

WHATTTTTT????? Oversleep today? Forgot to set the alarm – for TODAY?

I run to Jon’s room and he too is asleep. To say he FREAKED out would be a massive understatement. He was very upset. I tried to tell him just to get dressed and we could just leave, but he was still VERY freaked out. He barked at me over and over again, and finally I told him – at 5:35am – that I was not leaving until he calmed his ass down. This just made him more freaked out. Finally Chris woke up and came down and calmed Jonathan down… giving him a hug and telling him that it would be okay. He explained to Jonathan that the plane didn’t actually leave until 7:35am… so he really did have time. And with that we left.

When we got in the car and Jonathan saw the time of 5:38am he said “It’s not after 6:30??” --- The poor kid thought when I woke him up it was actually 6:30 not 5:30.

I dropped him off at the airport and had time to come home. I get home and thought to check the kid’s rooms for some reason. It’s now 6:45am – their bus comes at 6:35 and school starts at 7:10 or so. Laying in the bed sound asleep is Kayla. I ask her if she’s planning on going to school today. (I dunno…maybe she was going to decide to skip the whole day.) She said yes… but ‘nobody woke her up’. Apparently her sister and brother usually wake her up. I told her that she is 18 years old and perfectly capable of setting an alarm and getting up on her own – and that now she needed to find a ride to school. (I assumed one of the many people she’s always out with could take her to school on their way.)
My plan was to lie down for 20 minutes or so… then get up and take a shower… then go to the dentist.

Gosh I hate the dentist.

Sure enough… a knock on the door and Kayla tells me that she needs a ride to school. I guess resting was out of the question for this morning.

I got Kayla off to school, came home, took a shower, and went to the Dentist.

Well, the dentist appointment went MUCH better than I thought it would. Having not been for 10 years or so… I thought for SURE I would have cavities. I know I have gum problems (a receding gum line), and I’ve researched what to do about it – which can entail surgery. I went in expecting them to hit me with a bagillion dollar price-tag for what I needed done… but he told me that my teeth were in excellent shape. No cavities or anything like that. He told me I brush too much/too hard and I needed to stop that (I am a little OCD at times, ya know?) He did not recommend the gum surgery at this time – he recommended I brush less since I’m actually removing enamel when I do it. I’ll need two cleanings – and all 4 of my very, very old fillings have cracks in the teeth – but he recommended we just watch them for now to see what they do down the road. I’m liking that! So I had one of my cleanings today and will go back for the deep cleaning in April sometime.

*************************************************************

I got a very sad phone call today from Julie. She was actually crying, which broke my heart. Julie has not been ‘smart’ about money with things like her house and her car. When her car was stolen recently, we tried to tell her that she should pay off that car and go to a better dealership for a replacement car. Drivetime is charging her a fortune, financing it themselves at a high interest rate, and now they want her to sign something saying that she will only go to Drivetime next time she needs a car. I thought this was ridiculous – she could have a car offered to her from a friend for what she can afford in cash – but she’d be locked in by contract to purchase her next vehicle from Drivetime. Julie’s reasoning is that she will “always have car payments” so why not. In other words… she’s always going to be throwing money into a car… so she might as well pay way too much in the cost of the car and in interest to Drivetime. That just… makes no sense to me.

Well, now Drivetime is telling her that they want her $500 deductible paid as well as $900 for ‘prior damage’. Julie sure as heck DID have prior damage to her car… but I think she hoped it would be covered by the insurance when her car was stolen. Apparently she spent so much money on the rental car, she no longer has $1,400 to give to them to cover the car.

I feel bad for her… but she’s making her choices and has to live with them. It was her choice to be irresponsible by letting a guy that she barely knew into her apartment. Her choice of where to go to get a car – and not caring if she pays too much for it.

Ya know, I was talking to Chris about something. The other day Julie called me about needing a ride to Drivetime. It was Sunday, the day of Jonathan’s birthday. First she wanted to know if I could drive her to Brandon on Monday night, after she finished work. After thinking about it, I knew I couldn’t get from North Tampa at 5pm, to Brandon, and back to Tampa to make it to bible study. I told her I could not bring her there and that she needed to find another ride. This conversation went back and forth for a while – and then she said that she would look into riding the bus.

What you should know about Julie is that – years ago, she would ride the bus EVERYWHERE. Need to go to St. Pete? Julie could tell you how to get there, or figure it out. Brandon – there’s a bus for that too. Julie asked if I would look up the information for the bus and tell her how to get there. My mind went back to all the times she’s asked for this kind of thing recently. If she needed to get to the kid’s school – she would ask me for step-by-step directions on exactly how to get there. Telling her that it’s North on Dale Mabry, North of Ehrlich and just past Northdale on the left – isn’t good enough. Then I remembered what she was like years ago… would go anywhere on the drop of a dime and not need step-by-step instructions.

I asked her if she could look it up, and she said she tried but couldn’t find it. I typed “hart line bus Tampa” into Google and it came up right away. You can just plug in your address, and then the address where you are going, and it tells you what bus to take, times, and what the walking distance is from where the last bus drops you off. But she couldn’t find it when she looked it up? It just didn’t make sense. I realized that… and I don’t mean this to sound mean… she used to be a lot smarter than this. I wondered if the huffing and overdosing all that time really did kill some brain cells. It’s sad to think about that, but – maybe.

***************************************************************
I just got word that my Uncle Bob died. He wasn’t really an uncle, but he was more like and uncle than some of our actual uncles. Mom and dad had best friends up in Massachusetts – Carol and Bob. They had kids around the same time, and when they decided to move away from Mass, they moved together. Aunt Carol and Uncle Bob moved in two doors down from mom and dad. I think if they could have gotten houses next to each other, they certainly would have.

We grew up with love, discipline and friendship from mom and dad, and from Aunt Carol and Uncle Bob. They were my sister Katie’s Godparents. They are good people. Their Daughter Lisa is my age, and their daughter Charmaine is Katie’s age. Although I don’t see them much – Katie and mom still see them all the time. And… I know I can always count of them for anything. They are family.

I remember my dad always drinking. Not Uncle Bob... I don't know why he didn't follow my dad down that dark road... but he didn't - thank God. I remember how we could just walk into their house and it was like being home. I remember Aunt Carol and my mom working together at Maas Brothers. Funny... I don't recall what line of work Uncle Bob was in... I just remember him always being at home.

Sigh......

He’s been very sick lately. Both he and Aunt Carol have not been well. This morning Uncle Bob passed away. I don’t know how he passed… I’m hoping it was in his sleep. I know he was home.

I need to run. I need to gather myself. I’m at work, and I really need to pull myself together. I hoped that blogging would help, but… not yet…….

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.