Dad's House » life

Free Breakfast

dadshouse — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:30:59 +0000

My local grocery store gives me a bazillion coupons every time I check out and pay. I guess they want me to feel like I won the lottery, hoping I’ll come back and spend even more the next time. With savings! Of course.

The coupons are usually for products I never buy, or stuff I don’t want, and I just chuck them in the trash. But two weeks ago, the market gave me coupons worth keeping.

Free breakfast.

We’re talking a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, a carton of orange juice, and a loaf of bread. Free. The only catch was that I had to use the coupons this past weekend.

“I can’t wait to get this free breakfast,” I told my son.
“Aren’t we at mom’s that weekend?” he asked.

Sure enough, my ex had custody. Oh, well. Too bad for my kids. Sometimes in a two-house divorced family, things don’t quite work out the way you’d like. It wouldn’t stop me from getting my free breakfast.

When the weekend came, I went to the grocery with my coupons and picked up a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, a carton of orange juice, and a loaf of bread. I got into the express check-out line.

“Sorry, you can’t use these coupons for this,” the checkout guy said.
“Why not?” I asked. The coupons clearly said free. They listed the specific products. I was there on the right day.

The check-out guy pointed at the fine print, and told it to me straight: “You have to buy fifty-dollars worth of groceries.”

Sigh. There’s always a catch. No way was I going to spend my weekend morning shopping for $50 worth of food supplies. Especially when my kids weren’t at my house.

I went home empty-handed. Thank goodness for frozen waffles.

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Why Does Life Have To Be Planned?

dadshouse — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:04:45 +0000

Imagine you’re divorced with 50-50 custody during the week. For custody on holidays and long weekends, the kids go with one parent or the other. So if your ex got the kids for Memorial Day weekend this year, you get the kids for Labor Day weekend. It might not be a perfect approach, but it works.

Only problem – if you don’t make plans on your three-day weekend with the kids, your ex asks if she can have the kids instead. She has plans, after all – with extended family, no less. Who are you to deny your kids time they could spend with her cousins?

To which I ask: why does life have to be planned?

Kids these days lead incredibly busy lives. Between schools, sports, band, and living in two homes, my kids have a ton going on. They need their down time.

But don’t take my word for it. Look at how a lot of people spend their leisure time. Some pay big money to head to relaxing places like Hawaii where they can lay on the beach without a plan.

When you have no plan, life slows down and you can enjoy each moment for what it is.

And so this past Labor Day weekend, we didn’t rush out of town to visit my folks. We didn’t run from soccer game to soccer game. We didn’t make plans with multiple families for barbecues (we did try to get together, but all the friends we usually cook with were out of town)

We entered the three-day weekend not knowing how we’d spend it.

It was great!

Friday night, my daughter went to a movie with her friends. My son and I watched Italian Serie-A soccer on Tivo.

Saturday, my son spent the day hanging out with a friend, then did a sleepover that night. My daughter worked on her college application essay, then played nerf gun wars with a group of high schoolers.

Sunday, the kids and I did a 10-mile hike through a redwood forest, then barbecued chicken shish-kabob skewers that night.

Monday, my daughter did club projects with girl friends of hers, and my son enjoyed a day of hanging out with buddies. (Sweet kid that he is, he also dropped by his mom’s house for a while just to visit.) Then Monday night we had a big meal, just the kids and me.

No plans. Great weekend. I wouldn’t change a thing.

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Senior Moment

dadshouse — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:10:17 +0000

Ever have a senior moment?

You know the type – you wonder where your glasses are, only to discover they’re sitting on top of your head?

Well, I’ve got a senior moment beef to pick with my kids. And what better place to do that than over at the Silicon Valley Moms blog.

Use your walker and inch on over to the SVMoms Blog and read about:

Senior Moment

(If that pre-configured link doesn’t work, try this: David at SVMoms)

Now then, where are those dang glasses of mine…

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When Hanging Out is Better Than Dating

dadshouse — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:00:59 +0000

You meet somebody new. You enjoy a coffee date or martini together. You’d like to see them again, but you don’t quite feel the spark, the chemistry, the je ne sais quois – it’s not quite there to ratchet things up another notch and date.

Whatever happened to just hanging out?

I recently met a woman who struck me this way. We’re both single parents of teens, so we have a bit in common. The few times we’ve gotten together, we’ve had fun. I’m pretty sure we could be good friends. But, for a variety of reasons, it just doesn’t seem like we’re destined to be a couple.

Oh, sure – it’s possible we simply haven’t spent enough time together yet to make that determination. We need to let down our guards and see what the other person is really like. People can grow on each other over time. The problem is, we don’t have mutual friends (we met in a restaurant bar), so we have no built-in reasons to just get together and hang out.

Every time I call her, the pretext is dating. Why keep wining and dining if my gut says it’s not going to last?

Remember back in college, you’d meet someone new in your dorm and start hanging out together? Or now, at work, you and a colleague might grab an informal lunch. Male/female relations don’t always have to have an undertone of getting it on. Women and men can be friends and just hang out.

As a divorced man, I know I need more feminine energy in my life. And female companionship doesn’t have to come in the form of a lover. I already have some good friends who are women, some of them married, some single. But there’s always room for more. Hanging out is healthy.

The bottom line – I don’t yet know this particular woman well enough to invite her over to my house to just hang out. And yet, that’s exactly what I’d love to do. For me to suggest that I cook dinner for her, or that we watch a DVD together, seems far too intimate. The initial steps of getting to know her involved flirting with an intent to date, and now I’m finding it hard to say “hey, let’s just be friends.”

Easier to just drift apart, I suppose, and chase someone else.

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Fiesta

dadshouse — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:00:11 +0000

Between two back-to-school nights this week, plus taking care of my kids and working, I need a fiesta! And so, I am declaring Friday to be Cinco de Mayo in August. I’m shaking my best margarita recipe, doing tequila shots, sipping Coronas, and taking a holiday. If I was in Mexico, you can bet I’d be laying on la playa all day, getting ready to salsa all night.

Meanwhile, here are the Pogues performing the song, Fiesta. Have a margarita and take the rest of the day off. Happy Friday!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Blogger Happy Hour

dadshouse — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:01:12 +0000

I’ve met a bunch of bloggers in real life, and for some reason these meet-ups almost always involved drinking. Go figure! (Aren’t those some big-ass cocktails in the photo?)

After meeting single mom Mindy and her daughter in San Francisco last weekend (I drank a Bloody Mary, Mindy drank white wine, and we very nearly made it to the Buena Vista for Irish Coffee), I figured it was time to wax poetic on the drinking encounters I’ve had with bloggers in real life.

Cathouse Teri – a sexy irreverent blogger (who hasn’t written a post in a month – WTF?), Teri gets top billing because not only have I met her twice, but we drank a lot both times we met. Woohoo! We downed some fine Belgian beers and ales at the Trappist in Alameda. Fun times.

Dirt & Noise – she’s a married mom of two young boys, and a contributor to the Deep South Moms (a sister group of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog). She gets second billing because not only did we have killer cocktails (some sort of Rosemary martini thing), but she blogs cocktail recipes every Friday at 5pm. That’s my kind of blogger!

Ts Quest and Depot Dad – we met up at a party when T visited the Bay Area during the holiday season last year. Alcohol was flowing! Good cheer all around. I think I stuck to red wine that night. And I actually didn’t drink all that much, because I had to drive afterwards. I totally enjoyed meeting both Jim and T.

Kat Wilder – she blogs anonymously, and so in an effort to hide her true identity, I can pretty much make up whatever I want right here. So, rather than say we met at a wine bar for conversation and a drink, I’ll say we hooked up, did tequila body shots, and swore each other to secrecy. (Oops – so much for that secret.)

Sandra (aka Sandrita, Fraulein Senorita) – she’s single and not a mom, but she flits around the single parent blogosphere (right on!) We met up at a hookah bar for a hookah smoke (right on!!) I drank a vodka martini that night, and I believe she had a cosmopolitan. But after my second martini and all that hookah smoke, I sort of can’t remember the details so well. (Maybe she’s the blogger I did body shots with? Right on!!!)

Mama Dharma – I met her and some other mom bloggers at the Trappist for Belgian beer. (Cathouse Teri is influential! Especially when she was there too.) Picture me, a lone guy downing beer with a trio of good looking women. Nothing like an ego stroke to get us men folk going! It was fun.

Susan Courtad – we started with coffee at Café Trieste in San Francisco, then moved to lunch and alcohol in North Beach. I can’t recall our beverages of choice, so let’s just say I had a gin and tonic, and she had a mai tai, and we’ll call it a day. (Susan has a great sense of humor, btw. And she spent this year planning a wedding, so hasn’t blogged in forever.)

Silicon Valley Moms – I joined an SV Moms Blog girls night out sort of thing. They swore to me it wasn’t really a GNO. But I think they just wanted me to feel welcome. (I did! I did!) We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and we drank a few pitchers of margaritas.

On that note, I think it’s happy hour. Anyone for a drink?!

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Back to School Shopping in a New Age Pharmaceutical Church

dadshouse — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:09:44 +0000

Pardon my exhaustion, but my kids are back in school, and I was the custodial parent who helped them shop for school supplies. For some genius reason, our local school district decided mid-August was a great time to open the fall term. That’s seven to ten days earlier than usual, and the stores were barely ready to sell supplies.

This meant every school kid and his parent was packed into Office Depot and Longs buying supplies on the same night. Oy!

It was so congested, we couldn’t park our car, let alone bear to face the long lines inside. Instead, we drove to Target, which was further away and far less crowded. Only problem, the store was lacking key items. For instance, plain-covered binders were nowhere to be seen. Some kids (like my teen son) refuse to be seen carrying a binder covered with photos of the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus. (Can you blame them?)

In a coup of coups, we headed over to Rite Aid. The place was empty! Not only that, it was loaded with every school supply we needed. (I suppose people think of Rite Aid for First Aid, not binders and pens. Whatever!)

The atmosphere was genuinely soothing, partly due to music playing throughout the store. Acoustic guitars, electric keyboards, violins, tambourines, drums played with brushes instead of sticks. It was almost like muzac accompanying a woman singing.

Except for one thing: the lyrics were all about God.

WTF? This was Rite Aid, not a New Age Pharmaceutical Church!

Imagine the dulcet tones of a woman’s voice drifting through the drug store. Something like this (I don’t remember the actual words, so these are made up):

God, you are so wonderful
You are love and all that is good
You are the shepherd and I am your flock
In you I place my trust and faith

I’m thinking, who sanctioned Jesus music in a non-denominational store? I figured the manager had to be mega-Christian and a bit of a nut. (Not that all mega-Christians are nutty. But given the circumstance, that phrase seems appropriate.) Look, I don’t care what religion a person subscribes to, but please don’t ram it down my throat, especially in a drugstore.

Then I realized the woman wasn’t singing about Jesus, she was singing about God, and somehow that made it okay. In fact, I let myself take comfort that our school-supply shopping needs were being met. Maybe God played a part in that. Who knows? Now I feel nutty. (Sister Mary, price check on register ten.)

At any rate, it was a godly night for binder buying. We found just what we needed, and avoided all the crowds.

Amen!

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