Things are going well. We seem to have settled back into our rutt.

The house persists in a state of being 45min-90min from clean at any time. We have clearly missed a couple spring cleanings and the kids toys and stuff has built back up to squalor levels.

We never really addressed the storage mess that is our garage, and as of late I have been going through it and trying to get rid of the bulk of it. The wife is very keen on detecting this and intercepting me with promises of a yard sale "next weekend". Ofcourse she has NEVER actually done a yard sale in the 20 years I've known her, but like an idiot, I keep giving her the week to sell the stuff only to have nothing happen.

Anyways, Same shit, different day. But we are still in substantially better shape than we were 2 years ago!

Kids made out well despite my unemployed status (Credit card company's made out well at my expense too ).

12yo got a new desktop computer, One of those crazy R/C helicopters and lots of new clothes.

One twin got a Tonka helicopter, and the other got a police car. They also got r/c cars, scooters, play dough, leap frog learning thing, hand held electronic games and lots of new clothes.

Other gifts included a dry-erase board for the twins, several board games, Uno attack, cheese/meat thing, several DVD movies, etc.

The past year has been interesting to say the least.

I started this blog to vent my frustrations about my personal home life. Little did I know that within 6 months I would experience the very drama that I feared.

While things are much better, there is still much to be done.

I haven't posted my recent frustrations as my wife has pretty effectively shot down all my attempts to progress with the simple excuse that I'm currently jobless and that makes me free to be the family maid.

I so much want to share photos and the lighter fun side of my life, but my shame on these personal matters keeps me locked into impersonal "my wife", "the kids" and other vague / anonymous references.

 

The kids have been relentless the past week about getting a Christmas tree. The psychological scar of not having last year has them very worried and concerned about this year. They have been aggressively keeping the living room "Christmas tree ready" and making sure I am aware of this fact!

So today we went out and got a Christmas tree. The kids were excited. Once I got it setup in the house they spent the evening decorating it with lights, glitter, etc.

 

Well, have not spoken much about my job, so to lay out the whole soap opera as fast as possible... Wrote a computer program for a local company about 8~9 years ago. I've moved on to other things since, but have continued to accommodate their feature requests and upgrades over the years.

When I lost my flying job last year, the company got wind of it and called me in for a major upgrade they wanted me to develop. Being out of work, I accepted.

The nut of the upgrade was to incorporate my application with a new accounting package they were installing. It was my first experience dealing with a major software development company and I must say I was just amazed at all the bureaucratic steps taken to make the smallest bit of progress. We basically came up with a plan of action in the beginning of the year and it was all documented in the EDD. This EDD what was to become the Holy Bible of what everyone agreed to do, complete with terminology explanations, diagrams, time lines, database structures, etc. Any deviations from the EDD that were not show stoppers were put on the list for a future phase of the integration.

The players in this upgrade was the local company (the customer), myself (representing the application I made), the other developer (representing the accounting software), and the Mediator (a 3^rd party software savvy consultant who could call out the bullshit that the other developer or myself may try to pass off).

To make a short story long, things went horrible from about day one. There was issues between the other developer and the company that lead to them using a programmer who lived in India, There were a lot of missed details in their own "gap analysis", the list goes on.

For the most part, I have had it pretty easy in that most of the complications did not affect or impact my software or my databases. I've teased the company that my billing for the last several months has been about 10% programming/development and 90% meetings with the other software company. I've even taken to coordinating with the programmer in India to walk him though the development and debugging of his own code!

Now, in November, we have missed several target "go live" dates, and I think it is safe to say everyone involved is frustrated to one degree or another. We were trying for a mid-month go live by next Friday when I started getting a lot of notices to fix issues with one of my "private" database tables. I advised the other software company to stay out of this database table as it was not part of the "go live" objectives as per the EDD. It did not take long to figure out the source of these notices was not from the other software company, but from our Mediator! What I discovered is that our Mediator had learned how to program and add features to the accounting software and was tapping into my softwares tables for direct access to data. I advised him that his features were unsupported in the EDD, and thus unsupported by the other software company, and certainly unsupported my myself. I liked what he was doing, it was just not the right time to do it; after all, the accounting software was still not online yet! I also advised him that he looses his "neutral" mediator status the moment he enters the programming arena.

Long story short: He was not going to remove his unsupported code from the software, making my future development substantially more complex. So I quit.

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ffs!

Tuesday our niece died. She was 6 weeks old. My wife left today for Arizona for the funereal and will be gone all week.

It didn't take long before we found ourselves at Ci-Ci's pizza. One thing is for sure; all my bitching about my wife and it does not take long to miss her cooking. She is a good cook.

Tonight I removed all the items from the mini-storage back to the house. Only took 2 trips. The bulk of it was VHS tapes. that I just put in the back room. I will most likely just throw these away.

Also brought back my 12yo sons train track. It is a 4/8 ply board with a figure 8 track surrounded by a second track. It is the larger lionel type train and simply huge. His bedroom is very small and really does not have room for it, but we went ahead and set it back up on the floor with a couple feet extending under his bed. He and the twins have been playing it all night. I let them stay up an extra hour past bed time since it was "new" again.

My wife's AVON has been in the living room for two weeks now. It is up to 6-7 boxes. She insists they are perishable and can not be stored in the garage or car. We had a shelf/cabinet that our friend gave us to use as a pantry. Since it was still sitting empty I had he move it all into this cabinet.

There was also a revelation a couple weeks ago at the counseling meeting that she can RMA (return) unsold items to Avon. I have been pushing as hard as I can to get her to send this pack-rat dead inventory back but she is very resistant. She said 2 of the boxes in the living room were for shipping; one to Avon and one to her Mother. I will try to get her to mail those out ASAP and get working on the other 15-20 boxes of dead Avon inventory.

Well. Last Thursday. Our marriage counselor put quite a bit of responsibility on me, suggesting that my wife's unwillingness to embrace the rules and bring a level of consistency to our home was because all the rules were all mine and not hers.

There was also a lot of discussion about how I expect others to follow a rule, yet I seem to exempt myself from them (i.e. kids not allowed to eat outside of the kitchen, yet I will eat at my desk). He explained a lot of logic about how I'm subconsciously teaching the kids that breaking rules is ok if no authority is around to stop them. His suggestion was to have a family meeting and make new rules for everyone and to get everyone to agree to them so that they are the family rules and not just "Dad's" rules.

Well. Had the family meeting today and went through the rules. I used what I had as a guide and asked for input. My wife was stone cold silent for the entire meeting and would not discuss, suggest or agree with anything we talked about. About the only changes that ended up happening, from discussion with the kids, is that if food is not something that can stain the carpet (like popcorn, chips, crackers) that they could eat outside the kitchen after asking. Another change was the nightly dishes my son and I do. We changed from us alternating weeks to having the person on the off week along with the twins help clear the table and dry the dishes. The twins would also spend this time picking up their toys for the day.

Well, the dishes plan fell apart the same day after a couple dishes were broke. Since everything was basically still in "my" rules. I decided to abandon the changes and continue with what we had.

I justified and rationalized that me eating outside the kitchen is a "grown up" privilege and would make additional efforts to explain the logic. Just as they are not old enough to drive or drink.