Saturday, January 26, 2008

Don't Call CPS

It’s not abuse if they like it, right? Look at her. She looks happy! I can’t keep her out the stupid thing. Seriously, she keeps asking us if she can sleep in it. My life would sure be a lot easier if all I had to do was keep her in the crate when I needed to. Think of the babysitting money I could save.


Its not like Ernie likes using it. He prefers to sleep under the bed. I guess that is OK since he has been kind enough to pull out all of the crap that was underneath it. This won't last long. He is growing so fast he won't fit under there in another month.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Scary

Sarah came home for a visit a couple of weeks ago. It went well for the most part. She is in a much better frame of mind than when we sent her away to Red Rock Canyon School. It looks like she is very close to graduating from the school. If she does, she will have completed a very tough program for any kid, let alone one with emotional problems.

One of Sarah’s biggest problems before she went away was her obsession with the neighbor boy. She was trying to get pregnant with his baby. She still has a problem with it. She did whatever she could to be around him as much as possible while she was here.

Austin and Alissa were hard for her to deal with also. They can be very overwhelming. They are kind of like two Jack Russell Terriers. Sarah was too at that age. She is 16 now and doesn’t want too much to do with them, but they wanted her undivided attention. We had to take A&A aside and chill them out.

I am also a big issue she hasn’t begun to deal with yet. She has expressed concerns with her therapist about not getting along with me, but she won’t engage in any kind of conversation with me about her concerns.

So I think she will be back home sometime in the next 8 weeks. They have a combination of meds that seem to be working OK. She HAS worked hard to complete the program at Red Rock. But she doesn’t have a good start on dealing with the same problems that she had when she left home.

Scary

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Damn It!

My time as acting superintendent at MVCC is just about over, although officially the GM was the acting superintendent. I met the new superintendent today. He will start officially in about two weeks. Ironically, I met the guy before about three years ago when I just got out of turf school. I interviewed at his course and accepted a position there. But when I got home from the interview I found a message waiting from MVCC. They offered me the same position and money, but MVCC is five minutes from home and a much nicer track. I would have had a 35 minute commute to a public course that had half the budget and 36 holes. MVCC only has 18 holes. So I had to call him back and renig on the job.

This is funny, as I was just getting ready to bag on the GM; he has called me at home. He is using the company truck and can’t find it in the parking lot. What a retard.

All the agronomical decisions the last two months have had to go through the GM and his advisors on the east coast. I was a little offended that they didn’t trust me enough to let me actually run things. I met the advisors and they knew a lot about growing grass on the east coast, but not the nature of the business here in the resort area that I live and work in. I even took the GM aside and said, “These guys are good guys, but I’m not too sure about some of the things they are having me do. You should be getting your advice from an expert that knows the golf business here in the Coachella Valley. We have over 100 golf courses here, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone.”

Well the “acting superintendent/GM” let the golf course get nice and yellow before he came to me and asked what the hell was going on with the golf course. I should have told him to ask his freaking advisors. Instead I made a couple of calls to superintendents in the valley that I trusted. I got some “good” advice and one week later the course is much greener and the members are much happier. It took 20 minutes of my time and about $15,000 in fertilizer that my old boss didn’t budget for. The advisors cost that much.

The guys I called threw 41-0-0 just like we did, but they knew it would shut down during the frosty months of December and January. A different fertilizer needed to go down in early December, before the frost started to hit, then the course would not have gotten yellow. My old boss did not do his homework. He didn’t plan for that fertilizer application in December. There was like $1000 in the fertilizer budget. So ironically, the 41-0-0 purchase that cost my boss his job didn’t even do the job he thought it was going to do.

OK, so I have had to deal with a lot of political B.S. and stupidity over the that last two months. But one thing has REALLY made me mad.

Before the whole 41-0-0 thing, I had been working on losing some weight. I had lost close to 25 pounds. You can probably guess what I’m pissed about now. I’ve gained most of it back. I’m a baaad emotional eater. I have sought the comfort of chili-cheese fries, pizza, In-N-Out Burger, and strawberry cheesecake too many times the last 8 weeks.

DAMN IT!

I'm Just A X-Mas Kinda Guy

It is January 12th and I just took down the Christmas tree. It's a good thing I don't do lights on the house.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Hot Dogs and Pupsicles

Conversation between father and son while driving home.

“Hey Dad, what smells good? It’s making me hungry!”
“You don’t want to know.”

The problem was that we were not driving by a restaurant. We were driving by the local veterinarian. I had noticed this before, lots of smoke coming out of a large smokestack on the property, and the smell of BBQ. No, it is not a Vietnamese vet.

I don’t know if I could bring myself to take my dog to a place that disposes of the not so lucky patients.

Then there is this alternative.

Back in the early 90’s I worked for Domino’s Pizza. One of the restaurants that I worked at was in a strip mall, right next to a veterinarian. This guy didn’t incinerate the unlucky ones; he froze them. I guess he had a freezer that he kept the corpses in until a truck came to pick them up. There were many nights that we watched the heartless “pick up” guy toss frozen dogs and cats from inside the building into the back of his van. It was a long toss too, maybe 15 to 20 feet. Sometimes a leg would break off, but it was frozen solid so it wasn’t too gross, just sad. We made lots of gross jokes, but I think we all thought deep down inside, those pets deserved better.

So on the topic of pets let me introduce you to the new member of my house. His name is Ernie. He is a 13-week-old Labrador retriever. Sherri had a Lab when she was a teenager and always wanted another one. We also think the kids should get the opportunity to have a puppy when they are young, so Christmas morning we sprung Ernie on the kids. It was quite the feat hiding the little guy all day Christmas Eve Day.