January 7, 2015

Mornings are fun times around here – especially with the help of drizzly skies.  STP continuing their play at the house  while Nirvana takes over in the car.  I believe Jason is coming by on Monday to hook up speakers.  Rawk.

Straight to Juvenile Hall after I drop the kids off where I got 2 assessments done and an individual session as well as getting to know some guards and reading up in veracious texts books.  I’m not really trusted yet, I feel, by staff or kids and that’s perfectly ok, I get it.  I’m new – no one knows me and both groups have their closed little community of sorts. 

 And then, I was honored to be able to watch a graduation ceremony which moved me more than my own did a few months ago.  This kid has experienced a hell I could never imagine and subsequently learned coping skills which resulted being incarcerated here.  Yet before, when I saw this individual at the school I worked at for the last few years, there was always a smile, despite what was going on under the surface.  I would never have guessed, imagining a picture-perfect home life.  That meme which passes through once a month or so about “everyone fighting a battle you know nothing about” is so damn true.  I wish I would have known back then when I was at the school so I could have offered support.

 

Every few months (or maybe it's only twice a year, the years are beginning to blur...) I think there is an interest in me by someone I have could easily develop an interest in.  This lasts a period of days and then explodes into Nothingness again when nothing happens from the other end.  It’s like my quarterly Love high (or lust, but at this point in my life they are one and the same, I think).  If only there was a vending machine….

Picked up Boy (Girl had gone home with a bad headache).  As soon as we got home, I threw a pot roast in and started dooing what I could to cook up dinner.  Girl chopped onions, Boy took care of carrots and we waited.  About a half an hour in, I thought a food truck, Culinerdy Cruizer, was coming up to Red Hawk Casino and I told the kids we’d go here, instead, and have the roast tomorrow, but it was actually Keith and Amy actually going to the casino for pleasure, so kids and I had pot roast tonight– which ended up tasting quite delicious. I love dinner-time with these kids.  It's special.  I wish I made meals more often and we sat down together like this.

 Pictures: A beautiful sky this evening (3 pics); Maggie's shot of Wicked Tree.  She said it looked like it had cotton candy coming out of it; My BBS hours...which I have not recorded since the end of October.  Yikes.