8/21/22 Turning 51?

     I have now been asked how I feel about turning 51 by both Wife and Mijo.  Thirty years ago, I would have thought I would be old by now, and honestly, when I see my peers around my age, some do look old.  I don't feel old, other than a bad knee, a little bit of a bad back, I mostly feel like my sense of self is still very alert.  I am still telling myself all I have to do is start and keep up a workout routine to strengthen both back and knees and I would be fine, but something always seems more important, like a cup of coffee in the morning.

    I don't know where I'll be in a few years, or who will be riding the journey with me, but my life has been good to great.  About ten years ago, Wife and I came up with a plan, call it a five-year plan if it needs a name, but that is when she decided to go back to school, get her master's, and since then she has been working out of town and all that stuff.  My focus has been to stick close to my boys, so they stay on the straight and narrow, focusing on them growing up.  Now that Wife is all schooled up, she is able to bring in more income, even if she has surpassed me, I still win because all her extra money is our extra money, so life is good and getting gooder.  😉

    I think we did a good job with Boy; it took longer than planned, but he did just graduate with an engineering degree and right at this moment, he is in Japan (for two weeks), sent there by work to fix something or other.  I call that a success, and even then, he is still driven to get more out of his chosen profession, as he keeps applying for better paying jobs.  I see Mijo climbing a lot farther than I ever attempted, after we provided the tools for him.  Our husky Mijo is now a senior in high school, and he is basically my full-time attention as I play Alfred to his Batman.  He is also on a good trajectory, he is loved by all his teachers and coaches, just this week chosen to be the student athlete leader for his football team by his coaches.

    Maybe at 51 I should be driving a better vehicle, but I don't really care too much.  I could go any day and buy one, but I keep waiting and hoping Ford comes to its senses and releases another Excursion.  I am happy enough with our big house and how we are living.  Yes, it is hectic, driving around Austin sucks, and I don't love my job, but everyone has to something, and what I do for pay is not hard.  I am thinking in another year or two, once Mijo is well into college life, I can once again focus on me, and get another boat to ride on into our sunset years.

8/20/22 My Feather Flags Came In?

     In my attempt to be over the top showing Cougar support, last week we went and ate down Manchaca Road and saw a business advertising all sorts of printed materials.  This got me inspired, so I went online and looked for those type of flags, they are called feather flags and are mostly used for advertising near the streets of businesses.  Honestly, I would have bought from that business, but the lady was shady as shit, so we left.  I then tried Amazon, but their color palette just wasn't matching what I wanted, and there wasn't much control in the layout.  After a day or two of fiddling around, I thought to just go on Google and see if some site would just give me freer control of the layout.  I found that with www.flagsonthecheap.com.  Not only were the prices okay, but the promise of delivery was outstanding.

    I laid out the flag like I wanted, added my Cougar on top, chose between 6ft to 15ft height length, paid the total and waited.  I ordered the flags (2), and they were delivered Thursday afternoon, even though delivery was set for on Friday.  Each flag came in its own box, about 4ft long, but the boxes were taped together, which adds strength so they wouldn't be bent in shipping.  Inside the box, there was a bag, and the bag has sleeves for the various poles and even the base.  There with the poles and stand was the flag all rolled up.  The material feels like good quality, because it is double sided, I think there are two sheets sewn together.  The printing was as good as expected, but if there was one thing I did not like, it was the overall color of the flags.  Since we seem to have gone black and tan with the school colors, I went with a black flag and the lettering in the tan/gold color.  The bag is made of the same basic material, which is what made it that much more evident.  The flags are a definite dark navy blue, with an edge in actual black.  If the whole flag was in the color of the seam edge, I would have thought perfect!

I called the company this morning, the guy on the phone said that is as close as their printers can get to black, but to my eyes, it just isn't.  He said I would get a decision in a couple days if the printer guys could do anything.  I still like them, set up inside the house, the navy blue looks black, but I don't know what will happen in the sun.

8/19/22 1st Scrimmage Of Season?

     I don't know whether to call it a game or a scrimmage.  Either way, we got there as quickly as we could, with Wife arriving from work around 6:20pm, taking 10 minutes to go potty and change shirt and back out the door to Kyle, Tx.  We got out there before 7:00pm but had a hard time figuring out where to go.  I guess at that time, students were letting out of school, so there was a long line of cars which we got in, for a little while, until I noticed they weren't trying to park, but just picking up their kid at the front door.  After a couple minutes, we figured out where to go.

    We walked in freely, there was no one running the gate, and by coincidence, we ran into 2 of the boys we frequently give a ride to, both are injured, and they were walking around trying to look at what the concession stand was selling.  We gave them a $20 so they could get some snacks, and we went to find seating.  By now, we know people, and we went and sat next to the wife of the wrestler's coach.

    I was a little impressed, the boys looked really good, which I have to say, was really surprising, especially since Mijo had been saying that the offensive line looked atrocious with a bunch of 2nd and 3rd stringers trying to cover for the injured starters.  It was some sort of scrimmage, maybe the one team starting on offense got to start from first down 5-10 times, then the other team took a turn.  The must have run about 20 plays without gaining a first down, then got lucky on an open man, followed by more chaos.  Eventually, they scored.  In the first batch of first downs, our boys scored at least three times.  It was pretty much the QB1 show, he was scoring from passing to running, he could not be stopped.  He lowered the shoulders and just ran through defenders with that loud clash of pads that sounds so primal.

    This is what was going on most of the game, until the other team got tired of being pushed around, then they took to playing "dirty".  At one point, it being a scrimmage with the coaches being on the field behind the offense, and we have a female coach, one of their defensive guys got an interception and ran directly into her, knocking her to the ground hard enough she may have gotten a concussion.  Maybe it was an accident, maybe not, but what are the chances of so many coaches on the field, at least 7-8 that the kid hits the one female.  This, my son says, set off the boys, so there were hard hits every time after that, followed by skirmishes broken up by referees or the coaches.

    It got really intense when a parent sitting about 15 feet away from us started yelling to get the kid off the field that had just started the last push and shove match after the play.  It got quiet after he kept yelling for about a minute, he had the attention of the whole stadium.  Another parent yelled at him to calm down, this is football, he then yelled that is why these kids are behaving this way, because they are being raised by trash parents (or something to that effect), I was sure the parents were going to get into it.  On the next play, there was the most exciting play, our QB ran around to the sideline and lowered the shoulders and just ran over a defensive back, poor kid was probably 50 pounds lighter than our QB, laid him out, but our QB kept going and ran into another defender, who apparently had been pulling hair on this kid with really long hair.  The play stopped on the tackle, then the long-haired kid came and shoved the defender who was just getting up and all the flags flew, kids from the sidelines went it and all the parents that were still standing ran down to the bottom of the bleachers.  I was sure it was going to turn ugly with parents down there fighting kids and stuff.

    At this point, the referees called the game, the mom of the long-haired kid went down to the field and talked to her son, who was trying to calm down.  The teams went off in opposite sides of the football field and they started running wind sprints, or gassers, as my son called them.  They ran and ran, until a couple of the bigger linemen were actually crawling.

    I can't say who is to blame, but I've been watching this team since 7th grade and they had never busted out in a fight, other than Dripping Springs, when Mijo was in 9th grade, these boys are not ghetto in that way, although they look the part, being that our boys are ~70% Hispanic.  My take from this was that this might be their Replacements moment, where they fight in the bar and become a united team.

8/18/22 My Socks Arrived?

     The socks I ordered blindly online came in and I am pretty happy with what I see.  I was worried they would be cheap, and they could still be, but holding them in my hands, they feel like they are built well.  They have a tautness to them, and they resemble Nike socks with the accordion in the middle of the foot for extra support.  The logo, Cougar profile, looks about as good as a large print copier can be expected to perform.  If I have one complaint, it would be the tone of the tan/gold.  I chose Old Vegas Gold, which looked a tad more vivid, but the tan provided isn't.  It's probably for the best, this matches more what the colors should be.

    When Mijo was in 8th grade, we went to a football game, sort of an introduction to what he was to expect if he had stayed in band.  We were a little grossly disappointed in their colors at that point.  It was brown and white, with tan as an accent.  If I remember correctly, the drill/cheer squad were in long brown sad outfits.  David Crockett with his Coonskin hat was the only thing that looked okay, because he has always been dressed in brown.

    Fast forward to today and the Coogs have come into the new age.  They started adding black to their uniforms and now brown is pretty much gone.  The look I see is more of a black with the tan and now with October being breast cancer awareness, pink is seeping in.  After showing the booster club, I was asked if pink and black socks could be ordered, everyone in the room was ready to buy some.  Adding that one fun color to the mix really changes the look of the uniforms, even the football team breaks out the solid pink socks once or twice a season, along with pink somewhere else, as an accent.

    We shall see what the people say.  I got about 80 pairs to sell, so it's time to see if people really like them or if it is "puro pedo" as my dad would say.  If they sell at the suggested selling price of $15 a pair, the booster club could make itself $1200 out of our donation.  They offered to pay me back half the cost, but I told them if they did, I would use it to find another thing to sell.  These are the socks.

8/17/22 Always Something At Home?

     As if we haven't been busy enough, Wife said the dryer was not working all of a sudden.  I have not been impressed with that machine since we bought about 2-3 years ago.  We normally have to run it twice to get a dry load, which we have just become accustomed to doing it.  I normally do our clothes during the week, usually on Wednesday and I keep up with it as I move back and forth downstairs with the washing room door open, so I hear when it turns off.

    Because we have been so off by all the extra stuff going on, I fell behind and Wife was trying to wash over the weekend.  I wasn't even aware she was doing this, but she said Sunday that she had restarted the dryer four times to get one load dry.  I am always skeptical, especially because I have not had that trouble, and this was the first time she was running the machine in a while.  I then tried washing a small load to keep up with it and see and I had to agree, there weren't even heavy towels in the load, and it took three rounds to get it dry.

    She was sure it was the heating element because it's the one part inside the dryer she knows of.  I wasn't so sure; I ran it for a minute and stuck my head in it and the clothes was already warm and muggy.  My thought was that the lint collector/exhaust was plugged up and not allowing it to breathe right.  I didn't want to pull it away from the wall last night (Tuesday night), but I wasn't going to be able to relax until this gets resolved, worst case scenario, we just go buy a new one.  I looked at a Youtube video and sure enough, the guy said if the clothes are heating up, it is probably a problem with the exhaust being plugged up, start with the lint collector.  I clean it every time I run it, so I know that wasn't the problem.  I was envisioning the port taking the exhaust to be filled with lint past the lint filter and was really wanting to open it, and luckily, the guy had the same machine we have and showed how to open it, really easy, like 10 screws total.  I was impressed that the machine was as clean as it was, very little lint past the filter.  The next suggestion he had was that it could be the machine to wall tubing.  This did look suspect as could be.  I believe this tubing has been with us since our first house and looking in it, light was barely coming through, and that was after I unfolded it.  I decided this would be my attempt to fix things.  After dropping off Mijo at school today, I ran to Lowe's, bought new elbows, 90-degree 4-inch tubes, and a small piece of adjustable tubing.  It was a pain to get in there, behind the dryer, with the washer next to it, the room is designed to fit both machines side by side and wall on the outside of them.  Still, I moved them around and got behind them.  This time connecting them, I did a much better effort than the first time.  The first tube was already all stretched out and crushed in several places.

    I am really hoping the dryer can dry the load in one cycle, but I will settle if it can do it in two.  If this doesn't work, then I need to look at the wall and the port from the wall to the outside.  The washroom is inside the house with the small downstairs bathroom between it and the outside wall.  I think there is a tube running in the space where the tub sits leading out, it's the only thing that makes sense to me.  Maybe there's a bird's nest in the exhaust housing, but I did stick a cleaning tool in there and didn't see any activity.

8/16/22 Team Spirit

     Wife and I decided that we were going to go out with a bang this year with Mijo.  We are fully immersed with the booster club and trying to make it worth something other than a lot of talking and volunteering.  We might be idiots, I can hear my family telling me, but I am having fun being a Cougar.  First off, I found that site to do the personalized socks and then ordered 100 pairs.  My initial idea was to just order them for my son, who as usual, was fighting the idea that I was being extra.  I then told him I wouldn't give him any, but I would order them anyway and give them to all his friends.  He came around when I started including more people.  He thought it would be a good idea if I got some for all the football players.  I said no.  Then I showed them to the booster club, they loved them but added I should get some pink ones, for breast cancer awareness month.  They should be coming in any day, they said 8-16 days, about 10 days ago.

    I then got the idea of those feather flags, the flags you see outside business that are skinny and tall.  We had gone to eat breakfast at Mucho Taco, on Manchaca and I noticed a small business advertising printing on anything ability.  We went over, but I was not impressed by the twit running the place.  They seemed as if they had just gotten done burying a body and were cleaning their van.  She came up to us with big dead eyes staring at us.  There was no smile on her face, or suggestions of what they could do when I asked her if we could put the Cougar logo or something with Cougars.  Just confusion in her eyes.  I thanked her and we left.  It did give me ideas afterwards.

    I went to Amazon, looked up flags and found a place that does personal flags.  I ordered two 4x6 flags with the Cougar logo, I hope they look like I envision them, very simple yet bold.

When I couldn't find the feather flags with color option I wanted, I jumped on Google and found a site that might just get it done, if everything is legit.  I got two of these and they will fly 10ft x 2ft tall.  I know this doesn't change whether the boys do better or not, but I want them to feel like they are supported and when they show up on a field it is theirs.  Go Coogs!!

8/15/22 Last First Day Of School?

     I had been thinking about this for a while this summer, that once this year starts, we are off to the races and getting to the finish line (graduation).  I've teared up a time or three thinking that next year I won't be driving him every morning to school, sometimes joking, sometimes arguing, but that has been my job with him, and I enjoy it 95% of the time, especially since I don't really work nights anymore and I am alert.  The reality was way different.  Nothing like I had thought it would be.

    First off, he had an awesome plan, he was just going to wear hoodies as his clothing.  Because of this, I had been buying him nice hoodies.  He just asked for a new bag of white T-shirts.  Sunday, we went to the mall in the afternoon, after we came home and slept some after the sunrise thing.  I kept telling him, "Get some polos or new button-down shirts, just in case you have to dress nice one day."  Nope, he knows what he's doing.  Fast forward to around 8:00pm, he was in his room talking to his GF, and suddenly he comes down and tells us "I need some new shirts, she told me I am not going to wear hoodies all year, she wants to match outfits."  I just stared at him in disbelief, all I could do was laugh, and call him an Idiot.  The best I can do is go tomorrow and get you some, but you need to get through Monday.

    Back to the Monday at school, he wore an old freshman-year shirt which he has really likes, but looks old, to me.  When we got there, one of his teachers saw him outside and commented, "Oh, I see you're going for that retro 80's look."  I followed with "No, he's going for that I am an Idiot who doesn't listen look."  We know her pretty well (she was their shotput/discus coach), so she knew I was joking, then I explained the whole GF thing, which she didn't know about, so I filled her in.  She has been their class sponsor since freshman year, so she knows the kids well, at least the ones we know.

    All the familiar faces of the booster club were there, so it made it easy to just lay low and hang out.  I saw most of Mijo's friends and other football players going in.  We took some pictures, but there was more an air of fun and excitement.  The lead mom is a bigger ball of energy than Wife and she was literally getting in all the kid's way before going in, telling them to get their phones out, set a message to mom or close family and set it to picture.  She was then taking their pics, giving the seniors a shirt and they would move on.  They also had little snack cakes, so the mood was fun. 

    I was there from 7:45am to about 9:30am but the time passed by pretty quickly.  After that, I headed to the mall to be the parent that I am, getting shirts for my Knucklehead, then going home to get ready for work.  I liked the whole experience overall.  Plus, Boy was around for almost 10 years after he graduated, so it's not like Mijo will just disappear.