New Friends, Kid Time, and Love

Over the past few weeks I have made 2 new friends.  One local and one far away, both quite a bit younger than me.

I met a guy I will call "Cody" a few weeks ago.  He is 23, gay and trying to work his way through school.  In some ways he is more mature than I would have expected.  His thoughts around how to relate to others are pretty mature and compassionate.  He has had a interesting and difficult life for someone his age.  I am not going to share the detail here, but that he has gotten through to this point earns him some respect from me.

On the other hand, he has some immature tendencies too.   He is looking for work now and he landed a temp temp job that could lead to more work.  The job requires him to work in a retail store and they want him to wear a name tag that, admittedly, is not very stylish.  He plans to refuse to wear it, because it's ugly.  Not a smart idea, I suggested.  If he is looking for something more regular, he should just do it for the few hours they are paying him.  It's not like it will kill him.   He didn't want to hear about it and was going to refuse.   

The other, I will call "Vinny".  He is a blogger who stumbled across my blog and wrote to me.  I will not share his blog's name, since it's private, but it's an interesting read.  Vinny lives about a 1000 miles away from me.  He is in his 20's and lives with his partner (soon to be husband) who is also in his 20's.  Both both Vinny and his partner have interesting, yet very different pasts.  The more I read of his blog, I am struck by how drastically different they are, but how well they compliment each other.  If you believe in soul-mates, then these guys are it.

Vinny and I have been trading email for a few days now and last night I was up WAY too late, chatting with him on Yahoo messenger.  We had an interesting and wide ranging conversation.  He made me think about some stuff, that I will write about another time.  I need to think about it more before I do.

-------------------------------------------------------

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with my kids.  It was actually my oldest son who floated the idea of taking all the kids to the movies to see the new Ice Age movie.  We saw the 3D version and it was a lot of fun.  I didn't really like the movie, but they all did, which is all I care about anyway.

We (me and the kids) talked about our upcoming trip to my families camp in Maine.  We will be leaving 2 weeks from yesterday and will be gone for a week and a half.  I will be offline during that time.  For this trip, we will kind of split the kids.  I will drive up with them, go to camp and then meet K and AJ in Connecticut.  We will hang out there as a big family for a few days, and then I will leave for home alone and K will take the kids to AJ's family for a few days before she brings them all home.

I can't wait for this trip.  It will be the first time we have been to camp without my dad.  It was one of his most favorite places in earth and even when he was not feeling well, he always perked up when it was time to go to camp. Since we live so far away, we do not go as often as I want to and when we do, I can't stay as long as I want to.  This trip will be something like a pilgrimage. I guess you could call it a tribute to my dad.

----------------------------------------------------------------  

After the movie, I headed to T's house.  His mother made this wonderful beef and noodle soup that I had been looking forward to all day.  It was just as good as I thought.  His mother was particularly friendly last night.  She is always nice and polite, but last night she went out of her way to engage me in some limited conversation.   I say limited, because her English is not very good, so we have never had a real conversation.  That's not really important, what is important, is that she made the effort.

After dinner we went up to T's room...

Closed the door...

Got on the bed...

and he pulled out...

... a huge box of paperwork he had brought home from the office.

I hung out there for several hours, where we would exchange some smooches in between charts and lab reports.  

My poor overworked baby...