With my Mom and Grandma dying this year I just don’t feel festive at all, it just won’t be the same. usually at Thanksgiving we all went to my Grandmas for dinner and here an my Mom cooked, this year I spent it at home. I do have other family nearby, but I don’t speak to them since the funerals, let’s just say that they did something unforgiveable to me and my brother concerning my Mom and Grandma, and leave it at that…

and of course Christmas won’t be the same as well, no gifts from Grandma for my kids, no cookies, no sweets, none of that made by Grandma for them… and well I won’t have my Mom or Grandma this year..

…but with me being basically the only one working really it’s hard to pay the bills.

Every bill I have is late, and it’s not because I’m buying things I don’t need, it’s because I don’t make enough money to cover them so Christmas isn’t going to be very nice for my kids, and I feel really bad I can’t get them the things they want… They’re too young to understand about money really.. they’re young so they expect Santa Claus to take care of them really, but Santa is broke this year apparently…

So I’m pretty much very depressed, I can’t sleep and honestly I don’t feel like doing anything at all, and I just can’t wait until the holidays are over with… I hate them more now than ever…  there supposed to be this wonderful time of the year, but that’s for people that have money apparently, and have their families still around..

Anyway, I found my local super market Giant Eagle now carries good Iced Tea, and it’s HFCS free!

They carry several flavors, but I only tried the regular tea and the southern style, I like the southern style the best. I love it actually, I’ve given up Coca-Cola in favor of this tea…

and to end this here’s some links to the latest reviews and articles from me:

SpongeBob Truth or Square for Nintendo Wii

MusicSkins Custom Netbook Skin

Epson WorkForce 610 All-in-One Printer Review

Verbatim 500GB InSight USB Portable Hard Drive with "Always On" Display

SSD vs HDD on a Netbook – OCZ Neutrino

Thrustmaster T-Fitness Pro Pack NW for Nintendo Wii

TomTom One XL-S 4.3" Touchscreen Portable Bluetooth GPS Navigation System Reviewed

NZXT GAMMA Classic Series PC Case

i-Tech SIMDrive

TrickleStar PC TrickleSaver and PC TrickleSwitch

Oh well… till next time… and I hope your holidays are better than mine…

every night at bed time I go into his room and rub his back for a few minutes and we usually talk about his day, or sometimes we also do rhyming words or maybe opposites. Tonight though we were taking about his day, and me and him went to the grocery store and bought some food. One of the things I bought for myself was Hummus and Pita Bread, well he remembered and said he’d like some of my pita bread, and I said sure he could have a piece tomorrow. I then told him to remind me and  I’ll put it on the grocery list for next time so he can have his very own bag of pita bread for himself. He said “I know you will daddy because you’re a good daddy”, that would have been cool there, but he went on actually about it. He told me it’s because I buy him good things to eat, and other things he wants, but he said it’s also because I pay the bills and take care of him..

I don’t know.. just felt like sharing that..

Today I was hungry for a sweet snack so I made German chocolate cupcakes with Strawberry icing.. no I didn’t make them from scratch, used Betty Crocker mix and some Betty Crocker Whipped Strawberry icing for them. They came out pretty good, but they aren’t very sweet.. The kids like them of course though, a cupcake is a cupcake to them really.

We can call that the nice intro to a rather aggravated rant on my part. My kids were at Edgewood Primary school last year, well the school district, Woodland Hills, decided, (in all of their infinite wisdom), to move kids around yet again and combine schools and close others. So my 7 and 8 year olds went to Dickson Elementary, my 4yr old thankfully is still at the same place his daycare is, they have pre-school there as well. Anyway, we never had a problem at the old school with bullies, and actually everyone seemed very nice there, I like it, but now we’re forced to go to somewhere that I really don’t know the teachers, and I don’t like the principal or my kids teacher now either.

If you go into the school there are signs all over the place about anti-bullying and no bullying etc. They supposedly have a ‘Zero Tolerance‘ bullying policy, which to me means Zero Tolerance, or it’s just not accepted. Well apparently my definition of Zero Tolerance and theirs differ quite a bit.

Here’s a definition that matches what I thin it means:

“The policy or practice of not tolerating undesirable behavior, such as violence or illegal drug use, especially in the automatic imposition of severe penalties for first offenses.”  (it’s from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/zero+tolerance)

But if you go to the same school my kids go to it doesn’t mean that, to them zero tolerance means just let them keep doing it and ignore it and hopefully it will go away. At least that’s what it seems to me and my children.

oh and here’s a quote about the program from the school website: “Dickson Elementary School along with the entire district is implementing the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program this year. Bullying is not acceptable behavior!”

If it’s not acceptable then why won’t they do something about it?

My oldest son is 8yrs old and he’s been being bullied since school started by one child, at least 7 times now that he’s told me of, it’s probably more actually. I should note that the kid doing the bullying is of a different race than my child, we’re white he’s not basically, I think you can figure out the rest… I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the bullying, but who knows…

So anyway, this has been going on for a while. My son tells his teacher and his teacher tells him that there’s nothing he can do and he should tell his parents about it. WTF?!?!? Seriously WTF ever happened to Zero Tolerance? So this past Friday is when things got bad, but right before that this kid tried to push both my sons down the steps at school, again the school does nothing, he could have seriously injured or even killed my kids. Back to Friday, I get a phone call that I need to pick up my son at school because he’s hurt, my son was in gym and this bully ran as fast and he could and kicked my son in the back while he was tying his shoe. Talk about a p*ssy *ss move, hit someone when their back is turned with enough force to leave him in pain for hours and marked…

So needless to say I flipped out once I found out it was the same goddamed kid that has been doing this all along that these pricks at the school refuse to do anything about it. So I went to the school of course and I got into with the principal, and she’s a winner let me tell you…. but I won’t got there right now. She tells me that this kid is a known problem child who has been bullying kids everywhere, but yet they can’t do anything about it. I’ll be honest I wasn’t the happiest person there, and yes I raised my voice, but wouldn’t you when you see your son crying in pain because of something that has been known about and could have been prevented?

So she tells me there’s nothing she can do about it, and I’m like WTF?! What happened to the Zero Tolerance policy and what is it for… she never answered me on that on by the way. I told her fine, if she won’t do anything I’m going to the police and pressing charges. The principal tells me that I can’t do that because the kid is only 8 years old and they won’t do anything about it?!?! It’s assault, battery, whatever you call it at any age last I checked.. 

Then of course after a few minutes I’m waiting for someone to bring my sons stuff down from the classroom, the principal comes out and tells me the other childs parent is on the way and I could talk to them if I want… not going to happen, and it’s not supposed to happen in a case like this.

So needless to say I went to the police to ask for advice basically and see about filing a report. Guess what? They told me that I did the right thing by coming to them, and they don’t understand why the principal would ever tell me NOT to go to the police… hmmm… wonder why she didn’t want me to go the police.

So that’s how my week end has been, it started out pretty bad overall, but it’s ending up not so bad, but we’ll see what this week brings….

OH well…

With Halloween coming it’s time to get Halloween costumes for the kids. Having three kids we kinds of just passed them along to the next youngest, but it’s getting the point now where they are independent thinkers and they know what they want to dress up as for Halloween and they won’t settle for the ‘hand me downs’ anymore.

So of course that means shopping for costumes, personally I hate shopping period and I try and do all of my shopping online if possible, I don’t have to deal with people and I don’t have top pay for gas either. So I was bopping around the web and found a rather cool site aptly named BuyCostumes.com and they’ve got tons different Halloween costumes on their site, not just for kids either, you can find men’s and women’s costumes also.

The popular costumes for kids are of course Batman/Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and Iron Man, and they look pretty cool, for a kid anyway, and they’re really not that expensive. They’ve also got an offer of 99cent shipping on orders over $40 so that’s not too bad there at all.

You can buy full costumes or just parts of them as they have an entire accessory section as well, and they’ve also got Decoration, Props and even party supplies! Oh and they’ve even got Mascot Costumes and costumes for your pets!

So if you’re looking Halloween Costumes for your kids or even yourself stop by and check them out, they’ve got something for everyone!

but anyway, it was my 2yr olds first time there and he really had a blast, he loved it, he wanted to ride the rides and play games, it was like he’d been there before, he’s a little pro at it now it seems…

but I didn’t take a digital camera with me since I have my phone, I figured that would be my camera.. so here’s a few pics:

I really didn’t take that many, it was just a bit much with the kids to keep track of everything, but the pics are pretty good for a cellphone

Edit: oh and this is my first post to this blog using Windows Live Writer, for whatever reason I see one of the thumbnails lnks to teh same picture.. oh well, it’s late.. I’m going to be

The baby (2 yr old) was up and down most of the night, when he finally woke up this morning I found him miserable and his face and neck are swollen to three times their normal size and he’s talking funny.

He says his ear hurts, so obviously it’s an ear infection and it can’t wait until tomorrow to see doctor so I had to call mom to come back home from work.

She just got to work and had to turn back around to come back home.

So she just took baby to Children’s Hospital emergency room a few minutes ago…

so much for Father’s Day… it makes me sad to see him in pain and miserable, I feel so useless that I can’t help him to make it stop hurting, but he’s on the way with mom to see doctor so he’ll get medicine to make him better and help him

I was taking pictures last week of the Ultra M998 case I got for review and he decided he was going to help so he got out his toy camera and took some pictures as well, I thought it was cool..

He also likes those temporary tattoos that seem so popular now, OCZ sent me a big one with their Christmas  Card and I really didn’t have any use for it, so I figured I’d give it to him, he thinks it’s just so cool, he just loves it! Already a geek who knows quality stuff at 2yrs old! That’s my boy!

Well grandma spoils my kids of course, buying them their favorite sweetened cereals and usually it comes with a toy. So yesterday she gave me a box go Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies and it says on the box that there is an Xbox Mini Game Inside.

Naturally I’m a bit curious as to the quality of this so called game.. Looking at the back of the box there are pictures and descriptions of the many possible ‘games’ that you can get for free. In the center is a huge ‘Turn On The Fun!’ announcement surrounding a graphic of the Xbox power button. Inside the box I found the Car Racing game, the description makes it sound so cool and exciting, but in reality it’s pretty bad…

The graphic on the back of the box actually looks better than the actual thing.. now that’s bad…

Here’s some shots of it playing and a brief movie as well after them:

Check out that “Heart-Pounding Excitement” we have going on here… bah.. junk

Online shopping websites sell wedding rings jewelry ranging from imitation jewelry to diamonds. You can buy pearl earrings that might be interested for people looking for wedding rings. It’s just like buying dvd players from stores selling cheap dvds.

So now I’m wondering what am I supposed to do with their old computer/case mod … I was thinking to donate it to my youngest sons daycare for them to let the smaller children use, or I could possibly sell it (but is it even worth anything? other than maybe a pop art type collectible?!?!) or maybe just give it away to someone who might need it for their children…

Dunno… any advice for me?!

Click HERE to read the full worklog and details of the mod, and here’s a few pictures as well:

(Thumbs open in new window to 1024×786 size approximately)

Well it’s like stuck in my head now…. and it won’t go away, so I figured I blog about it and maybe it would go away if I did..

I’m sure you know who Winnie the Pooh is right? Well Piglet is his little buddy the pig, and well my two year old can’t say Piglet and he says ‘Pligit’ instead…  He pronounces it ‘plig-it’ if you’re wondering how it’s pronounced…

It’s really cute actually, but for whatever reason it’s like stuck in my head now….

Dunno, just threw that out there for whatever reason…