March 20, 2014

I woke up several times last night but I think it was only due to bathroom breaks, not pain or my throat. So that is an improvement.

I went to Hobby Lobby today to see if maybe they had the right color of yellow yarn for my blanket. They didn't. It is still the bland color. It looks like if I ever want to finish the blanket then I'm going to have to change up the pattern a bit. That is unfortunate. For my first blanket I bought all the yarn at once and then never got around to finishing it. This time around I have gotten pretty close to finishing it but made the rookie mistake of not buying all the yarn at once and now I am paying for it. Lessons have been learned.

On my way back across town I stopped and rented Father Ted and Black Adder. I have only seen a Christmas episode of Black Adder but I have always wanted to watch it so I went for it. By the time I got home I had about an hour to hang out before heading back across town to pick up Chipotle. It feels like forever since I've been there. And it was delicious. At least partly due to eating while it was still warm, not reheating it. After dinner I had a bunch of YouTube videos to show and my mom actually sat through all of them. It was a shock.

I didn't plan on having a visit with the new volunteer kid but when I called the house he answered. I thought he was still out of the house but apparently he has been back since last Tuesday. I probably would have learned this last week but I didn't call because I was dealing with the kidney stone. When I called he had just started making dinner so we pushed the visit back until 8:00PM.

It ended up being a pretty good forty-five minute visit. We went to Sonic and I asked him a bunch of different questions, some of them in several different ways just to get an answer. Not interrogation-style, but just to find out what had happened because getting the kid to talk about stuff is like pulling teeth. According to him he got really angry about school and house stuff and punched a whole in the wall. So he was moved to the treatment facility for a week to work through that. He said they had some group sessions and he learned some coping mechanisms for when he gets angry. Although he felt like the whole thing was boring and pointless because when he gets angry all the coping stuff goes out the window. He had a black eye which he says he got from horsing around and his hand is still noticeably swollen from punch the wall even though that happened over two weeks ago. The email I got from my supervisor said he had tested positive for alcohol and several drugs but the kid didn't mention anything about that. At the moment he has a black eye, that he said he got while horsing around, and the middle two knuckles on his right hand are still pretty swollen from punching the wall (and the stud in the wall and a ceramic sink). It has been over two weeks and that seems like a long time for something to be swollen without something worth looking at happening in that hand.

While we were sitting at Sonic his grandpa pulled next to us but the kid didn't see him until he walked into the building, the door to which was right in front of us. It looked like instead of placing his order like everyone else he walked in to place his order and then stood there and waited for it, even though I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to do that. Strange. While he was standing there, the kid kept trying to get his attention but his grandpa never noticed him. At one point the kid tried to get his friend to say something to his grandpa, but it was the friend's first day and he wasn't convinced that the kid wasn't trying to play a trick on him so he said “I'm gonna go ahead and not do that.” When the grandpa finally came back out the kid was finally able to get his attention and they shouted back and forth through the window a few times, because instead of coming over the grandpa stayed by his truck and the kid stayed in the car. A little while after the grandpa left, the friend came back out and asked if that was really the kid's grandpa, because it turns out he is kind of stalking the friend's sister, even coming to their house a couple times asking for her. That was creepy to hear and incredibly awkward. How do you react when your friend tells you that your grandpa is a stalker? The friend managed to lighten the mood a little bit when he said he had to get back to work because he needed to save money for college because he wanted to do something with his life and it all started at Sonic.

Now I'm going to go to bed. I've got my urologist appoint tomorrow afternoon and then work at the theater. It looks like I'll be there until at least two in the morning so that's something to look forward to. I am also hoping to do some laundry in the morning. It is looking to be an action-packed day.