pulled pork – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

So the boy has figured out that there are pictures and videos of him on those little objects that Mommy and Daddy carry around and look at all the time. If you look at my Instagram feed, there are two videos on there already where basically all I’m doing is pointing the front camera at the kid and recording his reaction to it. He’s gotten into the habit of crawling into our laps and insisting on being shown videos of himself. Over and over and over and over.

“More Kenny! More Kenny!”

“You’re right there. You can look at yourself!”

This remains unconvincing. Mirrors don’t work either; he wants to see himself moving on a screen, and nothing that isn’t a screen will do. I can’t wait to see what he does the first time I mirror my iPad to the television in the living room with a video of him.

We’re raising a narcissist.

(That said: it bugs me how often we have our phones out around him; if anything, this will end up curtailing that behavior a bit, which is probably a good thing. I don’t mind him seeing me with my nose in a book all the goddamn time. I’d prefer he not grow up thinking your cellphone is how you interact with the world.)

The pulled pork didn’t quite work out as I intended, unfortunately– not to say that my family didn’t devour it with great gusto and insist that it was wonderful, but I would have expected something substantially spicier with the amount of seasonings and the entire freaking jalapeno pepper that I put into it. It ended up with barely any kick at all; I was openly adding sriracha to my food by the end of the meal. (Sriracha makes everything better, including, now, barbecue and cole slaw.) What little is left– of, again, nearly five pounds of pork, so it ain’t like it was rejected– was buried in barbecue sauce and put in the fridge; I have high hopes that marinating overnight will lead to food that’s better on Day 2 than it was on Day 1. We’ll see.

I have a to-do list today as long as my arm, featuring the full gamut of Things That Must Be Done: some parenting (handing the boy off to grandma for part of the day so I can do the rest of this) some shopping, some cleaning, some intellectual work (I have an essay that I must finish and some other writerating that I ought to work on), some teacherly planning stuff, and a fair amount of physical labor. And then OtherJob at 5, and it’s going to rain again. Who wants to bet that I spend the whole day on the computer but don’t actually get any of the computer-based stuff done?

I need, need for it to be about four hours in the future, y’all. Four hours in the future (hell, maybe three by now, I dunno) is when I get to eat my dinner, and I’ve spent most of the last two days wanting to eat today’s dinner. And some cole slaw. And maybe some chips and French Onion dip.

And maybe six hours of treadmill/exercise bike time after that.

Mmmmm giant slab of piiiiiiiig.

Been tossing around ideas for ways to make more money lately, and I think I may have to see if I can work with a homebound kid next year. This would mean that in addition to my regular classroom duties I’d spend two hours a day after school working with one kid, someone who for some reason (generally, behavioral) has been deemed unable to attend school with everyone else and thus has to receive his education in an alternate setting.

It’s going to be a lot of work, but my brother did it last year and it’s really good money for the extra work. Whether it’s enough to make it worth it will no doubt depend on the kid I end up with. Even the worst-behaved student is often easier to deal with in a one-on-one setting where they don’t have anyone to show off for, so hopefully that’ll work out decently. If not, these types of things are generally relatively short-term, four to six weeks at a time with one student. I can put up with anything for a month and a half, right? He said?

I dunno. I’m turning 37 next week, which means I will officially be in my Late Thirties, and it’s kind of messing with my head a little bit. Generally I haven’t been too affected by my birthdays; I was happy to turn both 30 and 35, but 37… yikes. I made a lot of bad decisions about money in my twenties (some more justifiable than others) that I have spent most of my thirties trying to undo. I had a solid plan at one point to be free of credit card debt by my fortieth birthday; it’s not as on track right now as it was at the beginning of 2013 because everything in my house keeps exploding and my son had to have tubes put in his ears and my car and blah blah blah life intervenes in your plans, but I’m not too far off, especially if I manage to find a way to bring in some extra funds.

“Write a book!” my brain tells me.

“Shut the fuck up, brain,” the rest of me tells my brain.

Anyway, a homebound kid is more realistic. I’d basically never be home from school before 5:30, and I’d have to shift some things at Other Job around once it kicked in, and it’s entirely possible it’ll make me crazy, but it’s better than being broke, right?

…right?