Lunch Break Notes

   Time and time again people comment at my size and weight. Usually the comments come in the form of either mockery or in a way to make me feel inferior to the larger person spitting the insult. The comment is not always meant as an insult but either way it makes me step back and feel pretty bad about the size I am and have been for the past 10 years. I am 5'and 5", weighing in at 120 pounds. This may sound ideal to most but for someone like me, it's not where I am comfortable being. Have I accepted this size? Yes, of course, I have no choice. I'm Hispanic with a high metabolism. I eat to gain weight and it vanishes overnight. I can only work out so much before I start to burn more weight. Not what I like especially since I work in a field where I deal with macho type personas that try to show dominance by size. Just like in the animal world where a larger male will show dominance over a smaller male. Larger guys don't scare me but they like to think it does.   ...

So last week I had to do one of the most difficult things in my life. I had to say goodbye to a friend that has been in my life every single day for the past 15 years. Levi was a good dog with a typical outlook on life. If it moved, bite it, if it smelt good, eat it and if a spot looked warm and cozy, lay and claim it. My wife had rescued Levi from a shelter as a gift to me for losing another Jack Russell previously. Clyde too was a great dog. He would attack your pant leg when you would go to leave the house. Sadly, he chased the wrong car and it got him. Levi was an incredible addition to our family. He was adopted under the notion that he was still somewhat f a pup but quickly came to realize that he was well past his childish phase. When we first got him, he would not bark at all, instead he would just sit and watch. It was not until my wife's cousin thought it would be funny to teach him to bark at specific races of people. After that he was a normal dog, ba...

As the old saying goes... Tonight i went to visit my mothers grave. Something that I do with my step dad about twice a month. My mother was the first one to be put into the new plot at the cemetery when she was buried. Since then, there have been quite a few additions to her surroundings. She has new neighbours if you will. One of those new neighbours happens to be a friend of myself and Lex. Our friend Wes is now buried in line with my mother in a far off plot in a beautiful cemetery. As soon as i got out of the car tonight and saw his headstone something inside of me just went click and then the cloud came over me. It could have been any other Wes but something told me it was the crazy fun Wes that we knew. The same Wes that my wife worked with at two jobs. The same Wes that only a couple months before invited me into his Dungeons and Dragons group. Boy, do I wish i took him up on that invite. I could not believe that a friend of ours lies just at my mothers feet so now when I vi...

In light of recent events I am strongly considering a long term vacation from Facebook. This decision came to me ever since my feed has been filled with arguments among friends and family.How did we go from sharing pictures of our kids and waffles to spewing hateful words and tragic stories, a direct bi-product of said hateful words, for all to see? I know the answer and many people will not agree or believe this but... this is what is now being called, the Age of Trump or the Trump Era. Tragically this is a time where it is OK to curse at illegal immigrants and laugh in the face of those less fortunate. White supremacists march not only in the South but our northern cities as well. I myself do not align with what is known as the Left or the Right. Lots of people will call me a "Snowflake", which is a joke itself being that it is a term used by supporters of our current leader. It is because of our leader that this hate is so front row in our lives.  This s...

Things are always changing here in good ol' Jersey. As of lately... for the worse.  Over the past few years it has become increasingly tough to maintain a life in New Jersey. For those of you that think it's all Guidos and nightclubs on the beach, well.. that's one reason it's been getting tougher. It seems that businesses here and landlords alike are only interested in satisfying the needs of the summer crowd that plagues, yes...plagues, our lovely little oasis. Not only are there no places to live year round but the cost of staying here is ridiculous. It seems to me that landlords want a chunk of that New York money that is no longer enough to sustain a life in the big city and its surrounding areas. I have seen the rent go up in our area at least twice a year for the past few years and there is no knowing when it will stop. I am sick to my stomach with knowing that it is only a matter of time before we go broke and are flat on our asses and forced to va...

I understand that there are two sides to the argument of curly hair being the better ... hair. People who have it hate it and those without it, want it. Its really a great embodiment of the phrase " be careful what you wish for". I wished for our daughter to have beautiful curly hair and she got it and I ha... ehh, for lack of a better  word, struggle  with it. Don't get me wrong,  Mealz and her golden locks are adorable. And I love everything about her, but man... that hair collects food and boogers like none other. Every other night during bath time I brush all the items out of those twisty little traps. It cracks me up to know that I actually have a routine to the whole thing. For any other fathers out there that are in the same boat pay some attention to this part. I pour water on her head and look for the frizzy parts. I brush, very lightly, the frizzy parts until they become smooth. That's how I know the knot and food is out. Once her whole head is smooth I k...

As I get older I find myself falling more and more in love with fluffy, sometimes crunchy and always welcoming doughnuts. As a kid I was never too fond of them but here I am in my thirties and damn... I love them. I have no idea when it happened but now that the obsession is here, it's here to stay. Years back, I would wake up early enough to head to the store and gather around the Entemans table with all the other old timers trying to decide how we would choose the treat ourselves. Now, I'm not an old timer by any means but I know how pastries draw in those with silver caps.  Me and my wife have been known to travel for great pastries and I wish we could do the same with doughnuts but with there being no shoppes that make "normal" doughnuts, it's tough. We have on place near where I live now. Broad Street Dough Co. I enjoy a good old fashioned type. I'm not so keen on the places that pride themselves on how many toppings they can pile on a single doughnu...

I recently wrote how we have lived with rude neighbors throughout the years but nothing like what we experienced just a couple days ago. For those that have kids you know what teething can be like and the menacing behavior that accompanies it. Our daughter has six teeth coming in all at once so needless to say, it's been rough. More than anything we wish we could trade places with her. This must be something that our upstairs neighbors have forgotten. Note, they have a grown son so they have been where we are. It was a fine morning until we heard , what sounded like, a flipped table come from upstairs. The husband upstairs began screaming at his wife and telling... actually... ordering her to go downstairs and tell us to shut our f**king baby up. He continued to go on about it sounds like we are rolling bowling balls across the floor. Weird to think this is possible especially since we live on the first floor. This went on for quite some time even going as far as screaming at his ...

The perfect ending to a long, stress filled week would be to come home and take my shoes off. Grab a glass of wine, after greeting my lovely wife a kid of course, and sitting on the ground playing some games. This would be best paired with Chinese food once the baby is down to sleep. Most Friday's look like this but not this Friday.  This Friday we were held hostage by Mealz and a serious bout of constipation. Normally we can deal rather quickly with this but on this occasion it was different. As Lex went to grab our Pho for the evening, I proceeded with bath time which normally gets thing all loose and... flowing? After a 40 minute struggle in the bath it was time to move on. So after the dreadful enema she still wasn't the pooh flow. As gross as it may be, that's all we wanted, especially since our Pho was now getting cold and it going to past an hour of her bedtime.   Finally after a couple hours of pushing the baby came out at a smaller than expec...

So anyone with kids will know what i am talking about when I say this. After you have a kid, especially the first one, the dynamics of you and your partners "intimate moments" get shifted... a bit. So long are the long nights of heavy breathing and noise making and replaced with a more subtle, peaceful and silent events. I of course have noticed the change and it makes me laugh when I think about it to myself. Some couples enjoy talking dirty to each other to really spice up the moment at hand but when you have a kid... you still say the same raunchy statements but you tone it down to a whisper. So you whisper dirty things to each other. Ha! Hilarious! You do this so you don't wake up the baby. Even though the baby sleeps in a completely different room. Also, the frequency of times that you interact with each other on an adult basis changes too. I feel like Luke Skywalker using the force to destroy the Death Star when it comes to finding the right moment to "ent...

A few days back I came across a status from one of my friends on Facebook. It was a simple question that I felt was being taken too lightly, considering the comments that were left. The question that was being asked was "Where can you find a husband?" Of course this being social media nobody seemed to get the question. This is what I gathered from answers like the dog park of the food store. I saw into the matter deeper than I should have. So keeping with the humorous theme, I gave my honest opinion but with my own twist. This was my response: Husbands are like plants. They start out as seeds, most of the time. You need to help it grow by giving it water, sun and a lot of time. Once you start to see it bud from the ground you can then start to trim it so it turns into what you want it to be. Take away the weeds and make sure bugs don't eat At the same time making sure you can return the growth. A better example of this is me, it took me A LOT of years before I asked ...