I’m trying to get this blog thing back on track… so it’s back to blogging basics.

This is some of the stuff I did today (which is now yesterday)… most of this is chronologically random.

I cooked for myself. It was just potatoes and onions fried up with two eggs, but I’ve done it every day for almost a week now.

I cook fairly regularly for my girlfriend — chicken, she loves my hamburgers, spaghetti, stuff. But generally when I’m cooking just for me it’s coming straight from a can or the freezer or, more likely, from the Chinese restaurant the next town over.

When I’m cooking for myself, with ingredients, it usually means I’m broke, because pretty much the only time I’ll get to the grocery store is when I’m down to my last few dollars.

Which, of course, is totally ironic.

My baby and I have been spending a lot of time together. He was here today. I realized before Christmas that, weirdly, I haven’t been hugging him. I hold him a lot, but no real hugs. So now I’m hugging him every chance I get. And now he’s hugging me as well.

He’ll bury his head in my shoulder, and hold onto my arm. It’s very cool.

We hugged each other a few times today.

My girlfriend came over after getting her oldest son to school. She put our son into his crib, then climbed into bed with me. They were both sound asleep pretty much right away.

My son will fall to sleep on his back, but almost always ends up face down and bum up. It’s adorable. I let them sleep for as long as they needed, which ended up being almost three hours.

Mostly, while they slept, I tried my best to avoid writing anything. Which I’m getting pretty good at.

After they woke up I played with my son while my girlfriend met with her boss about whether or not she still has a job. I’m still not sure. She hasn’t worked since before Christmas, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to go back to working the register at the store.

Very early in the morning, before they came over and before I went to bed, I downloaded a truck load of music. I was up late practising not writing anything, and the idea hit me to download music from movies I like. So I now have the soundtracks to ‘Death Proof’ and ‘Heavy Metal’.

I also downloaded the discography of the 5.6.7.8’s, who had a cameo in ‘Kill Bill’.

Then I started browsing and ended up with “Steal This Album” and “Pick a Bigger Weapon” from The Coup and, for my girlfriend, “Endlessly” by Duffy and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” by Kanye West… both of which are really good. I also… stole, I guess, “Until One” by Swedish House Mafia.

I’m still not sure if I like house music, but there are some really good songs on this album.

The “Death Proof Soundtrack” also has a couple of decent songs, but mostly it’s crap… kind of like the movie. The “Heavy Metal Soundtrack” is, of course, awesome — Sammy Hagar, Stevie Nicks, Cheap Trick, Don Felder, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Nazareth… awesome.

Something kind of weird that I did today was start taking photos off my wall of people I used to know. I haven’t changed the photos in over five years, so they’re of people I thought I was friends with way back in the beginning of my recovery.

It’s like, I kept the photos of these people on my walls out of some obligation to them I never really had. We had a lot of really cool adventures, but that was like ten frigging years ago. I haven’t spoken to most of these people in four and five years, and the ones I’ve spoken to more recently I’d kind of like to avoid.

So I’m exchanging them for pictures of sunrises, sunsets and flowers I’ve taken over the past couple of years. Plus more shots of my son and girlfriend.

Speaking of which… I bought a new camera last week. While my girlfriend and our son were sleeping I spent some time trying to figure it out.

Mostly my brain hurts when I try to make it work. The instruction book is 129 pages thick. My little five-year old pocket camera, which I’ve given to my girlfriend because hers was stolen, was pretty much just a point-and-shoot with a few exposure options.

This one, a Samsung WB600, is twice the size with an internal menu choked with a hundred or more exposure, aperture, ISO/ASA and flash options.

I’m pretty sure buying it was a mistake. First, it cost $250, which leaves me with roughly $100 for food for the rest of the month.

Then there’s the fact it makes my head hurt. It’s actually more like my “big boy cameras”, the SLR’s I had been using from childhood, than my pocket digital. Which is what I wanted, I’ve been complaining since I got the pocket digital that it’s just a pocket digital with no features.

But now that I have a digital camera with all the options of a “real” camera, I’m figuring out in a hurry that I haven’t used a “real” camera in five or six years.

I have until Wednesday to get my money back.

After they left I also played Grand Theft Auto IV for an hour or so while I listened to the 5.6.7.8’s.

I had dinner at my girlfriend’s with our son and his five-year old brother. She made nachos. Her older son was having a hard time with his food, so I told him the mushrooms were rabbit poo, the olives were rabbit brains and his red-berry juice was rabbit blood.

He doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to be a boy, his father is a lazy, neglectful mess, and his mother comes from a family that has a crisis every second day and she kind of gets lost and forgets “accidentally” dropping food on the floor doesn’t have to mean an automatic “time-out”.

Sometimes a boy has to drink his juice and call it blood.

After the boys went to bed my girlfriend and I sat on the couch watching TV… mostly Family Guy reruns, and Tosh.0, then we had sex, then we watched America’s Funniest Videos and she fell to sleep on my chest while I watched “The Daily Show”.

I left just after midnight. On my way out she gave me a homemade loaf of banana bread.

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