The Latest...

I've been neglecting the site lately, I know it. This is what's been going on lately... About 2 months ago we decided to take care of my wifes step-sister. She's 15. We have 2 boys of our own 6 & 8. We also take care of 2 foster children (both under the age of 6 months), so our household is always really busy anyway, but lately it's been more hectic. About 4 weeks ago my 8 year old lost his wallet. This is really unusuall, this is the kid that usually has saved more money than his parents! He saves everything and then spends only on something that he really wants, or sometimes (which I think is awesome) he buys things for others. Anyway, it was lost which I didn't believe. My wife had seen her step-sister in the van before she went to school (where the wallet was) and she said later that "she was borrowing a CD". So, the wallet was gone, we had no proof, my son was out $15 bucks! Fast forward till last week. Step-sisters mother goes to the school to sign some papers. Sees other daughter walking on the side of the road skipping school, takes daughter back to school and calls the truancy officer to pick up the other kids. Totally forgets that she is there to get grades and sign papers for us... Then, we find out the other day that the day after the wallet turned up missing that $15 was deposited into a lunch account at the school... and, the monday after she visited her house and her sister was missing $50, she deposited the same amount into her lunch account. She's failing all her classes, she doesn't listen, she won't take advice or suggestions, she had internal suspension, then got external suspension for acting up in internal. ARRGGHHHHH! So, we devised a system that we thought would turn her around, we took all the things that she likes to do and took them all away (just kidding!).... We wrote them all down and put them in order to which ones she liked the most... Something like:

Television

XBOX

Telephone

Walkman

Books(other than school)

Etc...

Everytime a chore is not done or she does something in school that warrants them to call us gets a prividledge taken away for 2 days... But, I have run out of things to take away! She doesn't care about it, she figures that she should just be bad because everything has been taken away... I don't know. We decided to let her watch TV last night hoping she would turn around.... We'll see... So, family life has been consumed lately with all this DRAMA that I totally would rather not be dealing with. On the tech side, I've got some new code for my referrers list, thank you David Jones. Hopefully my icons will be back and I can scrap the crappy referrer code I'm using now. I was able to install the latest version of EvolutionX on the Xbox and FTP some stuff over. Somehow something got corrupted, but that's fixed now. I still need to wipe my Mac and install Panther from scratch. I've been running the pre-release beta for almost a year and it's just flakey enough to be annoying. Maybe next week. Sorry about the rant, I just wanted to keep you up-to-date! Hope all you mothers are having a Happy Mothers Day! I've got to go pickup a card for mine! (or I'll be in the doghouse!) Later!