Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down!

Happy Monday denizens of the Skipahsphere!  It’s the most wonderful time of the year….Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah for my Jewish friends?  Hell no, it’s Maui or bust baby!  Is Mr. Skipah vacationing in Hawaii (only if they let me pay with empty Polar Pop cups), umm no my second favorite basketball tournament of the year is on!  The Maui Invitational is a Thanksgiving week tradition for yours truly only this year it’s even better because my home state Hoosiers are playing in it.  Hammy and I are playing quarter bounce enjoying the game as he took Wake Forest +12.5 and I’m threatening to replace his vodka with Potassium Chloride since he won’t shut up!  At the moment he’s looking like a lock to win some more rubles from whatever bookie is dumb enough to take hamster action (probably a Kentuckian), and since I’ve seen better defensive strategy at an elementary school chess tournament I don’t see the results changing.  Hopefully Indiana can at least win.

So what has Mr. Skipah been up to you ask while on blogcation?  Sipping fruity drinks out of hollowed out coconut shells while globetrotting around the planet in search of world peace?  Moonlighting for Life magazine as an international photojournalist (I turned that gig down they wanted to send me to Antarctica), nope yours truly has been lying low in vacation destination New Albany, Indiana perfecting his lottery picking machine (were up to version 5.2) and actively trying to find somebody that would find me desirable enough to pay me some coinage outside of my normal day job temporarily.  I had one great lead but it fell through, no worries though my local Circle K is always hiring for the night shift and their current manager is about as lost as an opera singer opening for a 90s boy band so I guess worst case scenario I could end up there, wait a minute that would mean UNLIMITED Diet Dr. Pepper!  I’ll be right back need to go tell them I want the job……ok I’m back they told me to speak to the manager in the morning good chance he will be sitting on a stack of washer fluid outside the store puffing on a Marlboro while the lines are backed up to the bathroom so I’m sure he will have plenty of time!  Local readers #BringEddieBack needs to be trending on Facebook very soon, we miss you Eddie!

Submitted this photo to SurrealSunsets.com.

Also I’ve been spending time in my new favorite city up the road.  Quaint little river community nestled on the banks of the Ohio River and home of the annual Fourth of July hydroplane celebration known as the Madison Regatta!  That would be Madison, Indiana and home to no other than Miss Madison (what a coincidence), it was power packed weekend for us.  After breaking at least 34 state vehicle laws Saturday morning on the way there (Sloane and I were running late) we arrived just in a nick of time for the Jefferson County Historical Society gingerbread house party.  Awesome idea, for seven bucks your kids get to build their own gingerbread houses.  The house frames were already fabricated out of Teddy Graham and Saltine boxes (among other brands) and using icing as mortar the kids built there houses out of graham crackers that doubled as pretend siding.  Also there was a Mr. Bulky’s (are they still in business) assortment of candies to outfit their home with.  I think I ate seven bucks worth of Swedish gold fish before Miss Madison informed me that she had seen kids licking them and putting them back on the supply table.  In another sign that our society is really in the shitter, probably half the parents in attendance were hijacking their kids houses like there was some kind of honorary civil engineering degree to be awarded for the best looking abode.  It was actually quite comical, Miss Madison and I let our children be you know children and have all the fun themselves.  In other news I’m still mad at Miss Madison for ruining my Swedish goldfish free for all I was enjoying!  Kind of like the person that really enjoys a McDonald’s McRib until they hear about the ingredients, that’s the way I felt after hearing I may have ingested little Billy’s germs.

Kid tested, father approved!

Look very closely and you can see Sloane and Miss Madison Jr.

That afternoon we attended the local high school production of Mary Poppins .  I was floored, this high school troupe was broadwayesque good!  My only beef is a high school production shouldn’t take THREE hours as the director got a little too carried away with some of the musical numbers.  The local child labor laws might need rewritten since these young men and women performed this show five times in four days.  That being said though, there should be a lot of proud parents in the Madison area.  For one this is southern Indiana we are accused throughout the state of being hicks.  Pulling off the British accent of Disney’s favorite flying nanny (she was played by a true blue Brit in the movie) was no small feat and Miss Poppins and her cast mates made me think I was in Ye Olde England for an afternoon .  Sloane absolutely loved it and I can’t say it enough, the cast and production team absolutely nailed it on acting, costume design, and sets!  Not sure what the thespian budget is there, but it has got to be something rivaling a major college athletic department!

They thought it was Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

After attending church yesterday and the preacher giving a sermon on “Being Thankful” Miss Madison turned to me and asked what I’m thankful for.  Of course I told her the Snapple Beverage Corporation (Diet Dr. Pepper is part of the Snapple family), that won me about -25 boyfriend points, but then I rearranged her kitchen for her so maybe that deficit went down to -12.  What I am I thankful for, a healthy vibrant daughter that knows how much her father loves her.  A family that has went through as much as me with everything in the past 18 months.  An army of friends that grows everyday doing all they can for me to keep me upright every time I receive bad news, unfortunately it is way too often!    Meeting Miss Madison and hitting it off right away with her, four months already feels like a year, in a good way.  How two people with completely different backgrounds think so much alike is something I’m truly grateful for.  I’m thankful I’m alive, and I do not forget that any day no matter what kind of bullshit life throws at me.  I’m not turning this into a “Thankful” post but had to get that off my chest.

Believe me she wasn’t smiling at my Snapple comment, in case you haven’t figured it out I’m a dumbass!

Kind of bittersweet today for me, I more than likely attended lunch at school with my daughter for the last time in the foreseeable future.  I don’t know who was more downtrodden by it me or Sloane’s classmates.  The enthusiasm was only halfway there today, usually when I show up for lunch I’m mobbed like a rock star.  Today it was more questions about Sloane leaving than anything and I couldn’t give them any answers.  They are all eight and nine years old and have no idea how life works when you are an adult.  My daughter has already lost some of her youth, and I wasn’t about to take any of theirs away from them.  Long faces and somber looks were the norm from the staff, and “I tried” is about all I could muster for a response.  The lunch lady Nazi (great woman, runs the lunch room like Hitler) even charged my lunch to Sloane’s account today since Wednesday will be her last day and she had enough in her till to cover it.  I didn’t ask her to, she took it upon herself to just wave me by, that’s the community I’m going to miss since my daughter will be going to school elsewhere next week.  Straight A’s will soon be replaced by boredom since she is already smarter than her future classmates.  She’s working on long division these days, I found out last week her new classmates are just now learning multiplication with the numbers one and two!

Not fair!  I’m going to miss my daddy lunch dates!

I’m also going to miss her classmates, unless I want to look like the “CREEPY” guy I’m not just going to randomly show up to eat lunch with them.  Those kiddos are amazing and I feel like I let them down that Sloane will no longer get to be a part of their life.  I feel like I let a lot of people down, but in the end I did the best I could under the circumstances.  Did I always do the right thing….no, but I was learning on the fly how this works.

About it for tonight, freaking Indiana ended up losing the damn game and I’m done defending our coach!  To the victors go the spoils so I’ll let Hammy chirp away while he dumps more money into his HotHamsters.com profile, and I’ve got a couple more algorithms to fine tune on my lottery prediction machine!