Jay Cantrell: Blog

I have been meaning to post some an update here for the past six or seven months.

As with many things in the year 2020, it didn't work out the way I'd planned. I know I can't boil an entire 13-14 months down into a few paragraphs but I'll do my best to hit the lowlights.

First off, I have managed to spend a grand total of 29 days (by my rough math) actually inside the building of the company that employees me. More than half of those came in the first three weeks of the years.

As some of you might recall, I was struck by a moving vehicle about a decade ago (in the middle of posting Daze in the Valley on SOL). It messed me up pretty badly (mostly because the inattentive teenage driver who chose the sidewalk as her preferred roadway didn't touch the brakes until my ass hit her windshield).

After just dealing with the pain for the past few years, I finally had to get my knee replaced in mid-January. There were some complications and I wound up having to work from home for more than a month.

I had been back to the office for three days when we were told that everyone was going to work remotely for the foreseeable future.

I enjoyed my first foray into remote working. I had been alone. It was quiet.

The second time was a clusterfuck. My wife had been sent to work from home at the same time. All three kids in high school were moved to remote learning a day later. And my stepdaughter's college didn't let her return after Spring Break (since she had left the state where her college is located).

It took us a month to get shit figured out - who was going to work from where; what time everyone had to be doing what; which task got priority for the lone printer in the house; when a bathroom going to be free.

We all needed a place to set up shop; workspace was at a premium; everyone thought what they were doing was the most important thing in the world.

It's been years since I've been angry for more than an hour or two at time. I spent from mid-March to late May pissed off at everyone and everything.

I wasn't alone in being pissed off at the world.

My wife got a first-hand look at the bureaucracy involved in academia. She is the assistant dean of students … and the students were the last of the university's concerns. They were interested in how this would affect the school financially. I wish I could say it came as a surprise to me, but it didn't.

The kids in high school (a junior and two seniors, at the time) missed all the fun stuff. There were no proms, no graduations, no year-end picnics, no weekends hanging out with their friends. They got all the bullshit of being in high school but none of the rewards.

It got a little better during the summer. Our house has a nice yard so we could be outside some. School was out for my wife and the kids. I had hope that life would less hectic at some point.

I am a fool.

Summer turned to fall and we were right back to where we were in the spring.

My wife's college went fully remote (and since she is an administrator, they cut her pay by 30 percent); my stepdaughter's college did not permit out-of-state students to live in the dorms (and we hadn't been able to travel up there to look at apartments); my stepson chose a college he'd visited only twice (and they were fully remote for out-of-state students, as well); our adopted daughter wasn't planning to attend college (but her job market consisting solely of service-industry jobs so she started to take classes at a local community college); my son's school district elected to keep the high school students remote to use the classroom space to spread out the elementary school students.

My office resumed on-site work in August … for a week. Then COVID went through one of the departments like a California wildfire and we were back working from home.

We're still working from home. I have to go into the office for one day every month. I have never worked at a place that I looked forward to seeing. I treasure my one day each month away from the lunacy that my life has become.

Really, though, it's been sort of fun to be around the family. I've watched the kid's grow and mature, learn to compromise and adapt. I have a better idea of what my wife really does and they have a better idea of how I'm using the "fake it to make it" approach at my job.

Oh, and my oldest little girl, my granddaughter and my son-in-law will be moving to the area in a few weeks. He got hired at one of the overwhelmed hospitals in the area and we live about three hours from his family so it wasn't a hard choice for them (except moving in the middle of a pandemic).

I do, however, miss my moments of solitude. There is no place in the house that isn't "occupied" by a person or their belongings or a project.

There is hope on the horizon but no real end to this in sight.

The area where I live in inundated with COVID cases but few seem to be willing to stay away from other people.

This area never really got out of the first stage of the pandemic. The county where I live hasn't seen a day below 500 new cases since the first week of July. The past two weeks have brought 10,000 new cases.

We've reached the point where 1 in 11 people in the county have the virus or have had it. My family is the outlier. We have six people here and we're all good (maybe because we have enough sense to know what's safe and isn't).

But the neighborhood where we live isn't so fortunate. A family that hosted a Fourth of July barbecue (that we didn't attend) wound up passing along about 150 cases to our neighbors (oh, and killing three of them - two of the dead are a decade younger than my wife and me).

And yet, many in the neighborhood either traveled or brought in folks for Thanksgiving. The same was true for Christmas so I can imagine the January numbers are going to be higher than the December numbers.

For now, the clan here just keeps muddling along.

To the folks out there, I wish you the best and hope everyone has managed to stay healthy and content in 2020.

Let's hope 2021 brings a bit of relief and normalcy to our lives.

I posted a new chapter of Azkoval today.

Merry Christmas!

I hope to be a little more active after the first of the year.

Jay C.

I know I have been neglectful over the past few months and I hope everyone will forgive me.

As with the rest of the world, there is a lot going on in my little corner of the universe. When push comes to shove, it's the hobbies that get tossed aside.

Truly, I wish it weren't so. Living in a world of fantasy - that I create and control - would be a nice respite.

So, I wrote about an earlier addition to the family back in May. Having a grandchild is a lot different from having a child. I don't have to set boundaries or tell her that she can't do something. So I don't.

I raised my kids with a simple idea in mind: "If it doesn't leave a huge scar, cause permanent brain damage or land one of us in jail … have at it!"

Wanna stick a fork in a light socket? Fine by me.

Wanna see how long it takes you to smash a Matchbox car with a claw hammer? I'm interested.

I drew the line at playing in traffic or sniffing household chemicals but I've always believed that children learn by doing - even if it means they did something really stupid. Fucking up is part of life.

So is succeeding! And that's what the past couple of months have been about.

A few summers back, my wife delivered what I considered to be an accurate, if somewhat provocative, presentation at a national conference of academicians that discussed the changing face of higher education in a world where children have had almost unlimited access to knowledge since birth.

She spent more than two years researching and developing the presentation - and her colleagues absolutely hated it.

Her conclusion was that college professors had gotten lazy. They had shifted from teaching critical thinking skills. They were now more interested in pushing points of view than providing the tools for students to develop their own points of view.

My wife is what I would consider a "common-sense liberal."

Yes, I know to some that might seem like an insult and to others an oxymoron but it's my blog so I get to choose the terms.

As a professor of sociology, my wife is fully aware of life's ailments. She understands the imperfections of society far better than most people. She is aware of the perils we face in the future if we don't make radical changes in the way we do many things in today's world.

But she also knows that grandiose plans and talking points fall to the wayside when the shovel meets the dirt. She believes that we must find a way to pay for these changes without leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed or underemployed. We cannot sacrifice today for tomorrow, as easy as it's been to sacrifice tomorrow for today.

And she also is leery of giving a blank check to a bureaucracy that has never once in our 50 years on the planet proven itself to be a faithful steward of the public trust. Rather, the government has always reminded me of drunken Spring Breakers turned loose with their parents' credit card.

So, her presentation was centered around less activism and more mental infrastructure for the young minds that will shape tomorrow. And with the wealth of knowledge available today, the infrastructure needed to be developed far before the collegiate years. It needed to start in early adolescence, with professors putting the finishing touches on the work that had begun in middle and high school.

College would no longer be about bending students to the professor's worldview. It would be about refining the thinking skills already developed in order to help a student create his or her own worldview.

As I noted, it was not well-received. I can tell you from firsthand experience that no one likes to be told that the skills he's honed over a career are no longer relevant.

She was, however, undeterred (a trait I admire). She was the head of her department and she instituted policies that reflected her findings. She had seminars with secondary school teachers to introduce them to educational methods that didn't revolve around reciting a textbook verbatim to ensure a high score on a standardized test.

The secondary students responded well to the lessons for the most part. Some of the teachers actually permitted classroom discussions that ran counter to what the proscribed textbook ascribed as fact.

The students that matriculated to the local university (a high percentage, given tuition costs) performed better than the average student (and far better than the local students had in previous years).

It was a small sample, to be certain. Numbers don't lie but they can obfuscate.

The local school boards were unhappy. The local teacher's union was unhappy. Many of the professors were unhappy. The college board was unhappy.

But, as they say, shit happens. My wife had tenure so … fuck them all.

Then something that amazed her came along. Other people were listening and paying attention to what was happening at an insignificant college in the middle of nowhere.

My wife was approached to apply for an assistant deanship at a really nice university. I wasn't surprised. Outside of agreeing to marry me (and I'm actually an upgrade from her first husband), she is about the most competent person I've met in my life. I've known her since we were kids. She was always this way. She has terrible taste in men but she's great at her chosen profession.

I've been around academics most of my adult life (courtesy of my ill-fated first marriage and from my own work experiences). I knew as soon as her foot was in the door, she had the job.

Well, I didn't know it. Academics often lack common sense.

But for once, my prophecies proved accurate. Keep in mind that I've been predicting the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series since 1985 so my track record is rather spotty.

She was offered the job at a university that is, in academic circles, one step below the Ivy League.

No-brainer, right?

Yeah, not so much. Decisions we'd made in the past couple of years have created havoc with what should be a one-second decision.

First is one that I totally fucked up.

I worked under a contract that runs April through the following March. I renewed my contract in March without really talking about it with anybody. We had a ton of shit going on and I didn't think it needed a huge conversation. It's the only job I have and it ain't like there is a line of people out the door looking to hire a 50-year-old man with a very specific skill set (think of the movie Taken without any hint of physicality and a lot more sarcasm).

So, when they offered me a nice raise to compensate for the shit I've been doing without pay for the past nine months, I agreed.

Then two months in, I wanted out. My bosses understood. This was an opportunity my wife worked for all of her life. She deserved this.

The owners were … peckerheads. It took me a lot of time to get me out of something I could of put off if I'd taken five minutes to ask my wife if anything was going on in her life.

The other problems stemmed from joint decisions.

We are bound by a multitude of custody, visitation and guardianship agreements with various local and state jurisdictions.

I was able to keep my ex-wife from moving my son to the West Coast because I resided in the state where our custody agreement is filed. Leaving would mean we'd have to renegotiate the agreement and let's just say that the conversation would be unpleasant.. My son has adjusted to life in our household and he's doing really well. I worried about him asking to move back with is mother but the opposite is true. He wanted to stay with us - at either location.

I didn't want to undo all the strides we've made in the past year and, while I would relish a screaming match with his mother, I know that wouldn't be productive. We married because we were so similar. We divorced because we're so similar.

I don't think I need to expound.

My wife's son is entering his senior year of high school. He's OK with moving 600 miles away but we're the adults so we have to ask ourselves if it's fair to him. I don't write about this young man much in these posts. He's a private person and he doesn't really relish attention.

The only thing I can say is that he is the glue that holds our disparate households together. I brought a daughter and a son into the relationship and so did my wife. I've written about my daughter before. She isn't my kid but she's totally my kid. She's the oldest. My wife's children are in the middle. My son is the youngest.

It was an awkward melding and it might not have stuck without my stepson. He is the one who put forth the effort to integrate his family and my family into our family. He's quick with a joke and quicker with a smile. He's the kid you see helping someone with their groceries or running outside in the rain with an umbrella to walk someone to the door.

It's high time the adults in the room (and I include myself in this assessment) take his need into account. He is still bound by a custody and visitation agreement until he turns 18 - even though it's been at least four years since his father has seen or spoken to him (to the best of my knowledge).

His sister is in her junior year of college. She gets a break on tuition because her mom worked in the state system there. If we were to leave, she'd either have to transfer or be on the hook for the burdensome student loans we all know about. She could probably transfer to the school where he mom would be working but … yeah, who in the hell would want that?

My sister was my high school principal and that sucked donkey nuts. Can you imagine if your mother was the dean of the college where your major was housed? Fuck that!

My daughter and granddaughter were considerations. I'm just getting to know the Little One and I don't want it to be like it was with my own grandparents. I barely remember my grandmother because we saw her so infrequently. I only remember my grandfather as the the bitter old man we moved 500 miles southward to take look after.

Then there is our newest addition.

We started adoption proceedings six days prior to my wife being offered the job.

Needless to say, the adoption process would have to restarted if we lived somewhere else.

She has grown even more than my son in the past year. She is on probation still but that actually proved to be the least of our worries. Her PO made a couple of phone calls and found out her case could be transferred in a matter of hours - so long as a judge agreed.

It was the guardianship proceedings that really tangled things up. We were not yet the "permanent" guardians. It was a step we just didn't bother to take because, to be blunt, nobody else wanted her to live with them. We viewed it - and the courts viewed it - as a unnecessary hassle that didn't need to be addressed.

Then it needed to be addressed quickly.

We couldn't walk away from her. It would be the (legally and logistically) easiest part of this whole deal. We could have literally just say "Fuck it." They'd chuck her into a foster home for nine or 10 months and then probably into the jail system for the next year or so.

Yeah, my stomach curdled a little just writing that. She's our kid now. We'll go to the wall for her (and, honest to God, I think she'd go to the wall for us).

She actually proposed that as an option (and I don't think it was just to see how quickly we'd dismiss it.) But, yeah, it got shot down before the sentence was finished.

So, uh, yeah, it's been tough finding a little bit of time to put down sentences in a fictional world.

For a time, it looked like I'd be living in one state with the kids while she moved to a new state to start a new career as an administrator.

Then an outbreak of common sense came crashing down around us.

Honestly, I think the family court judge got tired of seeing our names on her docket every other day (and that is not hyperbole - for two weeks, we were involved in mediation or status hearings or motion hearings for one of our three cases every other fucking day!)

I think a couple of our local ambulance chasers were a little bit worried that my wife and I were a new legal team in town looking to cut into their practices.

The family court judge isn't someone I know well. She is new to the bench in the past year or two. Our guardianship papers were handled without a single interaction with an actual judge.

After a particularly fruitless mediation hearing with my ex-wife (via teleconference) that led to harsh words between not only the attorneys themselves but with the judge and the attorneys, I think she'd had enough of seeing our faces. And I know she'd had enough me and my ex-wife sniping at each other.

She ordered us to bring the children to her chambers the next morning. And when I say "ordered" I mean exactly that. It was a written judicial order to produce the minor children in her chambers no later than 10 a.m.

There were no attorneys; there were no parents or guardians; the only other person in the room was the probation officer.

My wife and I sat outside the chamber for more than two hours. The probation officers left, returned with a couple of pizzas, and completely ignored the two fretting people in the anteroom.

The clerk barely acknowledged us. People coming in and out with pressing business were shooed away and told to come back after lunch.

The first time the clerk spoke to us in more than an hour is when she handed us a notice to be in Courtroom B at 8 a.m. the following Monday.

The kids emerged a few minutes later and they weren't forthcoming.

"We just … talked," our newcomer told us. "It was … you know … what we like to do, how we're doing in school, what we think about maybe, you know, moving away."

That was the story from all of them. It wasn't an interrogation. She didn't ask them where they wanted to live. She just asked open-ended questions and let them take the conversation wherever they wanted it to go.

It took 15 minutes the following Monday - in a courtroom that was filled with deadbeat parents who were behind on child support - for her to give us permission to take the kids to Pluto if we wanted.

She had worked it out with the new state that they would share jurisdiction on my wife's case for the next year. That will see my stepson through high school. His father has the right to visitation (at his own expense) and can pay to have my stepson come back for a weekend a Christmas and a week next summer (provided he set it up before my stepson turns 18).

We were awarded permanent custody of our newest ward and she set it up for the adoption to be finalized before we were officially residents of a new state (so long as nobody else had a problem with it).

The newcomer's case was closed in one state and opened in another. Her juvie record is now sealed and will be expunged if she can go a few more months without trouble.

It came at a cost, though. She was returned to supervised probation. For at least the next six months, we will have to take her after school once a week for a meeting with her PO. She'll have to retake the drug and alcohol classes.

But she seems OK with it. She's finally free from all of that. Nobody in our new town knows what she did at 14 years old. She was a minor so her name didn't appear in the newspaper. There is no mugshot of her on the Internet. Yes, we looked (at her request).

My son is going to start his third high school in three years but he likes the new place. My wife once moved him to a new state without notifying the court or me (in violation of about a dozen state statutes and binding legal agreements). The judge said since I'd actually asked beforehand, there was no reason to deny keeping custody with me for the next two years. At that point, my son will have graduated high school. If his mom wants custody for the first year of college, then we'll revisit the situation then.

Until then, my ex-wife can fuck off (so long as she keeps sending in those sweet, sweet child support payments!). Like my wife's ex-husband, she can pay for him to visit and she gets him for two weeks in the summer. I'm OK with it and he is, too.

We're renting a house for now. In a couple of years, we're not going to need as much room as we do now. A person affiliated with the university owns the place and he gave us a decent deal. Our salaries are much higher and the cost of living is much lower so we can afford to live in a nice neighborhood (in a house with a pool!).

And, yeah, I got a new job. It was actually pretty easy.

One of the customers from my old job has its headquarters in our new location. I casually mentioned to one of my contacts that my wife had been hired at the university there and we were moving in a few weeks.

Over the past 5-6 years, I'd heard stories of their epic Friday night pub crawls and their legendary tailgate parties for the city's NFL franchise. I figured it would be nice to meet the people I'd spoken to and emailed so regularly over the years. I'd met their bosses; they'd met my bosses. We'd never met each other.

Instead, I have somehow managed to fail upward one more time. They had an opening in their marketing department for an assistant director and after a couple of rounds of interviews … I'm it.

Just as I had no background in journalism but still managed to work as writer and editor for 17, just as I had no background in design or computer networking but have managed to cull out a niche position for the past 10 years, I will take my history degree and head into yet another divergent career field for the final portion of my working life.

It's not a bad gig, actually. The company has about 200 franchises across the region but already controls the lion's share of the market. My job will be to think up and implement innovative ways to keep it. Given the low-quality of the competition, it should be fairly simple to accomplish. Plus the staff I inherited knows what the fuck they're doing so if I just stay out of their way, it should be fine.

The ultimate irony is that the owners of my old job will have to negotiate with me when the contract ends in December. Unlike most, I know the profit margin at the old place. I know how much the old company massages the numbers for maximum profit. I know how much the salesman overstates the estimates for an increased commission. And I know how much of the company's bottom line rides on those padded figures.

Yeah, it's going to be fun. And I know that's the main reason I got the job. I'm OK with it. I'll have a few months to get my feet wet and get the lay of the land. As with before, I work under contract so I'm not worried about getting the boot once negotiations are over.

The best part is that no one from old job knows where I landed. I'm going to introduced in a teleconference sometime in August. The teleconference was my new boss' idea. I think she always suspected that her company was getting fucked over but she could never get the details on just how.

Sure am looking forward to seeing my old boss' face when she sees me smiling back at her from the other end of the line.

With the good also comes the bad.

Our daughters are now 600 miles away. Our grandchild is now 600 miles away. Our sons are now 600 miles from their grandparents. My wife and I are 400 miles farther away from our families.

The girls came down with us on one of our trips. They love the city. It's only three hours from our house to my son-in-law's parents house. The city holds a lot of opportunities in my stepdaughter's field of study.

I would imagine that they might be moving closer in the next year or two. But that's still going to be a year or two that I don't want to think about. It's funny. We don't see each other as often as we could (or should) but it was always nice to know that they were only a couple of hours away.

I hope life will settle down in another six weeks or so. Until then, I will do what I can to keep everybody up to date.

Oh, and another chapter of Azkoval is in the cue. I probably should have put that at the top. My bad.

As some noticed, a new chapter of Azkoval has been posted.

I thought I'd posted it six weeks ago but it seems that I forgot.

To update the familial situation:

After many stressful months - and more than few sleepless nights - we finally were able last week to welcome the newest addition to our family.

I've written previously about my new granddaughter's less-than-glorious entry in this world so I won't go into that again - other to note that some people are really pieces of shit and I hope their lives are filled with anal warts and festering pustules.

I detailed the facts surrounding the Little One's early years in a blog post from last July if anyone is interested.

The adoption process is never easy. It's intrusive. It's exhaustive (in every sense of the word). The process moves at a glacial pace and suddenly somebody shows up needing to see something (or be paid for something) in 20 minutes.

There is literally never a moment when you're certain everything is going to work out right - and most of the time you're positive that something is going to go wrong. It was horrible to watch from the outside and it almost broke my heart several times as I watched my daughter and son-in-law go through anguish as first one thing and then another cropped up. The thought of having the Little One taken out of our lives was harrowing.

In the following narrative, I use the word "we" a lot. I probably should use the word "they." But my wife and my kids (even the one that really isn't my kid, at all) gave emotional (and in my case, financial) support throughout. So I'm going to claim a portion of the credit for us that we aren't really due.

The problem with the Little One's original adoption five years ago came because of the birth father.

The birth father is not a citizen or a resident alien. He had little interested in participating in any legal process -- even one that promised anonymity. The current political situation means everyone is a target, I suppose.

He was part of the DACA program five years ago and he signed away his rights at that point -- but the process officially ended before his signature was notarized.

His DACA enrollment lapsed and he disappeared into a city where about 2 million people have his skin tone. Add in a very common name and you have a real problem.

It took almost three months to even locate him and then two more to get him to agree to sign paperwork. Except he had no documents to prove he was who he said he was. It took the help of an immigration attorney to get things moving.

I have no strong opinion on immigration (or at least none that is based on well-researched facts). I've seen the rhetoric (or propaganda) from each side (which, as above, clearly isn't based on well-researched fact) and I'm unimpressed by all their arguments.

By all rights, this kid isn't a bad person in any way. He was brought from his place of birth as a mere child. He no longer speaks his native language. He has no ties to his former homeland. Sending him back serves no real purpose that I can come up.

He's just as "Americanized" as I am. But, every day, he faces the prospect that someone will scoop him from where he's lived for 20 of his 24 years on the planet and ship him off to a place he doesn't remember.

I don't want to get off on a political diatribe. I truly understand both sides of the coin and I don't really like either. There just has to be a better way.

This was the final step in a very lengthy, very expensive adoption process.

I get that we can't just put these kids anywhere. But you have two good people -- with little debt, no criminal history, a stable relationship -- who want to bring in a child from outside. A simple background check pretty much tells you all you need to know these days.

Why should it take 10 months and cost close to $25,000?

We wound up hiring three separate attorneys (including one to help with the birth father's immigration status) and a private investigator for something that probably could have been decided in two weeks instead of 10 months.

The low point was getting to meet the people who had arranged to adopt the Little One five years ago -- but reneged because of the birth father's nationality.

I've written about "pieces of shit" but I have a new standard now. I swear, if it wouldn't have adversely affected the adoption, I would have seriously hurt both of these assholes.

I worked as a journalist for close to 20 years. Some of that time was working cops and courts. I've talked to people who've murdered their parents; I've been around rapists and pedophiles; I've met people who hit their kids or their spouses or their elderly parents. I've spent time around people who are involved in narcotic and human trafficking.

I know despicable when I see it. And I don't say this lightly.

Given the choice, I should spend time with any of the people I just mentioned if it meant I'd never have to be in proximity to these upper middle-class "pillars of the community" again.

They were more than willing to sign anything we put in front of them - for a price. I decided that I was willing to meet that price - but not for them. I was willing to pay that much to anybody who would put them in intensive care for an extended period of time. I finally decided I would rather do it myself.

I have a (relatively) clean record. I might even get off with probation. But, of course, given the continual background and financial checks Youth Services did on every member of the immediate family, it would have been a Pyrrhic victory.

Thankfully, the judge in the case had common sense. She simply terminated any on-going rights they might assert when she found out about their little extortion scheme.

We also pointed out that their "bleeding heart liberal" friends would be pretty disappointed to learn that they were just as racist as the white-nationalists they denigrate.

I'm a prick at heart so I'll probably wait a few months and then find a way to fuck with their reputation anyway. You can bet that they'll turn up in a story at some point along the line.

The process was so much fun that we're willing to do it all again.

Last month, our ward's father passed away. It wasn't unexpected and they weren't particularly close but it still hurt her.

Her mother is incarcerated for the next decade or so and she has no other relatives willing or able to care for her.

She's made strides over the past several months. She's in a new school and she has found new friends (who aren't into the same shit that her old friends were into). She goes to school with my son and stepson and they've helped to ease her transition.

With some of the baggage off her shoulders, she's started to turn the corner. She's still on probation (and will be for 18 more months) but she's been granted a little bit of leeway. We got to take her with us for the adoption hearing last week even though it meant taking her out of the county for three nights and she now only has to visit her PO every other month.

Her grades have improved. She's never going to be accepted to MIT but she's trying to do better in school and it shows. She's making better choices and learning to think about consequences. I wish I'd have learned to do that before I was well into my 30s.

Mostly, her demeanor has changed. She still has bouts of "teenage angst" and it would be stretch to call her "pleasant." But it's been a lot of years since I met a pleasant teenager who wasn't pulling the Eddie Haskell routine.

All I can say is that she's at least as nice as the other two teenagers living under my roof (and the two teenagers before that who grew into adults over the past few years).

Her tough facade started to fall away when it became evident that her father wasn't going to get better. We spent time talking about what was happening with him and what it meant for her.

She certainly doesn't deserve to be alone in the world at 17 years old.

We have permanent guardianship over her and we've offered to "make it official" even though the process might not end until after her 18th birthday.

This one should be easier than bringing the Little One into the fold. Her mother doesn't really give a shit about her. She'll sign whatever needs to be signed if I drop $10 on her commissary account.

A couple members of her mother's family came out of the woodwork when her father died but they disappeared pretty quickly when they found out that any money from his estate is to be held in trust until she turns 25 (or earns a college degree).

I'm the trustee and I made it clear that they'd play hell on Easter getting a penny of the money even if they did try for guardianship. That was the only clause I insisted upon: the trustee isn't her guardian; it's me - unless I die, then it's my wife or my daughter.

The reality is that there is only going to be a few thousand left after probate. Her father's illness was lengthy and costly. Hospice care consumed the sale of his house and most of his assets. A lot of his medical bills have been written off by the hospital but there are a few that still need to be paid. All in all, she's not going to get a whole lot. But anything would be enough for some of the vultures in her life.

And she'd be right back to the sort of life she had when she lived her her father.

I just can't let that happen when all it will take is a bit of patience and time and money to help her decide if she likes her new outlook on life better than her old one.

We're going to wait until school is out in a few weeks to really sit down and talk about what comes next for her.

Whatever she decides, I think she knows that we're not walking away and we'll always be here to help.

If it's as another daughter, that's great. If it's just as someone who cares about her as a person, that's fine, too.

So, as we've done for the past few months, we'll keep muddling along for a few more.

Jay C.

So, it's February the Oneth. It's BRR-F'ing-Cold outside where I live (and that stupid groundhog is in serious peril if he predicts this shit to keep going).

I have a couple of things to note.

One: There is a new chapter of Azkoval in the queue.

As with the last, it's probably not the best in terms of grammar and punctuation. I'm sure there are a few missing words and some I probably duplicated. Please accept my apologies and ignore the errors.

Two: I have decided to plunge into the world of "Writing for Profit." Writing has became a bit of a job for the past couple of years so I figured I might as well give it a shot.

As with most things, I've decided to be different. To that end, I will let you in on what I've decided.

I will never, under any circumstances, charge anybody to continue a series that I've started here for free. That means, in the event that I ever finish Andy and Regan or Phil and Hailey, they will go on SOL just like always. If I write a sequel to anything currently on this site, it will be posted here and nowhere else. Some familiar characters might crop up now and then but only in ancillary roles.

I have also decided that I will not charge anybody for something I plan to give away for free in a couple of months. At times, I might offer a preview chapter of a coming story that will go here but I won't offer paid "Early Access."

Well, I suppose that isn't quite true.

The story I have posted on my patronage account and on the site named after a long river (no, dumbass, it's not Nile.com) is exclusive in that it will not appear anywhere else for at least 36 months.

Again, that might be disingenuous.

I promise that I won't post it anywhere else for at least 36 months. That doesn't mean some thieving prick won't grab it and post it under his own name. But there ain't shit I can do about that so I generally don't worry too much about it.

So, yeah, I'm not really sure about the rules for shameless self-promotion so I'll try to be vague with the names but you should be able to find it pretty easily.

The story, called Contact Point, is almost 600 pages and totals 53 chapters and an epilogue. You'll find new characters and a few old friends stop by. There is no explicit content. It's more like Lifeline than Daze in the Valley.

I set the price at $5 at the patreon site. Because the site named after a river is all official and shit, I will increase the price there at $6.99. I hope that isn't too steep. I think it's worth that much but I'm a legend in my own mind.

The download from the patronage site comes in a variety of formats - .html that will look much like what you see here; pdf for reading in Adobe and Apple products; simple text for use in almost any word processing program; and a version for Kindle (that I hope I did correctly).

I think I figured out how to post it directly to the site, but just in case, you'll be given a link to a third-party site for the download. It comes in a zip file but you'll all four versions at the same time.

The river-themed site comes in Kindle because I wasn't paying for a paperback version.

The pain in the ass of producing all those formats almost made me jack the price up! Christ, what a fiasco.

So, where was I?

Oh, sure, I remember. I've gone full mercenary.

I actually enjoyed writing Contact Point. And it helped me produce a few chapters on Azkoval and do some work on the final part of Andy and Regan I promised.

So, if this proves to be worthwhile (financially and creatively), I plan to produce an "Exclusive" every year or so while I continue to be active on this site.

In time, I might go the G. Younger route and start my own website where I'll keep all the works I've finished (including a couple that never saw the light of day) and some unfinished projects. I've looked into it but have yet to decide. It seems like it might be a lot of work.

You should be able to find my stuff by using Jay Cantrell as a search term at either place.

I've complained enough to you fine folks about the home life so I won't belabor that situation other than to say it's better but still not the Cleaver family. Think the Bundys instead.

So, off we go!

Jay C.

Edit: It appears that PayPal forced a certain site to make all NSFW accounts unsearchable. Wish I'd have known that early. Anyway, just add /JayCantrell to the sites name and you should find me.