If it's just after seven o'clock in the morning and I'm posting this while sitting in Starbucks, dressed to eyeliner and mascara, having driven a tedious route to the next town and back it must mean that [cue the confetti, strike up the band]

Nephew is back in school!!!

Everything is just too tedious to write in depth about, but record it briefly I will:

Nephew is back in school, attending evening drug/alcohol counseling and I am no longer hiding out in the afternoon.  Everything's peaceful, right?

No, not right.  In the space of one week he's acted twice to upset the balance.  First the young man bought the moped that seemed like such a perfect answer to his transportation problems (and mine)--cheap to buy, cheap to run, with somewhat limited range so he might not follow the lead of every tamptation that came his way.  The virtue of his very young girlfriend, for example, was somewhat more secure in the open air, without an automobile around her. 

Last week Saturday he bought the cute red moped, rushed to give it a spin and   Sunday morning he ruefully began our conversation with "Uh, I don't think the moped thing is going to work..."  I reminded him that it will be just the thing on campus next fall where flocks of mopeds bear students around town and motorists are well-used to avoiding hitting them.

By Thursday he'd over ruled my wise counsel and had bought a thoroughly used car that cost less than $2000, not much money to you or to me, but the vehicle purchases wiped out about half of his total net worth, especially worrisome because he'd learned two days earlier the balance of the bank account opened by his mother as guardian of his social security benefits. 

She saved $3.51 of it.  Now the government is looking for the two of them to return over $2000 in overpayments to him and even my slippery grasp of economics sees a definite problem.  And then there's the matter of $12,000/year for uni costs and where he'll live during school breaks and summer.  His mother is currently residing in jail;   I've got a premonition about what will happen, do you?

Yesterday I saw Niece the Younger who is in a foster home in the next town.  She needs a place to chill from time to time and the chillin's pretty good at Auntie Sim's house.  We had a day of independent time and time together, just the chillingest thing.  She is doing well with kind people, but there are some stormclouds on her horizon as well.  The other two youngsters in the foster home were rescued from the kind of sick child-abusing homes that turn your stomach when you read about them in the newspaper.  Their abusers had ten children in the household, some theirs by birth, some they were given, and some they actually bought in other countries.  The eleven year old who is the older of the two living in Niece's foster family confides in her, but not in the counselors or doctors who are in place to help her.  The eleven year old and a two year old the good foster parents have adopted suffered every kind of abuse you'd fear happened, Niece tells me.  Besides the physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, the children were forced to fight each other and the child beaten in the fight was then beaten by the woman.  Niece feels the foster sister needs to tell someone about the nightmare her life was and she wants to help her, but Niece she is disturbed by it.  She is just 14, a child herself;  I'll alert the social worker about this first thing tomorrow morning.  Social Worker is just coming back from vacation--I hope she's coming back tomorrow--and I hope she's up to a new challenge.

Another potential problem for  Niece is that in June she was to move to Uncle M's place.  He's taking care of her older sister who reports that Uncle M is "mean".  Niece's mother's mother--not her Grandmother Rose--says that older sister is being a troublemaker and Uncle is angry.  Though with the imminent move, Niece the Younger was to visit the place she is supposed to move to in June one weekend a month and for Easter week, she hasn't been there even once in the three months since the promise was made.  This doesn't sound very promising to her foster parents, or to the girl, or to me.  With her brother expected to move to Uni in late August and Jean determined to stay in Minneapolis for the summer (sigh...), I feel that having Niece the Younger move in here would be best.  The other Guys feel that I've asked them to share too many times already.  Up until now I've done what I thought best despite their opinions and I've stretched their tolerance to a point where it really wasn't good for them.  Parker, in particular, has shared more than is good for him.  This isn't just my house.  Taking care of the Guys is my responsibility.  Social Worker thinks I've done enough.   And yet...

I know some people who are sure that they are safe from inconvenient misfortune in their lives.  It seems true;  they coast along looking perfect and at perfect ease;  they have great fun on weekends and take great vacations.  Then I think of other people whose lives are shattered when they have done nothing less well than the Lucky Ones.  I don't know why some people are sheltered while others bear the punishments of poor physical or mental health, others' greed, or unfortunate location.  I'm not in either of those groups of people.  I've sorrow and blessings both.  I wonder where I fit into all of these things.

The fine weekend that is ending could have been better.  What would have made it better would have been another day or two off of work.  Having Friday off of work helped, but Monday and Tuesday would just about take care of my recreational needs for the week.

Saturday I was out the door before Parker woke up, which doesn't actually mean that I left early, but that I was early enough to evade parental responsibility until evening.  What luxury to go to the coffee shop and take my drink with me to a park to sketch.  I don't think I could find the park again which is a shame because it presented so much interesting subject material that choosing what to draw was difficult.  I was happy to find some heavy construction equipment parked at odd angles and began drawing, but I was very tempted to change my focus to the pavilion set at the edge of the lagoon, drained for the construction project and revealing all sorts of interesting secrets that its water usually kept out of sight.  I was also drawn to the idea of recording some of the people who were enjoying their sunny day in the park.  There was a wide variety of humanity to choose from.  A young man wearing an artsy cap worked with a beautiful blonde--his girlfriend?  a model he'd hired?--having her pose this way and that as he snapped photos of her with an impressively complex camera.  Young boys fished the shallow remnants of the lagoon--"For what?" I wondered, as the mud-tinged water seemed too shallow to harbor anything that employed gills.  "They're crabbing," my companion suggested.  I suppose catching anything didn't really matter to the boys.  They frequently pulled their lines out of the water and raced around the perimeter of the lagoon, scaling fieldstone ledges and moved by the first warm sunshiny Saturday of the year to hoot and crow like birds.

Some of the subjects were older, professionals by the look of them, dressed in khakkis and bearing clipboards and serious expressions as they paced from point A to point B and stood, thinking or so it seemed, and then paced on for another segment.  They looked like they were performing some set routine with planned sequences of progress and pauses.  Joggers and runners passed through in pairs or singly.  Another person's traverse was slower and his partner was a dog who trotted next to his master's wheelchair.  They stopped to watch the fisherboys for a while and one of the clipboard-pacing guys visited with the man for a little while, petting the German Shepherd.  The dog didn't lose his on the job alertness even while being petted by the stranger.

You might think that I was so busy checking out the distractions that I never did draw at all, but I did just about finish drawing the whatchamacallit  which stretched out, mud-streaked and muscular in the sunshine.  It looked much simpler before I really LOOKED at it as I drew.  It was a great workout, I will say that about it.

Today was a day to put even that kind of work aside and my buddy Bonnie and I launched this year's gardening season.  There's nothing to do yet, but have the best garden of the season--the one you have in mind before the seeds don't sprout, before the rabbits eat everything, before the bugs infest, before the wilt, the drought, the weeds, the sick of the very idea of working out in the yard.  After shopping at the garden shop we had a mid-afternoon breakfast and a long visit. 

As I said, it was a very good weekend.  I think I just might be able to make it through the workweek so that I can have another one.

My younger neice called her brother tonight.  When I told her that he was out, she asked me to have him call her.  She has never called him just to chat, so my spidey sense tingled.  I asked her if she was okay and she assured me that she was, but asked me again to have her brother call her.

Nephew's reaction was the same as mine and he called her immediately when I relayed her request to him.  After the call he came in to the room where I was, returned my phone to me and then didn't rush out of the room as he usually does.  He lingered and I sensed that he wanted to tell me about the call.  I asked him how his little sister is and he replied, "One of them is fine;  I don't know about the other one."  And so begins another episode of worry and like all the others, this isn't without cause.  Indeed, this is with more cause than ever before.

My 16 year old niece ran away from home and has been missing since she and a friend took the friend's mother's car on Sunday.  I am writing this on Wednesday night. ElderNiece moved to a small town and lives with her mother's brother while YoungerNiece elected to live in a foster home near to my town and Nephew lives with me.  Nephew said that ElderNiece has been talking with a guy she met online and it is thought that she went to meet him.  He says that he's worried, especially because ElderNiece has very poor judgement where guys are concerned.  The ones he's seen her with are usually much older than she is and have disagreeable personalities, to put it politely.

ElderNiece's friend called her mother a couple of days ago and that is a good sign, we hope.  Nephew said the girl probably wanted to go back home to her parents who are both angry and eager to get her home safe.  ElderNiece has only the uncle to go back to.  He has been called "mean", but then again, she called me mean, too every time I spoke to her about her poor behavior and attitude.

I bet no one who reads this blog (if anyone does, that is) knows that I have 11 nephews and seven nieces, eighteen children in that generation in my family.  You might think I only have three.  They are just that interesting.