I guess turnabout is fair play. I had to cancel the previous weekend with my son so he returned the favor this weekend because of a friend's birthday party and the Superbowl. I ended up working overtime today and tomorrow looks like a day filled with laundry, movies and Superbowl.

I was a little torn about how to handle his wanting to cancel. One of the reasons I gave him the calendar with our weekends marked off was so that this kind of thing didn't happen. At the same time he is a teenager and is bound to be less and less interested in spending time with the old fart. His mother and I actually talked it over a little; debating the difference between teenager freedom and teaching lessons about responsibility.

Wait!

Do you hear that?!

That sound is my parents laughing from their graves at the thought of me having a debate about responsibility!

The Ex thinks he may simply be trying to shy away from using public transit to make the trip here. I have been trying for the longest time to get him to use the light rail system between his neighborhood and West Palm Beach for almost a year now. We have taken one trip together and in recent months he's used the local buses in his county to get to and from the mall; so the idea is not foreign to him. When I was his age I took a Greyhound from Rhode Island to Texas by myself; I think he can handle 90 miles on a train.

My father always said, at the time, that they chose to send me on that trip by bus for financial reasons but I swear to God he was getting even with me for something! To a 13 year old that was a grand adventure. My favorite part of the trip was a layover in New York City; my first time there. I drove through 18 states on that trip. I sat next to a nun from Connecticut to Ohio. Almost lost my tickets on Oklahoma. In a wonderful moment of karma got to squeeze in a seat next to a very fat gentleman for a couple of states. Got hit on by a panhandler in Arkansas. Suffered through an asthma attack on the return trip from Louisiana to North Carolina. I must have really pissed him off somehow!

Things should be back to normal by our next weekend, which is a three day weekend which will make up for some of the loss of time together.