I’ve taken Adam to see a psychologist/therapist/whatever a couple times, and most recently in late December, the recommendation was to have his teachers, myself, his mom, and Adam fill out a survey to help diagnose ADD/ADHD.

The results were pretty clear from everyone that he exhibits lack of focus and general forgetfulness. So, we got referred to his regular physician, and, in turn, he prescribed medication — Metadate.

It’s a standard stimulant much like Ritalin, or Adderall. I’m pretty hesitant about throwing medication at the problem, but I think at this point it can’t hurt, as Adam is quite clearly in need of something to help him out with focusing and things like that.

He started taking it this past Thursday, and he did report that he found himself to be more focused and not goofing off as much in class. Good news so far, but, still really impossible to draw any conclusions at this point.

Here’s to the pharmaceuticals!! Bleh.

OK, I really suck at chess.

I thought I was decent when I was younger, having played quite often in my junior high years. But I didn’t play much in high school, and then went up against some actual skilled players in college, and realized how poor I was at chess.

Fast forward to this weekend. Bob’s a quite solid chess player. He reminded me how bad I was a few years ago when he enlightened me to his skill level.

We played a few games the other night, as I wanted to remind myself yet again how bad I was.

Now, to the point of this roundabout story.

Adam’s grades are improving, but he still has a couple classes where he’s really struggling (mainly simply handing in assignments). This week, he failed to turn in a few assignments that he said he had turned in, and thus, his privileges for playing xbox and/or watching TV have been revoked until he gets those turned in.

With his primary sources of free-time entertainment gone, I gave him a couple of options. He could “win back” his TV privileges by beating me at either chess or Scrabble. (Scrabble being another game he and I have played regularly lately)

He decided he would take a stab at chess, as he concedes my vocabulary is too expansive for me to lose to him at Scrabble.

So most of last night and today when we’ve been home, he’s been learning what he can at chess. We played a few games tonight, and while I won quite easily, he showed promise on a few moves, and I think with a bit more study and practice he can be a reasonably decent player.

Why hasn’t a tournament encouraged fans to make noise? Would no professionals play in it? I’d like to see some big time television network sponsor such an event.

Set a prize pool of something like $5 million. It should attract a FEW big name players, right? Put up signs indicating it’s OK to make noise. I wouldn’t go so far as making it like an NBA game where the PA system blares out sound which is meant to induce crowd noise.

But something where you have fans jeering guys while they serve, hooting and hollering during long rallies, and players getting pissed off at the fans and having no control over the loudness they wanted to bring.

I swear this would make someone millions.

I bet more than half of my friends on facebook currently do not have me in their news feed/status updates/whatever the hell it is on facebook.

Not that it bothers me, I just believe it to be true.

It’s funny, I’m quite excited to start a new decade and be BLOGGING about it, as I’ve been doing for several years now (scary.). I really would get a good kick out of what I would have had to say about things 10 years ago, so I know I will definitely look back on this in another 10 years with a smile.

Eight days ago, I took Adam to see 2012. I had extremely little desire to see it, but he was quite the opposite, and he seemed to enjoy it. Parts of me want to like this kind of movie, but, it’s just so terribly predictable, annoying, and unsurprisingly unrealistic.

I know that these kinds of movies aren’t necessarily supposed to be 100% real, but I find it irritating when a tsunami overturns a massive cruise ship…. in the middle of the ocean. I decided to turn it into a learning experience for Adam and had him do a little research on tsunamis when we got home.

And speaking of learning experiences, Adam has been doing better lately in school. In fact, he was doing so well I took him snowboarding Sunday. This was after a fairly grueling karate workout Saturday. We spent about four hours riding the same runs at Loveland over and over. We decided it was a much better ski area for us than our only other experiences at Breckenridge.

Problem is, today I learned that Adam has been ignoring a rather large project for his language arts class. It was due today, and he hadn’t done hardly any of it. So, I was rewarding Adam for doing well in school by taking him snowboarding, and it turns out he’s probably going to get a poor grade in one of his core classes.

He is doing well in his other two core classes, but it’s still really frustrating to be constantly riding him to remember to keep track of all of his assignments, and then have this happen. Either way, I still have huge confidence in the guy to figure things out — it’ll happen sooner or later.