[ Monday, May 14, 2012 ]

Dr. Ron is suspended

After announcing that he was scaling back on February 9^th, Ron Paul officially suspended his campaign today. Now other than raise as much money as was possible during those last three months, I can’t think of any reason why he didn’t just leave in February.  Gotta love the political motivation these guys bring to a campaign.

Oh the redux

Yesterday, while Rejjie and Leonard were out buying groceries for our Mother’s Day barbecue, she was stalked throughout the grocery store by this guy, again. He made his presence known by circling and passing and making eye contact with her every time.  Leonard and Rej cut their trip short, came home and called the police because, once again, he’s in violation of the long lasting protection order, renewed each year just in case he might wig out on her again.

The responding police officer took statements from both and then we listened in as the find-Aaron-effort unfolded.  It seemed apparent that Aaron knew he was in big trouble because he was leaving chicken tracks to try to demonstrate that he was elsewhere when Rejjie spotted him.  He had a friend call and report he was suicidal at a local park at exactly the same time he was in the store. Then he apparently hot footed it northward to put some distance between Olympia and himself.  Finally the cop connected with him and first he denied that he was there and then when he was informed that the store ran a surveillance camera 24/7, he changed that story and then claimed he only walked by her to verify that it was her and then he met the obligation of the protection order and left immediately.  The cop then reminded him of the surveillance camera and the story changed.  Then the cop reminded him again of the surveillance camera and the story changed...and on and on and on. 

One thing about Aaron is that his idiocy never changes.  The bad news for him is that this is his third time violating this same protection order and in this state, that means he’s crossed the line into felony land. This means that he’s very likely to get convicted of a felony and likely to spend a few years in federal prison and in my mind, once someone goes to federal prison, most are lost forever.  But...and I can’t believe I’m writing this...I feel kind of sorry for him. His second and third violations were for getting too close to my daughter.  He’s going to prison for being stupid.  Yeah, I get all the reasons that he deserves this but I just can’t shake the sadness of his life. 

I’m such a sap.

That said, he is always a little bit of a nidge in the back of our brains. It will be good not to worry about him for the time he’s locked up.

I wish there was less drama in our lives.

[ Saturday, May 12, 2012 ]

Hoarding

There was a time when I think hoarding wasn’t such a bad thing to do...it meant you had enough canned goods and batteries for the big bomb and only the odd man down the street had newspapers stacked to the ceiling...and he was a rarity...and he was called crazy not a hoarder. 

Oh the good old days.

Now with the new focus on hoarding which is also clearly crazy, I’ve come to realize that I too am a hoarder and no, I don’t have bedrooms full of breakfast cereal nor a 698 year collection of gift wrap filling Rubbermaid bins in the basement nor even 2 billion cats peeing freely in the living spaces at Flummelville.  The truth is that I hoard links and bookmarks.  Right now my RSS feed collector has no fewer than about 750 links and yes most of them are active.  Like the cat ladies of the world, I don’t actually know all of their names or even visit them on a daily or even annual basis but at one point, I just thought this might be an interesting place to revisit.

I did keep up with the updates for a while but like other darker driven hoarders, I quickly lost control of it and if I don’t log in for a couple of days, I’m greeted by an overwhelming number of read-me and read-me-now blogs and websites.

Once I named this problem hoarding, I started to do something about it and for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been wiping them off of my blogroll...gladly....most of the time.  And I know that I’m not so terribly hooked and damaged by this problem because most of the time I have no problem just do a mass wipe of all the unread entries.

So...my promise to me the link hoarder....I promise to delete those bookmarks I no longer care about like trips to Australia and the details about the freakish mola mola fish and all those things that hit me as interesting once upon a time.  I promise to delete RSS feeds to websites that duplicate link giving and post obnoxious design collages every single day.  My new rule...if I don’t like posts for three days in a row...then you’re outta there.

This out to cut my blogroll in half...and my favorite bookmarks...well that’s more challenging because it requires that I actually try to remember why I bookmarked them in the first place.

Once I conquer these two hoarding problems, I’m so on to weeding out my amazon.com wishlist.

Oy....now there’s a greedy looking mess.

[ Sunday, May 06, 2012 ]

Capers

First a message to Laura....no this isn’t a post about those salty little bug looking things.

Long start to a short message:

I think Capers is a great name for a restaurant...not because of the condiment, but because it sounds mysterious and a little edgy.

Just saying.  Send me a finder’s fee.

[ Saturday, May 05, 2012 ]

Health insurance

Because he will be 26 this June, El Jay is getting booted off of our health insurance plan.

This places us at a health insurance crossroads.  El Jay will be out.  Rej will continue to be a member of the Medicaid health system and we have to decide if we will change our plan.  We kept Rejjie on our plan because I was nervous about cutting her loose when we weren’t sure if she’d be able to stay on the state dole and I didn’t know how easy it would be to add her back in once she was out.

Let me start again.

Rejjie is a member of the larger welfare state.  She landed there because she became with child and our health insurance plan specifically excluded maternity care. We chose that particular insurance plan because we gambled that we would no longer need maternity care.  We guessed wrong.  Rather than run ourselves ragged with the debt that comes with prenatal and delivery care, we encouraged her to seek that medicaid coverage.  And when she delivered our beloved Jethro, he joined his mom in those ranks.

We continued to carry Rej on our insurance plan but Jethro was not eligible because he was not our dependent.  Rej remained on Medicaid with her son.  She was double covered but better covered by Medicaid.

When the realization that El Jay would no longer be allowed to stay with our plan, we began to research options for health care coverage and found that even if we paid for an individual plan for him and stopped covering Rejjie, we could save a significant amount of money. 

The story would have been different if we could have covered Jethro but our plan specifically excludes him.

Don’t you just hate health care insurance?

Anyway, we are dropping El Jay and Rejjie from our plan and our health care costs, even if we pay for the individual plan for El Jay is dropping almost $400 a month.  Now if you consider that we cut our cable bill by $100...we are now $500 ahead of where we were just two months ago. 

If only we were able to cut our cell phone coverage......but there’s not much chance of that....at least until Verizon can figure out a way to beat Apple at its own game.

[ Monday, April 30, 2012 ]

And finally Mr Unlikable is outta there

Yup, after more than a month of promise, Newt quit.