Month: September 2009

I watched Obama’s speech last night. His goals were noble, but not realistic. First, according to his estimates that 500B could be saved by eliminating wastes in our current Medicare and Medicaid programs. This amount of money then can be used to support Universal Health Care he proposed without increase taxes. If his words were true, then why not save those 500B first to demonstrate that government really can deliver.

Remember, he promised the unemployment will be limited to 8% in summer during his various bail-out speeches. Right now, we are at 9.5% unemployment. And with one estimate, we are actually at 16% national wide.

Government, by its own very nature, is just not suited for certain jobs. For example, every time I visited US Post Office, no matter how long the line it was, and no matter how full its parking lot for their back office people was, there were only two Postal workers at the front desk working very hard to shrink the line. At FedEx and UPS stores, it was entirely different. More people will show up to serve and the line is always short and sweet.

Therefore, I kind of agreed with the Republican response to his speech with my additions, of course.

1) let us reform the health care system together, step by step.
2) no pre-conditions denial by the insurance companies
3) universal health insurance for our kids
4) practice preventive medicine more
5) reform mal-practice law (We need some safe guards, but not at current levels)
6) and please, no public (ie., government) option in any form or shape

In addition, no coverage for illegal immigrants . Of course, some of them are decent and hard working folks, but they are “illegal” nevertheless. No Medicare and Medicaid for those who have never worked in the USA and never paid our taxes for 10 years. Home makers are exempt because their spouses work.

Finally, President, Congress men and women should not have their own health care plan. They should shop in the open market, just like all of us do.

I am concerned a) Where is the money? b) I don’t like someone else (including government) spend other people’s money.

The plumbing got fixed, turns out that the blue stuff is fire stop which prevents flames from having easy access through holes cut in the floorboard and hopefully buying one a few more moments of escape time… We called a professional in for the repair, which was a good call because even thought it took him only a few hours, it would have taken us 14 trips to Home Depot and we would have probably made a mess out of it. There is still a hole in the ceiling and a hole in the master bedroom’s closet, but at least there is no longer a flood every time that Eliana takes a bath/shower. To celebrate, I managed to find another leaking pipe, this time it’s from the 1st floor sink into the basement. Hooray us!

The car battery did get replaced. Jeremy read on Consumer Reports that Costco sold the “best value” car battery – so for a brief moment, we thought about joining Costco. We haven’t joined yet because we can only shop on the weekends and the lines at Costco are legendary on the weekends. Actually, forget about the check-out lines, the lines just to find a parking spot are legendary. So Jeremy went on a weeknight to check out their car battery section and they were out of the exact type that we needed. So instead of buying a battery from Costco and doing it ourselves, we sent the car to the shop and got a new battery there. I know, we could have been more thrifty, but what can I say – convenience won out because even though Jeremy and I don’t drive, the kids are on the road quite a bit.

The kitchenaid is fixed. Nine dollars people! Nine dollars 🙂 Notice the little envelope containing spare part from Ebay. I love Ebay for finding little crap like spare parts to home appliances.

In thanks for dogsitting, Colleen and Eric got me this fabulous pink loungewear from the Outer Banks. You can’t really tell from the photo, but it has some sparkly beading in the flowers. The pairing with the orange Crocs add a little Pop! to the outfit I think…

Happy 09-09-09 everyone! Not as lucky as 08-08-08, but fun nonetheless.

We went to back to school night for Edda tonight. It was very nice to spend some time with Edda’s teacher and talk about what we wanted to work on this year and she’s been very receptive to our ideas. It’s a good mix of inclusion and self-contained classroom – I was a little hesitant to go either way full time just because both have benefits and drawbacks and really, I want Edda to lead the way to show me what she likes and what she dislikes. (Well, I know she dislikes art!) I hope to be able to participate a little more at Edda’s school this year – we’ll see how that goes and if work will cooperate.

Edda had a little “episode” last night. I hate to call it a seizure, because I don’t think that is what it is, but we haven’t seen it in a long, long time. This one was pretty long – about 10 minutes, her eyes were dilated and she was shivering a little and quite rigid. I tried to take a picture of her dialated eyes, but it’s hard when you have dark brown eyes to see the pupil. (I thought I didn’t have pupils until I was in 6th grade because my brown eyes are even darker than Edda’s.)

The kids are eligible to get free seasonal (not swine) flu shots at school this year. I looked at the form and it asked “does your child have any significant chronic or long term illnesses involving kidneys, heart, lungs, nervous system, brain or blood system”. I never know how to answer this question – I think Edda is a perfect candidate for a flu shot (we’ve gotten one every year and since she sticks her hand in her mouth every 2 seconds, she is quite the disease vector) and I don’t generally consider Edda to have an “illness”, rather I think of Rett Syndrome as a “state of being”, but it’s true she has a chronic condition involving her brain – so I guess the obvious answer is YES. But then I think she’s disqualified from getting the flu shot at school. Oh well. We’ll see how that goes too…

Even though it was drizzling, Jeremy was determined to get in one last grilling session of the season. What is Labor Day without some grilled meat? Edda was very eager to check up on the meat..

Jeremy ducked inside to make some of the sides and when he went back out, there was a pretty good sized grease fire going on. I even hauled the fire extinguisher out from under the kitchen sink, just in case it started to get bigger rather than smaller. Jeremy told me he could see the neighbors looking through their windows – they were probably wondering if they should call 911 on us. Once the gas was off, the rain took care of the fire and the meat turned out great (just a little charred on the outside, but perfect on the inside).

We celebrated Montgomery County’s 233rd birthday. We got there right at 2pm when it started and we wanted to stay until 3:30 pm when the cake was served by Ike Leggett, but we didn’t make it until the cake, so much for that.

Edda and Jeremy checked out the heirloom gardens:

Vince tried out some 3D glasses and a ball-flipping toy. God, I can’t believe that kids had to get through the winter with only that little toy in their little hands.

To celebrate our anniversary, Jeremy took me (and Ruby) on a walking tour of Georgetown. We parked about a mile away from the main drag and walked through gorgeous neighborhoods with beautiful row houses.

Though the university full of college kids moving into the dorms:

And finally to the main drag – so full of people and Hummer limos. We split a brownie sundae and headed back to the car. Total distance – 3.2 miles. I wonder if it was far enough to work off the sundae. Probably not.

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Last night, I went to the 9:30 club to see a Wallflowers concert. I didn’t take the above photo, I was advised not to take my camera to the club, so I’m posting someone else’s photos of the Wallflowers at the 9:30 club in 2007. It’s pretty much the same idea, except that the main dude was wearing a hat last night.

I’m not a huge music fan, that has already been established, so I went with my huge music fan coworker – Jane. This was the first concert that I’ve gone to where I could actually see the band – I was about 30 feet away from everyone in the band. It was a wonderfully intimate experience where the lead singer (Jakob Dylan, Bob’s son) would talk to the audience between songs. I am forever grateful that someone somewhere decided that these clubs should be non-smoking, so I enjoyed a whole evening without smelling cigarette smoke or pot and my still recovering lungs were very appreciative.

I got home at 12:30 am last night. I’m a little tired today, but I had a great time last night.

Vince’s least favorite subject is writing. He likes to write as little as possible in order to fulfill the parameters of the assignment. This is about his summer vacation with Kiki and Kappa, they went to a water park called the Zoom Flume. I thought the last entry was pretty funny.

Our Kitchenaid broke about a week ago. The little lever that brings the mixing bowl up towards the beater stopped lifting the bowl. The Kitchenaid is very special to me, it was a wedding gift from my group of closest friends in college – they all pooled their money together and bought us this mixer. We’ve made a million cakes, mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, and also grind our meat with it. And frankly, it’s suppose to last forever and 11 years is certainly not forever. I was determined to fix it, so I took it all apart..

and ordered a 9 dollar part on Ebay and then hopefully in a week, I’ll be able to put it back together again.

On a foodie note, since the kids are in school and Eliana is working way fewer hours during the day, we’ve been able to reinstate Tuesday date night which have been missing all summer. Jeremy and I went to see Julie & Julia which was so fun and perfect for us -> food and blogging both hobbies of ours. There is a scene where the husband and wife have a fight and then the husband says that no way can she blog about the fight. It doesn’t happen much, but certainly, there are moments that Jeremy looks at me while we are in the middle of some sort of complicated mess and says to me – this is totally staying out of the blog. Some things just have to remain unrecorded except in our own malleable memories.

The school year started today and I have no photos because I was already at work in Virginia with my camera, so instead of children heading off towards higher education making themselves into model citizens, I’m giving you a photo of Ruby eating a raw lamb bone. It’s not a fantastic photo, but I do like that the raw meat is completely in focus – glistening. We really need to get a 2nd camera so Jeremy can document every single second of everyday when I’m not around.

All weekend, we prepped Edda, told her she was going to kindergarten with a new fabulous teacher and new fabulous school. This morning, she wandered over to the front foyer many times to wait for the bus. This transition was completely traumatic for me and not at all for Edda. Apparently it was so not traumatic that she spent a lot of the school day napping – or maybe it was traumatic and she was napping to avoid it all. She has been in a great mood for the past few weeks and it was no different today.

Vincent headed off to 2nd grade. Apparently he doesn’t yet feel like a 2nd grader, he still feels like a first grader. No homework tonight, so he still got to play outdoors until dusk with his friends. One last taste of summer.