Date night.

After I did my little presentation in front of the school board, Jeremy commented to me that he very rarely gets to see me in a “professional” light. I had dressed up a little to go to the school board – a sweater set and dry-clean only pants and I delivered a pretty “professional” type presentation. I laughed and said that not only did I take talking to the school board seriously, but also the night before the school board presentation, I did kind of a fashion faux pas on “date night” and I was trying to make up for it.

The past few “date nights” have been kind of a fiasco for us, it’s hard to find restaurants at the right price point and sometimes we end up spending more money than we want to on food that isn’t very good. Also, we’d rather see the sights than eat, but that is kind of hard to arrange on a Tuesday night. So I’ve been on the lookout for cheaper and funner “date nights”.

What I found was alumni night at a science museum. Our graduate school was hosting an awards ceremony at a small science museum downtown with the assurance that attendees to the event would sit through a SHORT ceremony would get free access to the science museum. I had never heard of the science museum, but I figured I wouldn’t know anyone there and we could sit in the back and that there would be free food and drinks and we could enjoy the science museum.

So I show up right on time and I see the free food and the open bar. However, it turned out that everyone was dressed in suits and ties and there were no seats – no sitting in the back, only milling around and talking to people. I was dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt which advertised an LA rock station and black corduroys and white running shoes. Whoops. And it turns out that I actually knew some people there, so I was a little bit embarrassed. Oh well, at least it was cheap fun.

Free food:

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Open bar:

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Our one big thing.

Maryland doesn’t have a lot of funding for disabled kids – the money is really so short that when I’m on the phone with the state, they ask me – “Well, is Edda going to be homeless within 48 hours?” and I say no and then they tell me, well they only have enough money to help the folks who are imminently going to be homeless. So then I end up feeling that I need to be giving money to the state programs rather than asking for some help with a van modification or something.

Anyways, there was always this kind of extra bit of money that they put aside called “Rolling Access” where every year you could file a one time request and they would try and fund the request and distribute it among all the applicants. I don’t think the total was very much money in terms of the whole operating budget, I think the average pay out was something like $1000. Some people asked for help with therapy bills or camp bills. We asked for a jogging stroller about a year ago and we were finally lucky enough to get it, because a month after we got our check, the Rolling Access funding was cut. (That really wasn’t a huge surprise.)

I am very excited to go hiking again with the whole family. Hopefully, we can do it soon once all the snow melts away.

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Board of Education – making cuts.

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Last night, Jeremy and I sat in on the school district’s budget meeting. Our school district has 150,000 kids in it, it’s pretty big. The budget for this year is very difficult – as one can imagine, cuts need to be made and lots of people made impassioned pleas about keeping such vital services like buses, magnet programs and media specialists. Lots of people representing different clusters in the county got up and said basically we are asking for nothing, no building improvements, no special programs, we are just asking for no staffing reductions. Everyone is trying very hard to keep staffing in place.

We were there last night to try and save Edda’s preschool program, MPAC, which is run by the ARC of Montgomery County. Edda graduated from MPAC last June and we were sad to see her leave the program. MPAC has been a partner with the school system for over 30 years and was a wonderful place for Edda. Now the school system wants to no longer outsource the preschool program to MPAC, rather they want to create an internal program run by the school system itself. About 20 parents spoke out in support of keeping MPAC open. It was very emotional to listen to 20 parents of special needs kids talk about something important in the lives of their kids. Someone took video of my testimony! More information on Special Needs Truth ’08 blog.

Doris Lee: Testimony on Special-Needs Preschool from Mark Miller on Vimeo.

Where Is Al Gore ???

Where is Al Gore? The weather forecast in the Northern Hemisphere everywhere is for more snow. And it has been in deep freeze for many days already.

Al is investing in a foreign company which gets US government’s $800+ millions loan (from us, US tax payers) to produce $80,000+ futuristic “green” cars. Cars for generally public, don’t think so. Maybe, just for very few “green” people with a lot of “green” notes hanging around.

Without human, global weather changes (ice age vs. global warming) have happened many times before. During those changes, there wasn’t any man-made carbon in the atmosphere.

Yes, everyone needs to conserve, not only conserving energy, but also conserving everything else. “To leave as many as we can before we leave” and “being not wasteful” are always part of me. But to me, “having decent jobs and being able to pay the bills” is the foremost “green” thing that it can happy to any family world-wide.

To become a “green” fanatic (or worst, “green” parasites to feed on others’ job losses) isn’t the way to go. In short, “being green” and “being able to feed oneself” should be side-by-side and, furthermore, they should be hand-in-hand.