We have been very busy at work, more than 50 hrs/wk. But, we have also been busy to make a better Avocado Catcher. Several weeks has been passed and here they are:
Well, I just wanted to say that when I got up this morning and heard about the Kanye West debacle at the MTV music awards, that the only two videos I mentioned liking on this blog were – Single Ladies and You Belong With Me!!!! I’m totally the perfect demographic for MTV! They are totally trying to market to 37 year old female patent examiners who don’t own an iPod. Ha! I know a good video when I see one.
The derailleur on my bike has been giving me a little bit of trouble – missing some gears when I’ve been shifting. Jeremy spent a lot of time this weekend trying to adjust them into alignment. There are 2 screws and a tension-er and it was driving him crazy to optimize all three at the same time. Jeremy has a touch of dyslexia and this optimization was hitting all the right confusion buttons: right, left, tight, loose, more, less.
Such a sweetie, trying to make my commute smoother and more comfortable. When I came home this evening – yup, you guessed it. Someone stole the rear wheel. Is the derailleur the part that moves or does it include the gears on the rear wheel? Can I say they stole the derailleur as well? Sucks to be my beat up, rusty old bike! I’m takin’ the bus tomorrow!
Doris, Happy Birthday!
love
Mom & Dad
I can not get over the deep seated feeling that when I try and raise money for Rett Syndrome, that I am begging. It is a very visceral feeling and something that I closely associate with a sense of shame and a dash of humiliation. I do not like to ask people to help, I do not like asking people for money. I have spoken other successful fundraisers and they say, oh, after you ask 10 people, it will feel like nothing, and I have asked 10 people, I’ve asked more than 10 people and I still feel awful. I think that other people do not feel this way (I know that there are professional fundraisers – the ones that work in development offices, their jobs just give me the heebe-jeebies, but I’m sure none of them would like to be a patent examiner), but it’s what I feel and it makes me feel bad that I can not do this thing that might someday lead my daughter to be able to use her hands. I also feel like so many people put in so much time to raise $$ to find a cure, I can not let them be the only ones to carry the burden, I must do my part.
The Fairfax stroll-a-thon is coming up mid-October, so today I decided that I’d take Edda to the mall and ask stores to donate some gift certificates for our valiant cause. I’m a big chicken. I asked no one. Edda was pissed that I gave up. She was game, I was not. I am so lame. There really is no excuse.
I tried to distract her with gold lame short shorts from American Apparel.
Edda is also unimpressed with Apple products. Genius bar! I did not actually know they really called it the “Genius bar” – I just thought it was a nickname.
It’s been a weird few weeks. I wanted to say that it’s been a tough few weeks, but that isn’t exactly right. Somehow the past few weeks have seen a clustering of bad and scary news from my friends or the friends of my friends. There has been: someone diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in their early 20s, someone who died of a pulmonary embolism in their late 30s with three kids, the youngest is just 6 weeks old, someone whose baby arrived too early, someone with a history of mental illness had a suicide attempt and is now paralyzed, someone who accidentally ran off an unfamiliar curvy road at night and ended up upside down in a body of water and had to go in a rescue a trapped person, someone trying to take care of a stubborn, disabled relative from 1500 miles away, someone trying to navigate a child with autism through the aggressive teenage years. And I feel like I don’t really know that many people. It’s just whenever I open my mouth (or go on facebook) and say, how’s it going?, a great big scary thing comes out of the other persons mouth. 🙁 It’s a wonder why anyone bothers to get up in the morning and go out the front door. All I can say is that life can be crazy, scary, unbearable and unfair and a lot of the time not very easy… Sigh.
Anyways, on a lighter note, we all went to a Rett Syndrome fundraiser tonight and I had the best time… We went to Garba for a Cure, put on by the Shah family in Frederick, MD. I broke out the sari from Singapore and I’d forgotten how to wrap it around me – I tried to follow some directions from Youtube, but it didn’t work very well. When we finally got to the fundraiser, two lovely Indian ladies helped me rewrap my sari around myself. I had more fun than I thought I would dancing and eating and chatting. I like it when that happens. Look, so many colors of fabric. Yummy!
I came home today and this is what I saw – the music blasting and kids chasing each other around the dining room table.
We are trying to convince Edda that she loves to watch new videos… It’s pretty hard, even though she likes Bob the Builder, the Wiggles, Blue’s Clues, etc, she only likes certain particular episodes. We are trying to get her to watch broadcast PBS just so we don’t have to have the same 7 videos going around and around the DVD player. It’s working out OK, yesterday she laughed her head off watching an episode of Curious George she hadn’t seen before..
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…
