http://www.flummel.com/ee Flummel, Flummer, Flummo, Daily, Journal, Parenting, Whining, Fun, Feel free to follow frequent fine flummery from afar, Find fiendish fun, fiery fulminations, and fascinating fickle fumings from a fixated farceur, Festiviti en {karan@flummel.com} Copyright {gmt_date format="2008"} 2012-05-14T23:17:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/dr_ron_is_suspended/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/dr_ron_is_suspended/#When:23:17:00Z After announcing that he was scaling back on February 9th, 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. Blogging 2012-05-14T23:17:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/oh_the_redux/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/oh_the_redux/#When:16:25:00Z 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. Blogging 2012-05-14T16:25:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/hoarding/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/hoarding/#When:23:09:00Z 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. Blogging 2012-05-12T23:09:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/capers/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/capers/#When:16:29:00Z 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. Blogging 2012-05-06T16:29:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/health_insurance/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/health_insurance/#When:02:48:01Z 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. Blogging 2012-05-06T02:48:01-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/and_finally_mr_unlikable_is_outta_there/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/and_finally_mr_unlikable_is_outta_there/#When:23:20:00Z Yup, after more than a month of promise, Newt quit. Politics Schmolitics 2012-04-30T23:20:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/my_grandmothers_chin/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/my_grandmothers_chin/#When:14:59:01Z Lately I’ve noticed that I have my Grandmother’s chin...pretty much the same shape, a little bit of wrinkly skin below and two or three whiskers poking out.  Thank god for tweezers. Blogging 2012-04-30T14:59:01-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/one_more_thing_today/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/one_more_thing_today/#When:16:12:00Z We’ve had a rough year with our pets....two cats have disappeared into the void....gone and missed....likely owl or coyote captured and Riso.  Poor Riso. Today at 3:30pm, I’m taking Riso to the vet to discuss his options.  For the last few months, he’s had increasing periods of distress. For the last two or three years, Riso has had intermitent ear infections...some clearly painful...one most recently that came upon him quickly and terribly with nasty ooozing goop that was so smelly, you could smell him from several feet away...like in a different room.  It was horrible and terrible and not so great and he was miserable...all of this happened within about three hours.  After eight weeks of different combinations of antibiotics. he was declared cured and we all celebrated! During that same period of time, Riso ate half a pan of special brownies...brownies given to someone in this family as a gift....and not placed high and out of reach...most likely a mistake made by the folks who ate the first half of the brownies.  Riso likes brownies....heck Riso likes eating so he ate them and then was totally and completely stoned for the next 20 hours.  He wouldn’t walk.  He wouldn’t pee.  He wouldn’t drink or eat and I got worried in a big way.  Finally I had to take him to the vet and they put in IV in to rehydrate him and he spent the night there and was just fine in the morning.  I was mortified....not because I have any real strong objections to that particular herb but because...well, I’m sort of square....in a personal private kind of way.  It was obvious that the vet clinic staff were all well informed of Riso’s incoming condition and discharge orders, so I just sucked it up and told them that he was headed directly to rehab. Then, about two week later, Riso was hurting.  He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t walk, he wouldn’t bark at outside noises and he was obviously in pain. It was agonizing to see him that way.  We took him back to the vet and we opted to not get lots of testing done and he was prescribed some doggy pain meds.  They worked well.  Within 2 days, he was normal again...at least his nutty version of normal.  I stopped the pain meds to see if he could do well without them and he seemed to do just fine. After that episode...and while the ear infection wars continued, we noticed that Riso had a large growth on his side....one that is noticibly increasing in size. It went from a first noticed palm-size growth to one that now covers the space over his ribs on one side.  He also seems to be having increasing trouble walking...we assume arthritis.  He lapsed back into his not moving, not eating, not drinking and not barking state like before and now only seems to function if I give him the pain meds. Alas. Today my visit...this time alone with Riso...is to discus what to do for him.  Even though I am deeply grieved to write that money is a factor in determing the level of care and investigation we will embark upon, realistically we must consider the expense. My conversation with our vet is going to cover the obvious issues of continuing his pain meds, how long and how effective, his quality of life and the polar opposite fears I have of both impatiently awaiting his demise vs selfishly extending his departure. I always swore that I would never extend an animal’s suffering but here I am at that point....and I know what I must do....I just hope that I can do it. update: The decision today was to keep him on the pain meds because he seems to do well on them but we’ll not pursue a diagnosis nor take any extreme measures.  He’s in decline but for now seems his regular happy self.  At the same time I did ask about end of life measures.  That was hard. Dog & Cat Days 2012-04-28T16:12:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/on_getting_a_dumb_phone/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/on_getting_a_dumb_phone/#When:15:35:00Z I do not want a smart phone.  Not only do I think that the data plans are too expensive, I don’t really need one. Most of my day I have easy access to a computer and for the most part, I don’t want to view that computer access on a tiny screen involving tons of up and down scrolling.  The only benefit that a smart phone would bring to me is the instant comparison shopping offered by instant internet checks....but then I would lose the cooling off period that saves me from pressure and impulse-driven decision making.  And the truth is too ofen I am driven by impulsive decisions. So, with those things in mind, I know that I do not want a smart phone...even though they are very cool and I have the one I want in mind and oh boy some of those aps look very cool....no, I do not need a smart phone. Sigh and alas. Our cellphone service is our phone service. I do need a cellphone and the only level of cellphone service left to me is a basic phone or as my friend Diane calls it, a dumb phone. When I was recently checking out the basic phones available by my carrier, I found my options very limited...limited, true, by me. I had a small list of basic phone must haves...a qwerty keyboard, a nice camera function, an expandable memory and a decent set of reviews.  That’s pretty much it.  When I plugged those desired features into the cellphone selector, not one phone popped up. I dropped features off my list one by one and ended up with only the qwerty keyboard as a required element and three phones were suggested, two with really bad reviews and only one that seemed decent and acceptible...the LG Extravert.  This phone has either just been moved by Verizon from a pre-pay phone to a plan phone or is migrating to prepay status which means that there just isn’t much out there to read about it.  Anyway, that’s the phone I picked....and am still awaiting. That said...it seems that basic phone service is getting slowly archived as a cellphone option and soon enough, we’ll lose that as a choice...forcing us to smart phones.  Hopefully that means the data plans that drive these phones will eventually drop in cost and hopefully my new cellphone, if it ever arrives, will last until that happens.  Blogging 2012-04-28T15:35:00-08:00 http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/time_brick/ http://www.flummel.com/ee/index.php?/site/time_brick/#When:15:06:00Z The last couple of weeks have compressed themselves into a solid brick of work and time constraining.  Having been highly spoiled by a lifestyle of stretching out appointments and sleeping in, I don’t like it one bit.  Not one bit. I’ve been working on a new brochure for the cooking school and even though the process has become fairly routine, I am using updated software...and by updated I mean software with new buttons and layouts and things moved and it’s infuriating when I feel pressed by the deadline.  The truth is that I have had the software update installed for a while now but I’m the sort of learner that can diddle and practice as much as I want but I don’t “get” it until I actually have to get it. A personality flaw for sure, but one that I’ve had to endure forever. I’ve also chosen this crunch time to re-insert myself into some of the volunteer work I"ve been doing with those disaster folks plus I’ve had a few gigs doing moulage for some practice disasters.  And...I’m getting ready to do moulage for a ginormous eight county disaster simulation in early May.  Getting ready means meeting with the planning committee and researching the sorts of anticipated injuries so that I can make people ugly in a most reaslistic way.  Who knew that one day a sentence like that would be appropriate for my resume? And...my cellphone started failing....right on the heel of giving up our landline.  That meant a quick trip to the cellphone store to get hands-on with few measly basic phones still available. I made my decision and went home to order the phone online, an effort that grants me a $50 online discount.  That same effort proved too challenging because it failed and I was instructed to call for assistance.  The assistance took 56 minutes on my failing cellphone and in the end was wasted effort because after waiting all week for the phone to arrive, it didn’t.  I called again and found that the assistant from before boffed the order so I spent another 34 minutes on the phone getting it all straighted out....arguing that I was entitled to the $50 off and indeed, I would not pay the $30 upgrade fee that was implemented on all new phone orders the day after I ordered the phone the week before.  More about all of this later. This week ended with a nice visit from Leonard’s niece who stayed three days and flew home last night. She was the first relative to meet Jethro and their meeting was magical.  She’s a baby natural and he adored her from the first minute. Our challenge in the visit was that she is an all natural, all organic kind of eater with a billion allergies and food sensitivities so it was hard to feed her.  I finally just took her to Trader Joe’s where she shopped her own food and we ate around the foods she prefered.  I loved it.  Leonard not so much. And now, as the brochure is nearly finished and our lives return to quiet...I’m brewing a rather nasty cold that I just know will leave me flat....rest I need but not enjoy.  Alas. Blogging 2012-04-28T15:06:00-08:00