Not only our flight, but our trip to the airport this evening are in doubt.
I still expect to make out in time to see Eugenia chant the Haftorah on Saturday, but we might not even be able to leave the house until tomorrow morning.
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Taking the red eye to Seattle tomorrow for my niece’s bat Mitzvah.
Assuming that the weather permits, which is a substantial assumption.
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A Midsummer Nights Dream put on by Open Space Arts.
Natalie was Moth, Charlie was Starveling.
At the end of the play, Mark, one of the techs, proposed Elora, who played Titania & Hyppolyta.
She said yes.
I gave then my standard advice, which is to elope
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The kids have rehearsal right now. We’ve dropped them off, and Sharon and I are having a date night.
We are going to have sushi, but we won’t be getting our Repo Man on.
We will pay for said sushi.
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I am going to Seattle in 2 weeks (Happy Bat Mitzvah, Eugenia!) and I’m not even thinking about scoring some legal weed.
Some time in the past few years, it seems that I’ve gotten even duller.
FWIW, I understand that I chose a career that involves peeing in a bottle as a part of the interview process.
One day, I will do the Apple Juice Joke.
Because Maryland’s insurance exchange is completely f%$#ed up:
More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.
Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”
The repeated warnings culminated days before the launch, with one from contractors testing the Web site that said it was “extremely unstable” and another from an outside consultant that urged state officials not to let residents enroll in health plans because there was “no clear picture” of what would happen when the exchange would turn on.
Within moments of its launch at noon Oct. 1, the Web site crashed in a calamitous debut that was supposed to be a crowning moment for Maryland officials who had embraced President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and pledged to build a state-run exchange that would be unparalleled.
Instead, by the next morning only four people had signed up using the Web site — and amazed that anyone had gotten through the system successfully, state officials contacted each of them to make sure they were real. The site’s problems continue to prevent Marylanders from signing up for health insurance. As of Friday, 20,358 people had selected private plans, and state officials have said they do not expect to come close to their initial goal of 150,000 by the end of March.
This report is based on a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents, including e-mails, internal reports, audits and court records, along with interviews with dozens of current and former contractors, state officials and others. The review shows that the creation of the exchange was dysfunctional from the start and that there were repeated missteps at almost every level.
I had to do something, MHIP was going away in June, as a result of the implementation of the PPACA, but the web site is a horror show.
It pushed me to take a serious look at the plan offered by the job shop that cuts my paycheck, and it turned out that an HSA offered through my employer, with the attendant tax advantages of pretax contributions, was the best deal.
Updated Pic. Starfleet Transportation
We were driving to an SCA event in DC, and I drove by a school bus, and saw this.
I pointed it put to Natalie, who then snapped these pix.
[on update]
There were issues with the photographs, etc. because of the mobile posting app.
So I have updated this to include:
BTW, in case you missed it, the bus is from Starfleet Transportation.
*Obviously, I am limiting my set “School Bus” to those vehicles that are actually colored school bus colors.
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Better than the original.
Now going to eat Chinese food, the traditional Jewish observance of Christmas. (Movie & Chinese food, that is)
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I’m at my mother-in-laws, tweaking her computer. (Right now, I am waiting for updates to install)
Additionally, there were some documents she could not find.
They were on her kitchen table, and now she cannot find them.
Well, she did find them. It turned out that she had put them away, in the proper folder, in the proper drawer, in her filing cabinet.
If I had a dollar for each time that Sharon* did something list this, I’d be a part of the 1%.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, She Who Must Be Obeyed, my wife.
Latkes from scratch at my mother-in-law’s. (THANK GOD FOR FOOD PROCESSORS)
Unfortunately, because this is a collaborative cooking experience, there is a shortage of pans, so I am relegated to a tiny pan which can only handle 3 latkes at a time.
Chanukah in Thanksgiving, gotta love it.
No specific recipe for the latkes, just potatoes, onions, eggs, matzoh meal, salt, and pepper in proportions dictated by my gut.
My only specific advice is to grate the onions first, because the onions have a chemical that prevents the grated potatoes from changing color in the air.
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They saw my chin.
I shaved off my beard.
I got a lot of shocked looks.
Hopefully, we will get our internet back.
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Did I mention that it is F#@&ing raining?
The joys of children are without number.
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Natalie is a dryad, and Charlie is an Angler Fish.
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Because, you see, 19 years (!) ago, I plighted Sharon’s troth, and as such am no longer available to the general populace.
Let the lamentations commence.
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And seeing a how, based on two decades of observations about how Sharon* is affected by weddings, my guess its that I will more make our to my trusty laptop tonight.
So have some pictures of our kitten, Destructo, age 8 months, I a picnic basket.
Why he went in, I have no idea, but he did NOT want to leave.
* Love of my life, light of the cosmos, SHE WHO MUST BE
OBEYED, my wife.
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And I am not as think as you drunk.
That is all.
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Charlie and I both had a hard time, while Sharon and Natalie did OK.
Not sure why.
How I constructed the cat-trapinator, the video
How the motion detector works
My readers may recall my travails with RP the Cat.
Well, I have finally defeated RP, an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, using my allegedly superior brain.
In my first encounter with RP, as a kitten about 2 years ago, when we caught her in a “have a heart” type trap.
We brought her in, and when she was released, she ran around the basement at relativistic speeds, and then she beat me up, and ran up into the basement suspended ceiling.
She found her way out of the house the next day, so I chalked it up to experience, until, a couple of months later, when we got our new cats, she started venturing back to eat their food.
Sharon* told me that the cat was going in and out of the house, but I was dubious until until I caught it on time-lapse video.
Well, the other day, I got a frantic call from my wife: RP had lured Destructo into the ceiling, and she and kids had to rescue him.
So, I decided to get serious about catching the cat.
First, I used a bunch of wire ties to attach the have a heart trap to the travel cage we used to transport Lavi and Tudza when we moved from Texas to Maryland.
Then I put food, water, and a catnip sock in the cage, and we took to locking our cats, Meatball/Mousetrap and Destructo in the bathroom in the evening.
Unfortunately, this did not work. RP was too smart: She stepped over the trigger plate of the trap.
So, I had to figure a way to detect her, and trigger the trap.
First, I bought a remote controlled electrical outlet for twelve bucks at Home Depot.
I plugged my Dremel tool into this outlet, and then tied the business end to the trap plate, so when the power goes on, it triggers the trap.
Then borrowed my Son’s phone, and installed Motion Detector Pro, which uses the camera as a motion sensor, turned off sleep mode for the phone (It’s under development in settings), and put it on top of the cage.
I then tested the motion detector using our cats, and it worked.
Finally, I got myself a Ustream account, put the Ustream app on my phone, and used my laptop’s webcam to stream an image of the cage to the web.
Well, at about 2:00 am Saturday morning, I got the text, and I looked at the video, and the cat was there, so I hit the remote, and headed downstairs.
Much to my surprise, I had caught the cat, so I removed the trap from the cage, put a tray with some kitty litter inside, and went to bed.
Now we have to decide what we do after she gets spayed (she has already had 2-3 litters).
In the short term, we are trying to see if she is amenable to being adopted.
If not, we find her some place far away where she can live as a barn cat.
So, by using more computing power than was available to the Apollo program, I finally managed to catch the cat.
And there was much rejoicing.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
The kids spent some gift money from Pappa Ron on laptops.
So I’ve spent most of tonight getting their computers up and running.
More for Natalie, who got a laptop with Windows 8, that we are downgrading to Windows 7, because Windows 8 sucks like a thousand hoovers all going at once.
Still gotta wait for the Win 7 disk to arrive, but I have all the Win 7 drivers located and downloaded.
It also mean that all our primary computers will be running the same OS.
Sigh….