Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

Yup, here we go, yet another pointless political disquisition...  Off into the wilds, but hey, it's my space, I can do what I want. It occurred to me the other day that if you are a political candidate who is 100% invested in getting office so you can make sure you "get back at" some group, or seek to make sure those whom you identify with get ahead beyond any other group, you may not be the sort of person who we need in government. Before you get all bent out of shape, let me finish the thought. We need people who will work towards making our systems, our country, and our world both fair and workable in the long run.  That means we need people who are going to advocate for the disadvantaged or discriminated groups to come to a level with everyone else, so, frankly, no one is "advantaged" at the expense of someone else, and that if the group you identify with is one that is historically discriminated against, then yes, we need to make a fair system - PERIOD. I k...

Here we are, late February.  Just about everyone is fed up with winter, and this one has been something a bit unusual.  Over the past week, we went from "oh, hey, snow may be coming" to "SNOWMAGEDDON!!" and back down to "well, that's a lot of shoveling."  The local news I watch has been pointing out that our snow totals, to date, are running about double what a normal winter is.  Which is weird, but somewhat helpful. On the average winter, as a kid, we used to average about five feet of snow.  Yeah, sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, at least if you're used to it.  Then there's the details which tend to make it a little easier to deal with.  If you've been around snow like I have, you know that the five-foot number isn't all at once, happens over about eight months, and it's measured at the airport.  Gravity also helps to reduce that number. Huh?  Well, here goes.  In Minnesota, the only month out of the year in which we ha...

I've seen it said often, that having a pet offers many wonderful days and one terrible one.  Saturday, February 11 2023, was that day for our Leo.   Leonidas, we named him, back in 2009, as a commanding sort of fellow.  Turns out he was a big floofy teddy bear.  Though he had the sort of bark that could make people soil themselves, and he was definitely stand-offish if he did not know you and you were not greeted by one of his people. But that's the Terv breed.  Belgian Tervuren, the name is often spelled, are a fairly rare breed, thankfully.  Our first, Daisy, was misidentified so many times until we finally figured it out.  When we lost her, it was an immediate turnabout to get another one.  Daisy, my first dog, was so special and wonderful we really wanted more.   I know, I started about Leo, but I suppose I should put a bit in here about our Daisy, as well.  It was her fault we wanted Leo. It all started with my wife saying "hey...

My head hurts.  Probably would hurt a lot less if I stopped the self-abuse.  Such as slapping my forehead in outright despair.  First, I offer unto you this link: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/world/spacex-elon-musk-tesla-roadster-five-years-scn/index.html And then, careful reader, I direct you to the last sentence of the 10th paragraph, specifically "...a data storage device loaded with the works of sci-fi writer Isaac Asminov and a..."  Fairly confident in stating that Ms. Wattles has no experience with fiction published in the last century.  For this century, one expects her highest level of fiction consumption comes from TikTok. I know.  I nit pick.  Thing is, a hundred years from now, someone tries to read something like that and then they'll ask themselves "who is Asminov?  I know Asimov, but Asminov?"   It's not the little things that will kill us.  Not the germs.  It's the fact that someone reviewing a scientific paper...

Still here, still braining, a bit. I know, it's January, there's nothing at all going on, right?  Well, not in my world. For starters, did your health care insurance change at the beginning of the year?  For some of you, it did.  The reason why matters little.  The bottom line is that, for thousands, probably millions of people, their insurance changed.  For some, it's a major change - as in one company to another.  For others, it might have seemed a minor change.  A few more things included in the coverage since they hiked the premium, or maybe it dropped a bit, and so did some options.   Whatever those changes might have been, they play havoc in my world.  Let's say, for example, you're on an on-going therapy.  Like me.  I'm diabetic.  Is my insurance still going to cover the same things it did last year?  For most folks, that's a "yes."  For some it may be an "I sure hope so".  For a growing group of folk...

Full disclosure - I attended the same MIAC school which my father graduated from, Hamline is also an MIAC school, and it used to have a law school.  Apparently now it has a collection of kindergarten-level halfwits at the helm.  The great and wonderful thing about most kindergarteners is that they're filled to overflowing with potential.  The leadership of Hamline, on the other hand, is also full of potential - the sort of potential which leads to disastrous futures, disappointment, and generally low achievement across the board, because they're seeking not to offend. Yup, my friends, I've waded into yet another one of those rather large dustups that any slack-jawed halfwit could see it wasn't going to be that big of a deal until someone did a dipshit move... So let's start with the beginning of the day.  After my alarm clock goes off and blasts me out of bed (yes, it's across the room, where I need to get up, because I learned many years ago I had become so ade...

Part of me thinks that might be interesting, but another part admits that to be an immortal must be pretty tiresome.  I mean, the wonder of inventions, of new knowledge, and new art is probably wonderful, but the truly depressing part might be how cruel people can be to one another and the world at large.   So yeah, it's been a year.   Putting it mildly.   I mean, at the beginning of the year, I was sitting fat, dumb, and happy, with a solid job, working with people who liked me, who I really liked, and doing a job that really felt rewarding.  Then I started to get this itch.  I started looking around, outside my foxhole, as it were, as it had been three and a half years, and the IT Dork deep down inside of me kept screaming "Look, these jobs never last forever, you're gonna get run over and flattened by something because that ALWAYS HAPPENS!"  A larger portion of my semi-logical brain said "shaddup you in da corner dere.  Youse don...