User:Woozle/blog

• 2013-01-19 2215 What Happened with MegaPath : ... and the punchline, too.
• 2012-04-12 1559 Amendment : As pretty much everyone who is both in North Carolina and not living in a cave is now aware, our esteemed "conservatives" are currently trying to pass a law amending the state Constitution to make gay marriage even more illegal than it already is -- because of course if you don't make it illegal enough, you never know what those gays might do. In our part of the state, the political posters advocating against this change have so far heavily outnumbered the signs in favor -- which apparently didn't sit right with someone. Rather than putting up their own sign, however, they bought a can of black spray paint...
• 2012-03-11 1551 Our Financial Situation : I keep finding myself wanting to explain our somewhat unusual financial situation; most recently, a conversation on G+ has turned to employment status, and I felt I needed to have a reference page for the whole story so I could just link to that rather than explaining it in-thread.

2011

• 2011-09-04 0913 The US Chamber of Growth (a metaphorical tale) : Remember when used to sit back and admire our lovely hardwood forests -- and then the wisteria salesman talked us into leveraging our assets with accelerated growth through diversification?
• 2011-05-30 0908 Braindead Facebook comment of the day : I can see this comment, but FB won't let me reply to it directly -- it was made visible to me when a friend (FB and RL) made her own comment on the link which started the conversation. I couldn't let it go unanswered.
• 2011-04-28 2130 how to fix the economy : I've been saying this for a little while now, and I just saw a documentary which put some numbers to it. Here's the story:
• 2011-01-18 2123 Obamacare myth #5: Obamacare was forced on America; Americans didn't want it : Apparently many people believe that this reform -- for which many of us campaigned, blogged, or postered -- was forced on us by a government indifferent to our pleas for mercy. Or maybe a small cabal of us forced it on the rest of the country through our insidious back-channel connections to Barack Obama's secret squadron of black-ops mind-control goons.
• 2011-01-15 1138 Obamacare myth #4: Repealing it will save money and help the deficit : This is the mirror of Myth #1, but it's worth examining in its own right because Republicans are seriously arguing that this is necessary to help reverse the deficit -- and people are believing them.
• 2011-01-14 2140 Obamacare myth #3: If you don't buy insurance, you pay a huge penalty. : The worry here seems to be that The Government is going to take more money from people, one way (insurance) or the other (penalty for non-insurance) -- another form of taxation, increasing the size of the government and its confiscatory power. It's also "government interference in people's personal lives".
• 2011-01-14 0507 Obamacare myth #2: It forces individuals to buy insurance they can't afford. : Much is made of the health insurance "individual mandate", and how this forces people -- many of whom are out of work and in financially stressful situations -- to buy health insurance, even if they don't need it.
• 2011-01-13 1110 Obamacare myth #1: It's a luxury we can't afford. : The argument seems to be that when the economy is tough, we should spend less money. Therefore Obamacare -- which must be expensive, right? -- is something we can't afford right now. This argument is based on several bits of misinformation and misperception, the most obvious of which is that Obamacare is expensive and will increase the deficit.

2010

• 2010-10-27 2135 Josh Mediation : We're safe until December 11, but they want to move him from the real and appropriate services he's getting right now to inferior services he'll have to wait for, and they don't care what happens to him or us in the meantime.
• 2010-04-29 1101 Our Visit to the Josh Depository : Taking Josh to the Hughes Center went reasonably well yesterday; here's the (more or less) full report...
• 2010-04-22 2127 Mighty Are the Teeth of Josh : Josh has never been to a dentist because he wouldn't "open wide" on command, much less sit calmly for minutes at a time while someone mucked about inside his mouth. It has always seemed pretty clear that he would need a general anaesthetic -- so as long as there was no clear need for dental attention, we put that fairly far down the list of Josh Priorities.
• 2010/03/14 0903 Josh Smith, Agent of Entropy : It's been nice not having Josh in the house for the past few weeks. We put something away or clean something, and it generally stays put away or cleaned. Organization gradually increases. Well, Josh made up for lost time last night...
• 2010/01/28 1638 The Eternal Residential Placement Catch-22 : We just heard back from Residential Services Inc, a group home in Chapel Hill which came highly recommended and with whom I spoke last night for about half an hour.

2009

• 2009-10-24 1239 Josh Biathlon : Today's Josh Puzzler Challenge: Find the missing object.
• 2009-10-20 2131 what I learned about ValueOptions today : I had previously visited the web site for ValueOptions, the company which deniesapproves Medicaid and Health Choice benefits in North Carolina but had been unable to find any way of contacting them electronically. Today, however, I went poking around more methodically and found...
• 2009-09-05 0823 Balancing without a paddle : So here's the kind of thing I mean about needing daily balances.
• 2009-08-25 0654 Joshercize your way to rage and exhaustion : Josh's first morning back at school went about as well as I expected, which is to say not very well at all. We're fully expecting a call from the school any minute.
• 2009-07-04 1602 Joshing in the Men's Room : The lack of posts has not been due to lack of events but rather too many to keep up with. Here's what happened today.
• 2009-06-10 0640 No relief in sight : I don't really have the focus to write a proper blog post about this (except to note that the first sign of trouble came near the end of the day on Friday in the form of a phone call and that we waited all weekend and Monday with no news), but I should at least post this "team update" email which more or less explains what has happened.
• 2009-05-25 1033 Star Trek vs. Demonization : The other day, it somehow came up that Harena's 12-year-old wanted to watch the "Devil in the Dark" episode of Star Trek. Having not watched it in maybe a decade or more, I sat down and watched it with him (from a VHS tape I apparently recorded in ~1987).
• 2009-05-17 0806 In which the hypertwins are not engulfed in flame : Woke up abruptly at about 2 a.m. to the smell of acrid smoke, after a dream about being in an airlock (without a spacesuit) as it was slowly evacuated.
• 2009-05-13 0856 The Josh Report : It took me from 5:45 until about 7:15 to get Josh to school. Here's what happened.
• 2009-04-30 1751 A rational look at Inkworld : I was just ranting out loud to Harena about how the "real world" characters in the Inkworld series (which I've been reading to the chitlins for their bedtime story) seem to be almost completely oblivious to the benefits which 800 or so years* of additional civilization has brought them.
• 2009-04-07 1003 The Money Situation : This is at the root of what makes me freeze up when I'm trying to tackle gi-normous to-do lists, I think: the fact that no matter how hard I work, we're still ultimately facing a situation where we may have to move again. I don't know the rules and I don't know what the options are, but here's the situation.
• 2009-03-22 0933 Weekends are so much fun : If I have patience about the situation, then my clients will get mad for taking too long. If I push really hard to get stuff done, I end up blowing up at people. Here's what's happening right now...
• 2009-03-18 0735 Life With Josh : I'm not sure anybody really understands how completely Josh dominates our day-to-day existence, even when he's not here. I'm not sure I can explain it very well, either.
• 2009-02-26 1949 Today's Moment of Shame : I have a small collection of "Moments of Shame" -- times when I did or said something which, in retrospect, I realized was really stupid or tasteless, and possibly hurtful to others, and which I will never ever be able to forget or stop wincing about.
• 2009-02-22 1125 how time gets wasted : The worker says he'll be bringing Josh back at around 5pm. So a little before that, I stop trying to focus on anything where I'll be Vastly Annoyed if I get interrupted. (Maybe you can see where this is going already.)
• 2009-02-20 1222 Perfect Storm : Consider the following combination of circumstances: (1) internet functioning erratically, (2) both hypertwins with splitting headaches, (3) Friday errands to be done, (4) child sick and wanting to stay home from school, (5) some kind of special exhibition at Zander's school this afternoon...
• 2009-02-17 1913 Social Services Catch-22 : We can't get the service we requested because we should be using another service we can't get.
• 2009-02-14 0817 [[User:Woozle/blog/2009-02-14 0817 Inaugural post|[add title]]] : [add text.above]
• [add timestamp] [[User:Woozle/blog/2009-02-11 no light, just tunnel|[add title]]] : [add text.above]