Not quite skate-able
But close – there’s enough ice to keep her above the surface, but it’s to rough to really skate. Stephanie in the backyard.
Car door iced shut
Signs of the Icepocalypse 2011. We managed to chip through it to start the cars. But we’re due to get more, so we’ll see. Working from home today.
Draining the water heater
Yup, the water heater went out. Fun times! But it all worked out and now we have a new water heater, which we’ve been needing for awhile.
Ringing out 2010
Yesterday we had a mini earthquake here in Indiana and this time I actually felt it, because I was still lying in bed like a lazy person on vacation, because I was a lazy person on vacation. It felt like a harbinger, a bellwether.
I have been significantly lackadaisical lately about nearly everything except work. I’ve been focused there. And I have been focused on reading lately – a LOT. Particularly on writing that has a transporting effect on me. There’s something in particular I’m looking for, and I’ve been deconstructing and pulling apart what I’m reading to get at the heart of what has that transporting affect, and how I can bend, alter, focus and create that in my own writing. I feel like I’m poised to jump off a tall cliff and I’m waiting for the right moment; for the breeze to gather strength and help carry me off.
Today we need to get the house clean because we have a few friends coming over to play board games and watch the ball drop. Tomorrow; nothing to do. I have plans for the new year, I just don’t feel like sharing; they tend to falter when I do. And I’ve never been good at resolutions. So this year, a priority instead: transformation.
Well, hello there, hot cop.
Call me a juvenile goofball, but this email made me the teensiest bit giggly this afternoon:
Ahem – For your reading enjoyment: Fanfiction.net’s Rizzoli and Isles channel.
I haven’t read fan fiction in quite a few years because it was always so hard to hunt down good stuff and separate it from the crap. But I’ve been a long-time fan of Dorothy Snarker, and somehow I navigated from her site to fanfiction.net the other day. This site does a great job of aggregating fan fiction, sorting it out, and even encouraging group editing projects to improve people’s writing skills. There’s still a lot of bad stuff there, but it’s possible to navigate your way around it thusly: go to whatever category of stuff you like. Sort by characters you want to read about. Look for stories with tons and tons of reviews. These are the stories people really like because they bother to comment. Read some of them. Look at their authors, and the authors also have lists of their favorites stories and authors. Visit those. Repeat. This was an awesome distraction to the stress of going out of town on business this week (I suck at travel; indeedy I do).
(I have a similar method of finding cool stuff on Flickr by surfing the favorites of photographers I like. Hours of awesome.)
Here, let me highlight a couple of the steamier Rizzoli & Isles items for you:
Yeah, come back after you’ve read those and let me know what you think. 🙂
I have more stuff to link to, but I’ll hold off until I hear from you.
ADDENDUM: Of course, as soon as I posted this, I got email from the other other half of TNT’s dynamic duo:
Of course this whole post presupposes that you’ve actually seen the TNT show Rizzoli & Isles, which aired this summer and will be back next. If you haven’t you can catch it in reruns. It stars Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander, along with a small dog, a tortoise and absolutely insane amounts of subtext and Totally Gratuitous Touching. Shame on you for missing it.
Just to reiterate, this time with photos:
My grandfather and I in 1971
Leroy F. Mineart
Dec. 10, 1918 – Oct. 27, 2010
Me playing with my grandpa in January 1971
Leroy F. Mineart, 91, of Brighton, died at 4:15 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010, at Halcyon House in Washington.
A funeral mass will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at Saints Joseph and Cabrini Church in East Pleasant Plain, with the Rev. Charles J. Fladung officiating. Burial will be in St. Joseph Cemetery in East Pleasant Plain.
Open visitation will begin at 4 p.m. Friday at the church, with the family present from 5-8 p.m. and Prayers For A Christian Wake at 7 p.m.
Memorials to St. Joseph Cemetery may be left at the church or may be mailed to the family at 1022 Spruce Ave., Brighton 52540.
Arrangements are in the care of Gould Funeral Home of Brighton.
Mr. Mineart was born Dec. 10, 1918, in Brighton, the son of Henry and Grace Lamansky Mineart. He married Kathryn Wehr July 30, 1941, at St. Joseph Church in East Pleasant Plain.
My grandfather grew up in Brighton, Iowa and was a farmer there his whole life. He also worked at Louden Machinery Company in Fairfield, Iowa, where they manufactured farm equipment.
He was a pretty amazing guy – farmer, welder, woodworker, skilled mechanic – astonishing what he could do with his brain and his hands. He was the father of six children, 22 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren. My grandfather and grandmother’s marriage of 69 years is for me the model for “happily ever after.” He was funny, happy, kind, mild-mannered and he radiated goodness. I have been blessed all my life to have him as a role model for how to live life. He brought such abundance into the world.
Me, with a cupboard that my grandpa made for my play kitchen – December 1971. I still have this cupboard – it’s in my guest bedroom. Our house is filled with little things he made for me my whole life.
I will miss him so much.
Electric Tea Kettle Heaven
A couple weekends ago, I was out with my mom and we each bought an electric tea kettle like this.
I used to think this was a superfluous item; you can heat water in the microwave or in a kettle on the stove. But after using one at the B&B in England, I warmed to the idea – the electric kettle is much quicker to make a cup of tea and with so little cleanup. This tea kettle lets you know how much water is in it, and super heats the water in less than a minute. It will shut off automatically after it boils so you don’t leave it on. And I’ve used it more than any other counter-top appliance in our house in the past two weeks. Tea – my new drink of choice.
News from around the house
A couple weeks ago, we took the local ABATE motorcycle training class to get our licenses so we can ride the scooter – and Stephanie and I both passed. It’s fairly intense – Friday after work for 5 hours, all day Saturday and a good chunk of the day Sunday. I was glad to get through it. I still need more practice, though.
I’m continuing to make progress organizing around the house. Our most recent round of work includes cleaning out empty cardboard storage boxes from the basement and organizing packing materials down there. We also got some overhead lights replaced around the house. We had a ceiling fan we didn’t need taken down and replaced with a light fixture in the hallway upstairs, and we had a light fixture installed in the dining room overhead where one has been missing since we moved in. There was one when we looked at the house the first time during our purchase, but when we went back the second time it was mysteriously gone. We bought a fixture to replace it, but it’s been sitting around a couple years waiting for us to install it. So that’s finally done – very nice to have better lighting around the joint.
I’ve acquired a lot of books lately, so I need to amp up the time I spend reading. I’m on the right track with the reduced TV watching, but I need to spend a bit less time on Farmville and Frontierville if I’m going to get any real reading done. Very addictive, these Facebook games are.
I’ve been thinking about and working on a project that combines several of my favorite things to do – writing, photography and web design. I’m making progress on all three fronts for this work and hope to have something to show off for it soon.
Health care reform changes go online today
Democrats.org provides an overview of the changes that go into affect today – helping me and thousands of other Americans with direct, real changes. Bold text indicates changes that affect me personally, italics highlights changes that affect people I know.
This week marks six-months since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law–enacting one of the most sweeping reforms in a generation. Starting today, several important aspects of this historic law take effect. Among those provisions is the Patient’s Bill of Rights, which ends the worst abuses of the health insurance industry and empowers consumers with greater control over their health care. Beginning today, the new law:
- Prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to children on the basis of a pre-existing condition, extending coverage to as many as 72,000 uninsured children;
- Prohibits insurance companies from taking away health coverage from those who need it most, protecting more than 10,000 folks who would have lost coverage because of rescission;
- Prohibits insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits and restricts annual limits on health coverage and hospital stays;
- Allows individuals who purchase new health insurance to choose their own doctor within their network and visit the closest hospital that has the Mini C-Arm in an emergency;
- Requires new health plans must have free preventive care such as free mammograms, colonoscopies, immunizations, and pre-natal care;
- Allows young people under the age of 26 can now stay on their parents’ insurance longer, which could mean coverage for up to 2.4 million Americans who previously wouldn’t have health care;
- Empowers Americans to challenge insurance companies’ denial of coverage or treatment to an independent third party.
In addition, the Affordable Care Act has begun to close the Medicare prescription “donut hole,” increases payments for Medicaid providers to expand vital health care for the nearly 50 million Americans who live in rural areas, and will extend health coverage to an estimated 400,000 Americans with pre-existing conditions.
For people like me who have had expensive health procedures, that lifetime cap was a huge stressor – you find yourself questioning whether you should go to the doctor for any procedure, lest they find something wrong that would cost so much that you’d end up without any coverage as you get older, and you think things like – “I can just suffer through this, so I don’t rack up my insurance bill.” That’s a terrible way to have to look at life.
When you’re going to vote in November, keep in mind that almost every Republican has pledged to attempt to repeal these health care reforms – they won’t be able to do it, but they’re running on trying to.
Christmas organizing
We cleaned and organized our Christmas items in the basement and packed up 3 boxes of discard items this past Sunday, finishing up in an hour or so. I’m still on a high from that effort – we sorted outdoor decorations from tree decorations from other decor and labeled all the boxes so it’s easy to find what we want to pull out and use. I packed up all the discards and ran it to Goodwill on Tuesday at lunch. We have a much tidier section of the basement as a result. Still lots of tools and other storage items to go through and organize downstairs, but I’ll take that in sections over the winter and spring, I think. Some of my tools will make their way to my mom since we have a lot of duplicate items and she needs some basics. we’re making inroads in simplifying. Lots to do still, but lots more breathing space around the house, too.
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