The status quo sucks

Health care reform - that's what I'm talking about. Let's have a little honesty on the subject.

1. The President has recommended goals for reform, and here they are:

• No discrimination for pre-existing conditions
• No exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles, or co-pays
• No cost-sharing for preventive care
• No dropping of coverage for the seriously ill
• No gender discrimination
• No annual or lifetime caps on coverage
• Extended coverage for young adults
• Guaranteed insurance renewal

Raise your hand if you disagree with any of these. And I don't mean you jump three assumptions into the future and disagree with what some sleazy insurance company hack has told you will be the eventual result. Just stick with the facts, ma'am. I'll bet you'd seriously like you some no-pre-existing-condition-discrimination. I know I would, because AGE is a pre-existing condition.

2. It's not Obamacare. The President has not proposed a bill. He has left the writing of legislation to the Congress. You may call it Senate-care, or House-care, or Washington-care. Or, like me, you may call it better-than-the-crap-we-have-now. Whatever.

3. If you believe that anybody in Washington is planning on killing grandma in order to pay for the plan, then you need help. I hope the coming healthcare reform will cover psychiatric visits so you can become a happier and more grounded person in the near future. Oh, and while we're on the subject, most private plans already cover end-of-life counseling. What are we to make of this?

4. If you believe that the government is going to create panels to rule on your treatment options, then remember this: insurance companies have panels to rule on your treatment options. And the people on those panels get bonuses for saving the company money, i.e. denying you treatment. Feel better about the status quo now?

5. If you think that a government plan will limit your options, then you might want to check to see what options you have. Hm. Only the ones your company offers, you say? And your company changes those options every year? And none of those options include vision or dental? (And how about that psychiatric treatment?)

6. Will you be retiring early? Why not? Uh-huh. You have to wait until you qualify for Medicare, because your company doesn't offer coverage for retirees, and no private insuror will provide coverage to a 59-year-old person. Same here. Sucks, doesn't it?

7. Do your young adult children have insurance? Why not? I see - they haven't been able to find jobs with benefits. Well, maybe they should purchase private plans. Yes, I know they'll have to live at home in order to pay their premiums, but that's the way it goes. At least they don't live in a socialist country. Well, except for the socialized fire and police protection, the roads, the schools, and a few other things.

8. Do you hate your job? Why not give it up? You could be an entrepreneur, and fulfill your lifelong dream of owning a book store or publishing a weekly newspaper or designing jewelry or writing free-lance software. Oh, I forgot - you can't get health insurance because you have asthma, or a bad back, or acne, or allergies, or menstrual pain, or Type I diabetes, or a congenital heart murmur, or...

Well, you get the picture.

9. Are you worried about balancing the budget in Washington? What makes you think keeping the status quo will contribute to that goal? Our health care system is on the brink of collapse; it's a huge burden on business right now. If that burden were lifted, businesses would be more competitive in the world market place. Profits and the workforce could grow, which spurs more growth, and improves tax revenues. Stop looking at it as a new cost - it's not. Reform is intended to shift and contain costs. The potential benefit to our economy is huge.

Frankly, people, the status quo sucks. We need reform. Stop listening to Glenn Beck and that scary blond woman who was on The Daily Show the other day, and start praying that reform succeeds.

Life gets in the way

of blogging. I'll be splitting my time between traveling and remodeling for the next few weeks. Here's my report on the remodel: we've selected our contractor, laid out the plans for the new kitchen, and chosen our cabinets. We'll place the cabinet order next week (after our trip to San Francisco), which means within four or five weeks, the current kitchen will be demolished.

The new kitchen table, which I had intended to order later in the process, arrived today. It's got a nice farmhouse feel to it - rectangular, with the legs set all the way out at the corners so the top doesn't overhang. It can be expanded to seat eight by unfolding a nifty leaf which stores underneath the table top. It's coffee-colored. I've already done a crossword while sitting at it, so it has been appropriately christened into our family.

I bought the table now because I gave the old one away, along with the matching hutch, to be used at a rummage sale to raise money to benefit a family in trouble here in my town. In the few days we spent without a table, I discovered that it's really hard to enjoy the newspaper without a place to prop my elbows. So I bought the new one, even though it means moving it when it comes time to empty the kitchen. It's a small sacrifice.

So far, nothing awful has happened with respect to our remodel. But that, of course, is because it's way too soon for the adventure to turn dangerous. I'll keep you posted.

And just like that

the squirrels are gone. The nuts are gone, too. This hasn't happened before - that the nuts ran out well ahead of the ripening of the avocados. Honestly, I'm thrilled. I can use my deck without having to sweep it twice a day.

I suppose this is due to our odd weather, which is an accumulation of several years of odd weather. Odd weather has become the new normal - record highs, record lows, weird storm patterns. I'm not sure we'd recognize the weather we used to call 'usual.' Climate change. There you have it in a nutshell. (Pun intended. I apologize.)

Random Thoughts on Squirrels

A cat (not mine) killed a squirrel in our backyard last Saturday. Except for the scale of things, it looked just like a lion killing a wildebeest - you know, dragging the squirrel down by the neck, then kicking it with its hind feet while keeping a death grip on the throat. You've seen the drama on Animal Planet, I'm sure. When the squirrel was limp, killer-cat carried it off and we've seen nary hide nor hair of either of them since. I feel as if I should be sorry for the squirrel, but I'm not.

There's a squirrel on the deck right now, winding its way up and down my Engelmann oak. Its tail looks a little scrawny to me - maybe it had a close call with something hungry. It can have all the acorns it wants, but when it starts in on the macadamias I get annoyed. It's not the competition for the nuts, which are hard to open and require roasting and all what-not; it's the mess. See? I just swept that deck earlier this morning. Damn you, you little vandal! (It dropped a nut shell on me while I was taking pictures.)

The birds hate the squirrels, and not without reason. The squirrels eat the bird seed I put out, which is just grossly unfair. Squirrels are capable of drilling a hole in a macadamia shell, and they waste time stealing sunflower seeds? Puh-leese. Leave something for the less fortunate, you little bandits, you.

They'll dispose of my macadamias and then they'll start in on the avocados when they ripen in November. Squirrels love avocados as much as they love macadamias, and when they go after those, they seriously piss me off. In that case it's not the mess; it's the food. We're in direct competition for the avocados.

Eating all those macadamias and avocados (we're squirrel-gourmet-central here) makes our squirrels fat. When one jumps from the tree onto the roof, it sounds like a bear landed up there.

Squirrels are vindictive. If I fight back by throwing things into the tree or poking at them with brooms, they break things I leave on the patio, like lanterns and flower pots. This year the fight has been escalating - they've started knocking things off the balcony, too. I'm beginning to regret my rule that the balcony belongs to my cat - a little Roxy-presence might make a difference. Sadly, my cat (Amelie, who, you must remember, is not the killer) needs the balcony to be safe from coyotes, and she's worked out a truce with the squirrels, a feat she hasn't accomplished with Roxy. She'd rather be eaten by a coyote than share a space with the dog.

In spite of everything, I have to admit that squirrels are cute. If it weren't for the mess and the loss of avocado-goodness, I wouldn't have the heart to cheer killer-cat on. As it is, all I can say is: the killer-cat is cute, too, and it doesn't eat avocados.

Updated to clarify the non-killer nature of my cat.

Why are we born to suffer and die?

There's been a dearth of posts lately because I've been having a bit of an existential crisis brought on by the prospect of turning sixty next year.

Oooh, every time I think of that number I get a little light-headed. Wait a minute, let me just close my eyes for a second. Deep, calming breaths. Inhale, exhale. Ahhhh.

Okay, we'll go on but we'll leave the precise numbers out of it.

So, here's the deal. I'm getting old, and I hate it. I hate the stuff that goes on with your body - the sagging and the bagging and the sun spots on your cheekbones where your glasses reflect, and the shocking discovery that your grandmother's hands have somehow attached themselves to your body. I hate the thick waist and pouchy tummy and unruly gray hair, the sore back and hips from osteoarthritis, the inability to sleep through the night. I hate the new heights to which my cholesterol has soared. (Exercise more and eat less red meat, my doctor advised. Um, I exercise five to six days every week as it is, and I eat red meat about once a month. But, okay. I'll do better.)

More than the physical, though, I hate the mental stuff. I hate losing my glasses and my keys every day. I hate having words slither right out of my mind just when I need them. I hate the way time seems to have speeded up so I can't achieve a fraction of what I need to achieve in a day. I hate the feeling that doors are slamming, that my opportunities are fewer and farther between. (I dealt with the fact that I'd never learn ballet when I turned forty, that I wasn't going to get comfortable with horseback riding when I was fifty. Now, as another zero approaches, I wonder if I'll ever be a published author. Actually, with the economic woes our country and my poor dysfunctional state are experiencing, I wonder if I'll end my days living under a bridge on the 605 Freeway.)

I hate the social stuff, too: the relatives and friends who've died at an alarming pace in the last ten years; the way our conversations have drifted from things we hope to do, to things we've done, to complaints about our receding gums, our weight gain, and our leaky bladders; the inability to appreciate music that doesn't hail from the previous century.

So. I keep wondering, as the characters do in Kilgore Trout's book, Venus on the Half-Shell (I know, I know - Trout is fictional, but the book exists...): Why are we born to suffer and die? The answer in the book is Why not? But I'm still pondering.

We're remodeling our kitchen

I'm pretty sure this will consume me for the next few months. Our kitchen isn't awful. It's just worn out, doesn't allow traffic to flow, and gets too crowded when more than one person tries to cook at a time. It's that last bit that's the biggest motivator. I like help. I especially like chopping help, because we eat a lot of veggies around here and they all need to be sliced, diced, or julienned.


Right now we're evaluating bids. We've received two, and one is substantially higher than the other. At the moment, I'm inclined to go with the higher bid because it came with item-by-item documentation. I can believe in it. My husband would like to believe in the lower bid, too, so we need to ask questions of the contractors and that's what I'm doing today - assembling a list of questions for each.

This is all a bit scary for us because we had a bad experience with the last general contractor we hired. Seventeen years ago, around the time our youngest was born, we decided to add a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room. Our contractor did a reasonably good job on that addition, but when we decided to also turn an unfinished area under the garage into a rec room, we ran into trouble. Our contractor disappeared, leaving us a room which was framed but unfinished. My husband and my son worked patiently on weekends for two years to finish the room and the deck onto which it opens. (When they laid the decking, my husband marked the location of every screw. Then he drilled each hole and set the screws in place; my son, who was fifteen by then, came behind and tightened every screw. This took days. After working for several hours, they'd come in rubbing their arms and complaining about being exhausted by all that screwing, causing my eyes to roll back into my head. 'Right,' I'd say.)

Kitchen memories:

When we first moved here, in 1984, the kitchen had avocado green and harvest gold foil wallpaper. No, really, it did.

The guy we bought it from liked to party. The plastic panels which covered the fluorescent fixture had numerous champagne corks embedded in them. He didn't feel the need to remove them, which was part of why we were able to afford the house.

My husband replaced the garbage disposer sometime in the first week. We didn't get that wallpaper down for four (long) years.

Once I turned on the oven to preheat and went back to mixing the cornbread I was making. All of a sudden, a very strange crackly noise began emanating from the upper oven. My husband and I exchanged a glance, and I opened the oven door. Thick black smoke poured out, and below it I could see electrical sparks and something dripping onto the floor of the oven. I stood there, paralyzed, thinking, Oh, shit, the house is going to burn down. I knew this for a certainty because a) my sister's house had burned down a year or so earlier, and b) we'd had a close call a couple of months before when an electric blanket shorted out and started a mattress on fire. So, I just stood there, waiting for somebody to dial 911. My husband reached around me and turned off the oven. The sparks stopped sparking, the ceramic lining of the heating coil stopped dripping, and the smoke stopped smoking. Thank goodness somebody kept their head.

That big black refrigerator you see is the newest appliance we own. It's enormous - absolutely dominates the space. (Well, okay, if I were to reduce the clutter on the front, it might not seem so huge...) My son named it Darth on the day it was delivered. It will be replaced by a white side-by-side, which is taller than Darth but won't stick out so far. (I'm quite sure the clutter will simply transfer to the new location.) We haven't been terribly happy with Darth. It's really very difficult to organize those bottom freezer drawers in any meaningful way.


We bought the range top a few years before we bought Darth. It's black glass. Here's my very best advice: don't ever, ever, ever buy a range top made of black glass. It will always look dirty because there's no cleaning black glass without leaving streaks. By the end of the first week after it came to live in our kitchen, we knew we'd made a mistake. We've been marking time for ten years, waiting an appropriate interval to get rid of that sucker. It (and the double oven) will be replaced by a white, five-burner, double-fuel, double-oven range.

I expect this venture will have its moments. I'll keep you posted.

Bears and things

We spent the long weekend at my daughter's place in Lake Arrowhead. It was lovely. We swam off the dock every day, and we took the boat out twice on the Fourth - though it got so crazy crowded with everybody wanting to be on the water for the fireworks show that we tied up the boat around two-ish Saturday afternoon and didn't take it out again. Around eight-fifteen that night, we took flashlights and walked the mile or so to Tavern Bay to watch the annual (pretty darn fantastic) fireworks show over the lake.

To spare my daughter, we agreed on a new cooking scheme - each family took a day and provided all the meals, including clean-up. I promise - this is the way of the future. Everybody got to put their feet up a lot, but everybody went out of their way to prepare meals that were out of the ordinary when it was their turn to cook. Extra special - my daughter's grilled salmon and potato salad, my son's whole wheat buttermilk pancakes, and the open-faced grilled gouda and tomato sandwiches my daughter-in-law made. We had guests for dinner Friday night and they brought a wonderful New Mexico casserole of corn, squash, green chiles, and cheese as a perfect companion to the beef and chicken skewers my husband and I served up.

No trip to Arrowhead is complete without mornings on the deck with coffee and breakfast and some critter-watching. As usual lots of jays and woodpeckers and flickers and hummingbirds and gray squirrels stopped by. Ground squirrels popped up the new staircase to help themselves to the goodies in my daughter's garden-in-pots on the upper deck. And this year we had a larger guest - a black bear meandered up and cleaned out the bird feeders around five on Sunday morning. We're not sure if the lights going on scared it away, or if it had eaten as many nuts and seeds and raisins as it wanted, but by the time we decided to investigate the racket, it was back on the ground and ambling away.

Any lessons? Not a one. We had a good weekend. We ate, played, laughed. Nothing going on here, move along.