Friday Foccacia
A new reason to hate Comcast - Yes, I know there are some people that think they are Comcastic, but I have aboslutely no regrets leaving Comcast in the past. First, I am happy about saving money, as I have since switching from Cable to DirecTV. Second, I am thrilled that with Verizon Fios, I don’t have to worry (so far) about bandwidth throttling or the fact that they lie about it. But now they have acquired Plaxo, a company that thinks spamming your contact list is tantamount to being a “Social Network” company. Even if I did believe that Plaxo is Now Less Evil (which I don’t), I would be damned if I was to turn over all my personal information and contacts into the hands of Comcast.
There is something wrong with these people - Who can seriously look at a 15 year old girl that is 5′ 9″ and weights 105 pounds and tell her she needs to loose a few pounds? My dear friend Mitch McDad caught a bit of flack on this post when he said women do this for women and not for men. But I have to say, that I agree. There is no guy looking at some emaciated girl thinking, “I wish my wife/gf/so looked like that!” Simply put, most men don’t find that “hot” at all. Well… except for the designer’s themselves, and they seem to have some sort of vendetta against women, or at least that it the way it seems to me.
Be sure your children are safe from online predators… then stop and check again - Liz from This Full House got her own frightening wake up call on Internet Safety. Go read it. Then go and double check everything you have done to ensure your child can’t fall prey to some sick bastard that is stalking them on the Internet.
Like something out of a sitcom - IzzyMom has the Best.Newspaper.Clipping.Ever. Perhaps, I am a bit insulated here in the New York/New Jersey area from vast trailer parks of this country and those that consider Wal-Mart a place you need to get dressed up to go to.
Easy (Well Easier) for him to say - Adventure Dad has a good article on how being (or getting) fit is his Favorite Parenting Resource. If I wasn’t already working on improving myself, I think I might have been ashamed. He makes some exellent points about how most people think about getting in shape all wrong.
If you don’t why not? - Have you checked out Ivy and Heather at Home Ec 101? If not, you really should. Tips, tricks, recipes, and every so often a guest tip (wink). Ivy may be having an unnatural love affair with a container of Bar Keeper’s Friend (I’m kidding… mostly) but their advise is helpful, friendly and has saved my butt on more than one occasion (and that is no joke).
Exploding Patio Sets?
OK, not really… but now that I have your attention, let me tell you what happened this past weekend. It was Saturday, a relatively warm, cloudy day here in New Jersey. Like every Saturday for the past few months, my routine was the same, I would go out on my back deck, enjoy a cup of coffee and my morning cigarette (yes, I know… don’t go there), the dogs run around the yard, and then I get ready and head off to the gym. So like every other Saturday morning, I knew exactly what the condition of the yard was (mostly I note whether I will be mowing or doing yard work that day). Nothing was particularly amiss or out of the usual.
As I was coming home, TheWife calls me and says the our patio set is “broken” (I really must speak to her about her ability to understate a situation). I arrived home to find that the tempered glass top of our patio set had shattered into nothing but a chards of glass. I mean tiny. The pieces were so small that you could fit two or three of them on a dime. I found this quite baffling. Now granted tempered glass is supposed to break in a way that prevents thos huge sharp edges from forming, but in the past, I had only seen the tiny pieces at point of impact when something broke the glass, and the rest sort of hung together in a “sheet” of broken pieces. In this case the entire tabletop was completely in chards. I did my best Gil Grissom imitation (other than taking photos… dammit), looking for a cause. There were no rocks, sticks, branches from a tree or other projectiles within the rubble. The ring that protects the center hold where the umbrella goes had fallen straight down and landed on the leg of the table, so obviously the table came straight down, and not at some angle. There was no blood to indicate that a squirrel or other animal had landed on it crashing through. I even entertained the notion that since I live in the flight path of Newark Liberty International Airport that it was a case of “blue ice” and that in the midday sun, it had just melted… but even that would have left some sort of residue from the dye (and or contained waste…ewww). No, nothing seemed to fit.
The table, was one I had purchased from K-Mart a couple of years ago, one of their Martha Stewart line of tables. I was talking about it this week to somebody, and decided to look up some information on Tempered Glass, and at first found this article discussing how when tempered glass is compromised in some way that it can seem like it just “explodes.” Back into Google for a search of “Tempered Glass Exploding” and there… the first article up (at least at the time I did the search), was this little piece called, “Sounds of Summer: Martha Stewart Tables Shattering.” Turns out, this “phenomenon” that had struck our table was not at all uncommon.
There is apparently even a class action lawsuit that is in the works against Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia and JRA Funiture. However, JRA Funiture filed Chapter 7 Bakruptcy (total liquidation) last year, so at least they are no longer the source (depending on inventories of course) of the tables, but it also means no recovery for the Class Action Lawsuit either.
I’d like to think that with JRA Funiture out of business that this is the end of the situation, but to be honest, reading how Sears (and/or Kmart) and Martha Stewart Living have not even (so far as I can tell) acknowledged this as a problem, outside of saying they will work with consumers under warranty, leaves me a little ill at ease with them, leaving me doubting whether I want to trust them again. Problem is, at least the old sets were also farmed out under different names to other chains as well. JRA’s funiture was also sold under the Hampton Bay name at Home Depot, as well as being carried by Sam’s Club, Target and Safeway. (Only Home Depot has has a similar report of an exploding table that I have been able to find so far).
If you have (or had) one of these sets, if your table is still under warranty you can call K-mart Customer Service about it at 866-562-7848 (though K-Mart has not specifically said they will honor the manufacturer’s warranty) or Home Depot (who will honor the warranty) at 800-585-9969. Other than that you are probably out of luck. So what does this all mean? I guess, most of all be careful if you are going to buy a glass top patio set from a discount retailer. In my case, I am thinking a nice teak set might be in our future instead of risking it with glass again.
TechParent: mytvrss
I am not a big television viewer myself. If not for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I don’t know that I would be watching anything (other than Disney Channel with LatteGirl). But between blogs and Twitter, I know many of you do, and seemingly live and die by the schedules. Well, this week have I got a neat little tool for you. It is called mytvrss, and it is so simple, it is one of those things that I am sure many will bang their heads against the wall thinking, “Why didn’t I come up with that?”
The great thing about it, is the shear simplicity of it. You go to the sight (no registration required), check off the boxes on the shows you want to be kept up to date on, and click “Create Feed” It will generate a custom URL that you can use in your rss reader of your choice, and be kept up to date, on airing dates of the shows. Never miss a new episode again. It is like have a customized version of the TV Guide made just for you.
Fat Fight
I, like many people have battled weight issues a good part of my life. Despite what many “skinny” people will claim, it is not a “choice.” Is it something I can do something about? In my case, yes. At least I have managed to do it before, and with weight loss of almost 16 pounds since April 17th, I am making some progress again.
But this isn’t really about that fight. No, this is something that has been simmering since my Step-Father-In-Law passed away from Lung Cancer last year. It bothered me at the time, but I wasn’t completely sure why, but there was a gnawing at me about this. Mostly, I guess because I felt it was so unfair that by the time it was “discovered” he was given six-to-nine months and didn’t last that long, that I dismissed what was bothering me as just the sort of bitterness you have when you lose a loved one to illness.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, my uncle was diagnosed with Lung cancer. Fortunately, in his case, it is currently considered early enough that while the long term prognosis is not good (can it ever be?), there actually IS so far, a long term prognosis. Something, that my Step-Father-In-Law never “enjoyed.” I started rethinking it, and using “the Google” to seek some others information and similar type of incidents and stories. I probably shouldn’t be shocked in this day and age to actually find a Blog dedicated to the topic of fat prejudice in health care. This is exactly what was bothering me all this time, and a couple of delicately placed questions to my mother-in-law confirmed this.
He had complained of shortness-of-breath and several other symptoms for quite some time before his diagnosis. Every time his Primary Care Physicians “diagnosis” was that he needed to lose weight, and that then it would no longer be an issue. Symptoms overlooked, simply because, well if you are fat… that is the problem and the end of the effort by the physician (in these cases).
I would love to think that this is infrequent and isolated with a few “bad seeds,” but when you see things like, UNC-Chapel Hill: Obesity May Keep Some Women from Getting Screened for Breast, Cervical Cancer it seems clear that this is not the case, and Kate Harding has a excellent breakdown of this story and how (and why) this issue exists. (On a side note, Kate’s Shapely Prose blog is an excellent read.) There are even studies published on the Stigma and Discrimination in Weight Mangement and Obesity.
Of course, the media is not much help in this regard either. Yes, there are some articles that point properly at some causes and issues, but doing so is “too politcally correct” for some writers, and just a lifestyle choice for others. Of course even some governments get involved as well when they do something like tell a person that they are ‘too fat to adopt.’
It is like continuing to get picked on by the school yard bully for being overweight. Only the sonsequences to your health could be far more severe.
Teaching her too well?
I could have sworn, I had talked about this before, but for the life of me, cannot find it in my archives. Oh, well… to summarize quickly… One thing we did very early with LatteGirl is start her on an allowance.
Now, to cover a couple of issues, I always see when the issue of allowance comes up. We GIVE her an allowance. We do not tie it to chores. Why? Because simply put, we do not provide her an “option” of whether or not she does the chores we ask of her. There is no, conversation like, “well if you don’t clean up your room, your not going to get your allowance.” which eventually (at least once) leads to the reply of “fine, keep you money” No. This is not acceptable, and hence we don’t connect them in such a way.
Now for those that argue, “Why should I pay them for breathing?” I can give you some other ways to look at it. First of course you can look at it as paying on installment the eventual therapy bills they will have as adults, and just consider this sort of a payment plan or savings account towards that. More seriously though, stop looking as it as paying them. Think of it in how much it can possibly save you. You are going to spend money on your kids anyway. This allows an easy to understand cap on some types of spending, as well as provides a way to teach financial responsibility.
We give LatteGirl $1 per week for every year. On other words she is 7 now, so she gets $7 per week, but after the end of the month when she turns 8 she will get a “cost of living” increase. With that money we have set up 3 banks for her and (approximately) a third goes in each. So right now, $2.50 goes towards her college fund (and gets put into her 529 plan every other month), $2.50 goes into her “saving up” fund. These are for larger toy purchases she wishes to make outside of what she gets for her birthday or Xmas. The final $2.50 is for her “instant gratification” fund that she can spend (almost) any way she wants. She wants to buy gum, a candy bar or to get something from the Ice Cream Man rather than the ice cream in the freezer? It all comes out of her money. She learns to balance the “I want” against, “is it worth it?” Yes, she has made a mistake or two along the way (but who hasn’t… I still make them), but by and large, these lessons have really seemed to sunk in.
Which brings me back to why I started this post. Perhaps, she is learning a bit too quickly (for me anyway). I have gone out of my way to avoid certain toys. Some are hard and fast rules that we do not allow (i.e. Bratz) but others are things that I am just sort of trying to stall on. One of those items is a Nintendo DS Lite. She has enjoyed the LeapFrog Leapster, and I get the bonus of not only is it entertaining her, but she is also learning something while she is playing it.
However, lately I noticed she has been a bit more frugal than usual (her only real expense this year was that she finally decided to get her ears pierced… but that is another post), and saving some of her “now” money with her long term. Upon inquiry I was informed that since Santa didn’t come across with the DS, and she already knows she is not getting one for her birthday (her request was for another addition to her American Girl Doll collection), that she was now saving to get one herself. Between her allowance and a few dollars she got slipped to her from my mother (Aany money she gets in the manner gets split between her 529 Plan and her “long term” saving fund. Yes, we have this covered as well), but between her sources, she is already better than half way to her goal. And of course, she was quick to point out, that since it is her money, she is entitled to do with it as she pleases since it does not break the “Bratz Rule.”
I am going to have to add an ammendment to these rules and find a way to give myself more veto power. She is learning her way around these issues far quicker and easier than I ever imagined. I never thought I would regret teaching her money management, but while I am thrilled that she has taken to learning this so well, I can see this coming back to bite me.
I think I am
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