A brief program note: I'm getting towards the bottom of my to do list, believe it or not, and fixing the non-important stuff such as web site and email addresses. Today, I finally shifted the default address of this blog from toastfloats.blogspot.com to:
http://blog.toastfloats.com
This makes sense to those who are familiar with http://toastfloats.com and wondered why I had not done so in the past. Wondered being the polite word among network geeks to describe the basic, "Huh? She's being an idiot or what?" comments I received.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Keet's March of Dimes Fundraising Effort
Some people inspire above and beyond the call of duty. My superstar artist, long time best friend Keet is the light at the end of my particularly human, dark, and ugly tunnel. She does things that just brighten my entire world.
Her latest combination of art + good will is a fund raising effort for the March of Dimes. Grab an amazingly cute t-shirt or totebag and the profits will go entirely to March of Dimes.
Now if I can just get her to add my logo to her list of really cool bits of her art available on the shop...
Her latest combination of art + good will is a fund raising effort for the March of Dimes. Grab an amazingly cute t-shirt or totebag and the profits will go entirely to March of Dimes.
Now if I can just get her to add my logo to her list of really cool bits of her art available on the shop...
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Last Call
This week we traveled to California to visit my parents. I’ve been making this semiannual trip to the Golden State for nearly 10 years. My father lives in Squaw Valley so winters draw us to days in the snow and on the ski slopes, summers see us on long walks in the hills and swimming at High Camp. Sacramento, where my mother lives, has river rafting, more swimming, millions of shopping errands with Grandma, and fantastic food. The girls live for these trips. So here we are on our last trip to California.
I confess that each trip to California I enjoy less than the previous. Oh the countryside is lovely and the stay with family wonderful, but the driving itself is the one activity which drives home to me the accrual of years. I can feel the age slide down my bones and pool in my joints during the endless miles down I-5.
At the risk of digressing, I’d like to point out to those Easterners reading this blog that the West Coast is very large. This is often a surprise to people raised on the Eastern Seaboard... it certainly was to the folks with whom I rode across the country. I think the problem originated from the idiot who named Ohio the “Mid West”. Somehow, it conveys the idea that driving out to visit MMORPG friends in Columbus is driving halfway across the country. However, if you’d just pull out the goddamn map and fold it in half, you would see that Ohio is a really good chunk to the right of the middle of the country. Once you grasp the basic principle that two thirds of the country is to the left of the mid West, you begin to get an inkling of how far it is from Seattle to Sacramento.
So I may not be all that sorry to kiss goodbye to the 28 hour round trip, but it brings home to me how many things recently seem to be a “last.” Last week was probably the last time I spent an evening partying with friends from my computer geek bad ass tech writer days. Before that was probably our last dinner at Noey’s house. Next week is definitely our last week at the Homeschool Resource Center, the last opportunity I’ll have to visit with two of my downtown clients in person, and the last time I’ll have to shlep Mom down to the airport to fly out of Seattle.
The girls are scheduling their last play dates and sleep overs, DrC is booking his last days doing LASIK, and I’m making up the last shopping list for Costco. Before the end of the month, we'll visit the dentist for the last time, get our hairs cut (all of them), and swing by the pediatrician for a last looksee and updated shots. I’m tempted to make a last run to Ikea, Target, and Joanne’s fabrics before DrC sells the car in two weeks. We’ll be busy, that’s for certain.I keep trying to remind myself that we are not going on vacation. It’s not true that I’ll never step into a West Marine again; I just won’t be stepping into this one. And all wannabe cruisers hear the stories of boats gathering in big towns, renting a van, and making a pilgrimage to the local Costco in Acapulco. Everything we are giving up will be replaced.
Yet sometimes it seems like there is too much to let go of. We have already sold so much, stored or thrown away the rest. We’ve walked away from jobs, a beautiful house, all sorts of things things things. We don’t go to our YMCA or our favorite brew pub or the coffee shop I used to love, and we’ve had to change banks, grocery store, and library to ones closer to the boat. Now it's time to let go even of these cobbled together alternatives, and it really really hurts. I lie awake at night, and I’m not happy. This isn’t fun. This isn’t funny.
It’s exhausting. My mom told me I looked like hell when I arrived in Sacramento: tired, stressed out, and fat. We’re not particularly good with the little white lies in our family. She also said in the exasperated tone I think only mothers are capable of, “I’m looking forward to seeing you when you step off that damn boat in San Francisco this fall. You’re going to finally look rested.” We’ve come a long way when my hide-bound, land-based, neat freak of a bookkeeping mother imagines a week long ocean passage as a relief from the pressures of preparing for the cruising life.
In less than a month, we leave our homeport. We may not be ready, but we sure as hell are going to be done getting ready. The cruising life is not a vacation -- DrC and I know it will be as much work as our current lives if not more. But the biggest relief in those early weeks may be that instead of spending so much time on the last call, we’ll finally start doing things for the first time.
I confess that each trip to California I enjoy less than the previous. Oh the countryside is lovely and the stay with family wonderful, but the driving itself is the one activity which drives home to me the accrual of years. I can feel the age slide down my bones and pool in my joints during the endless miles down I-5.
At the risk of digressing, I’d like to point out to those Easterners reading this blog that the West Coast is very large. This is often a surprise to people raised on the Eastern Seaboard... it certainly was to the folks with whom I rode across the country. I think the problem originated from the idiot who named Ohio the “Mid West”. Somehow, it conveys the idea that driving out to visit MMORPG friends in Columbus is driving halfway across the country. However, if you’d just pull out the goddamn map and fold it in half, you would see that Ohio is a really good chunk to the right of the middle of the country. Once you grasp the basic principle that two thirds of the country is to the left of the mid West, you begin to get an inkling of how far it is from Seattle to Sacramento.
So I may not be all that sorry to kiss goodbye to the 28 hour round trip, but it brings home to me how many things recently seem to be a “last.” Last week was probably the last time I spent an evening partying with friends from my computer geek bad ass tech writer days. Before that was probably our last dinner at Noey’s house. Next week is definitely our last week at the Homeschool Resource Center, the last opportunity I’ll have to visit with two of my downtown clients in person, and the last time I’ll have to shlep Mom down to the airport to fly out of Seattle.
The girls are scheduling their last play dates and sleep overs, DrC is booking his last days doing LASIK, and I’m making up the last shopping list for Costco. Before the end of the month, we'll visit the dentist for the last time, get our hairs cut (all of them), and swing by the pediatrician for a last looksee and updated shots. I’m tempted to make a last run to Ikea, Target, and Joanne’s fabrics before DrC sells the car in two weeks. We’ll be busy, that’s for certain.I keep trying to remind myself that we are not going on vacation. It’s not true that I’ll never step into a West Marine again; I just won’t be stepping into this one. And all wannabe cruisers hear the stories of boats gathering in big towns, renting a van, and making a pilgrimage to the local Costco in Acapulco. Everything we are giving up will be replaced.
Yet sometimes it seems like there is too much to let go of. We have already sold so much, stored or thrown away the rest. We’ve walked away from jobs, a beautiful house, all sorts of things things things. We don’t go to our YMCA or our favorite brew pub or the coffee shop I used to love, and we’ve had to change banks, grocery store, and library to ones closer to the boat. Now it's time to let go even of these cobbled together alternatives, and it really really hurts. I lie awake at night, and I’m not happy. This isn’t fun. This isn’t funny.
It’s exhausting. My mom told me I looked like hell when I arrived in Sacramento: tired, stressed out, and fat. We’re not particularly good with the little white lies in our family. She also said in the exasperated tone I think only mothers are capable of, “I’m looking forward to seeing you when you step off that damn boat in San Francisco this fall. You’re going to finally look rested.” We’ve come a long way when my hide-bound, land-based, neat freak of a bookkeeping mother imagines a week long ocean passage as a relief from the pressures of preparing for the cruising life.
In less than a month, we leave our homeport. We may not be ready, but we sure as hell are going to be done getting ready. The cruising life is not a vacation -- DrC and I know it will be as much work as our current lives if not more. But the biggest relief in those early weeks may be that instead of spending so much time on the last call, we’ll finally start doing things for the first time.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
It's All Covered
We owned a house, two cars, a boat, and a medical practice. To participate in the modern U.S. economy as owners and responsible parties for these assets, we had approximately two dozen separate insurance policies. DrC spent the last month attempting to disentangle the mess, replacing it with insurance appropriate for a family of cruising sailors. The entire process produced a sense of befuddled frustration similar to that induced by a shot of whiskey, three beers, and a two-by-four to the back of the head combined in quick succession.
Itemized separately, it felt like death by a thousand cuts. Malpractice, of course, was the single largest expense. I need say little to the average American regarding the absurdity of our legal system and the horror it is wrecking our medical system. While not as bad as Obstetrics, the insurance burden placed on your average eye doctor is considerably more per year than many of his patients earn in the same period of time.
But after malpractice, we had employment insurance, unemployment insurance, and a life insurance policy in case DrC became dead and hence unemployed. We also had property insurance for property, business insurance for business, and disability insurance in case someone dropped into the office with a machete and cut off one of the doctor's hands.
For the household, we of course had auto insurance, home owner's insurance, mortgage insurance, more property insurance, and medical insurance. Then we bought the boat and were required to get boat insurance, more mortgage insurance, and more life insurance in case DrC died again. Then there was additional life insurance in case I died, and a bit of liability insurance in case one of our tenants died while frying up a few veggies on the stove upstairs. At one point, it seemed quite reasonable to conclude that the kids would conspire to off their parents as our demise and the immediate liquidation of all these policies would yield about the same as an X Prize without the trouble of inventing a super green car or a moon rover.
Getting rid of all these policies is astonishingly difficult to do. When we signed up for all this crap, all we had to do was prove we had a pulse and a bank account. Sometimes we didn't even have to prove the part about the heart beat. Telling them to turn off the accounts, however, inevitably required a notarized receipt written in a combination of blood and fairy dust to prove we no longer (a) wanted the insurance or (b) had the item that was originally being insured. Since in many cases, the insurance was on DrC himself, it's been difficult to prove we don't have him.
Moreover, whoever originally signed up is the one who has to turn off the spigot. Despite the frighteningly pushy community property laws in Washington state, it is impossible for DrC to close an account I opened or for me to turn off something he opened. Credit card companies, by the way, are even worse than insurance companies. At one point I found myself telling a very nice but incredibly stubborn sales representative that I was never going to allow my husband to open another credit card account again ever so their insistence that they had to speak to him before they shut the account was moot. My volume I fear went up at the part where I told her that her company would never see a g* d* thin dime from my checking account so the entire lot of them could go to hell. And oh by the way send the statements care of /dev/null.
I'd like to say we are free of all this insurance nonsense, but we can not escape entirely. Marinas and Mexico require boat insurance. This is insanely expensive and covers absolutely nothing. Our boat in Canada and Mexico, for example, will run us roughly $3800 next year. What it doesn't cover is a list so much longer than what it does that it took me a good deal of effort to define a scenario in which they would actually ever pay out. It appears valid only if we manage somehow to sink the boat within 10 miles of shore on a calm day with two healthy, sober adults, no other boat within sight, and no wildlife larger than plankton. On the other hand, the policy is oddly enough designed that if we get advance, written permission from Lloyd's, we are covered in the event a terrorist decides to self-immolate on the deck.
One really fine piece of news is that travelers’ insurance is so many light years more reasonable than medical insurance in the United States that I can only fall prey to Michael Moore's assertion that we have the worst “bang for the buck” medical system in the world. As long as you do not get medical or dental care in the U.S., a fairly decent catastrophic plan for a family of 5 runs only $200/month. That's roughly half what we're paying now. And the travelers’ policy has odd but useful little side-bennies: lost luggage allowance, bodies shipped home, and hotel stays if our plane is delayed. Interestingly, travelers’ insurance does pay for property lost to a terrorist attack as long as the attack does not involve nuclear devices. So we need to avoid that.
I'm also thinking that getting advance, written permission to be attacked by a terrorist might be a little challenging. These companies never answer the phone.
Itemized separately, it felt like death by a thousand cuts. Malpractice, of course, was the single largest expense. I need say little to the average American regarding the absurdity of our legal system and the horror it is wrecking our medical system. While not as bad as Obstetrics, the insurance burden placed on your average eye doctor is considerably more per year than many of his patients earn in the same period of time.
But after malpractice, we had employment insurance, unemployment insurance, and a life insurance policy in case DrC became dead and hence unemployed. We also had property insurance for property, business insurance for business, and disability insurance in case someone dropped into the office with a machete and cut off one of the doctor's hands.
For the household, we of course had auto insurance, home owner's insurance, mortgage insurance, more property insurance, and medical insurance. Then we bought the boat and were required to get boat insurance, more mortgage insurance, and more life insurance in case DrC died again. Then there was additional life insurance in case I died, and a bit of liability insurance in case one of our tenants died while frying up a few veggies on the stove upstairs. At one point, it seemed quite reasonable to conclude that the kids would conspire to off their parents as our demise and the immediate liquidation of all these policies would yield about the same as an X Prize without the trouble of inventing a super green car or a moon rover.
Getting rid of all these policies is astonishingly difficult to do. When we signed up for all this crap, all we had to do was prove we had a pulse and a bank account. Sometimes we didn't even have to prove the part about the heart beat. Telling them to turn off the accounts, however, inevitably required a notarized receipt written in a combination of blood and fairy dust to prove we no longer (a) wanted the insurance or (b) had the item that was originally being insured. Since in many cases, the insurance was on DrC himself, it's been difficult to prove we don't have him.
Moreover, whoever originally signed up is the one who has to turn off the spigot. Despite the frighteningly pushy community property laws in Washington state, it is impossible for DrC to close an account I opened or for me to turn off something he opened. Credit card companies, by the way, are even worse than insurance companies. At one point I found myself telling a very nice but incredibly stubborn sales representative that I was never going to allow my husband to open another credit card account again ever so their insistence that they had to speak to him before they shut the account was moot. My volume I fear went up at the part where I told her that her company would never see a g* d* thin dime from my checking account so the entire lot of them could go to hell. And oh by the way send the statements care of /dev/null.
I'd like to say we are free of all this insurance nonsense, but we can not escape entirely. Marinas and Mexico require boat insurance. This is insanely expensive and covers absolutely nothing. Our boat in Canada and Mexico, for example, will run us roughly $3800 next year. What it doesn't cover is a list so much longer than what it does that it took me a good deal of effort to define a scenario in which they would actually ever pay out. It appears valid only if we manage somehow to sink the boat within 10 miles of shore on a calm day with two healthy, sober adults, no other boat within sight, and no wildlife larger than plankton. On the other hand, the policy is oddly enough designed that if we get advance, written permission from Lloyd's, we are covered in the event a terrorist decides to self-immolate on the deck.
One really fine piece of news is that travelers’ insurance is so many light years more reasonable than medical insurance in the United States that I can only fall prey to Michael Moore's assertion that we have the worst “bang for the buck” medical system in the world. As long as you do not get medical or dental care in the U.S., a fairly decent catastrophic plan for a family of 5 runs only $200/month. That's roughly half what we're paying now. And the travelers’ policy has odd but useful little side-bennies: lost luggage allowance, bodies shipped home, and hotel stays if our plane is delayed. Interestingly, travelers’ insurance does pay for property lost to a terrorist attack as long as the attack does not involve nuclear devices. So we need to avoid that.
I'm also thinking that getting advance, written permission to be attacked by a terrorist might be a little challenging. These companies never answer the phone.
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