Author: jaysolo

In an effort to orient myself this feeling crappy, slept poorly, sick kid kind of already awfully late, rainy, possible impending hurricane morning, a list of stuff I need to do, even a few of which happening in one day would feel crazy productive, with limited explanation since it’s mainly for my benefit. And not necessarily including all the obvious “get a job” related stuff.

Write an e-mail about a business proposition.
Test a few additional elements of my niece’s computer.
Put said computer aside to get kitchen table back.
Put temp power supply from that back in computer it was borrowed from.
Move said computer off of kitchen table.
Swap sound card in Sadie’s replacement computer. (Ah, but the drivers…)
Try adding RAM to Sadie’s replacement computer. (Shame it doesn’t even see it…)
Deploy Sadie’s replacement computer.
Put away the carcasses of Sadie’s and Valerie’s dead/dying computers.
Write list of over the hill spices needing replacement.
Toss dead spices.
Clean shelves & walls of empty cabinet.
Clear counter of stuff waiting to go back into said cabinet.
Empty and clean two other cabinets.
Check and purge remaining stuff in those as needed.
Pack at-risk foods in zipper bags.
Put stuff back in the other cleaned cabinets (finishing the important set).
Dishes. Always dishes.
Freeze chicken bought last night.
Selected vacuuming.
Chip at the bookcase shelf project (clearing some upper shelves, storing some books & stuff, so things we are selling or need safe can have room out of reach and be more organized).
Followup yet more on my domain transfer.
Followup on my Arisia membership transfer and question of converting babysitting memberships to adult to sell more easily.

Then there’s the site work, posting, job hunting related profile updates, and so forth. All of which always depends on what the kids are doing or who is sleeping and where. Before I do anything, it’s getting toward time for a meal for them. Or a solid snack, anyway. Before they get cranky. Except Valerie, for whom it’s too late, though I think the ibuprofen has kicked in now.

Where does the day go?

No birthdays today.

Been turning the house upside-down looking for two lost cups. The kids are efficient that way.

Been cleaning cabinets and purging what’s expired and making sure we have no more bugs, after finding them in a couple things recently. Luckily some of the expired spices or spice mixes are things I don’t need or want to replace. It’s hard not to divert into things like “hey, the top of the range hood is gross, I’ll clean it… oops, cleaning it thoroughly removes the paint.”

I have bits of stuff like that to finish or stabilize, but this is also a day off for day and a “try getting work” and activities associated with same day for me, more than normal, with the kids being gone a while during the day.

Heroes was interesting last night. Not certain I love where they went with it, sort of like the fixation with time travel and consequences of same on Enterprise, but cooler.

Need to dismount the air conditioner today. I hadn’t done it yet, and it proved handy for the fan when it was warm again, but if it weren’t there I could simply have opened the window.

Trying and failing to remember other laundry list stuff I might mention here. Oh well. Back to the cup hunt! Which is related to filling the dishwasher the last few percent and running it.

Henry caused Sadie’s power supply to fry, so that’s been waiting for replacement if I could find one.

Valerie’s computer started sounding sick. When I found the CPU fan dying, which would explain it shutting down spontaneously the other day as from overheating, I cannibalized that machine for power supply, extra RAM, and a better sound card. Gave Sadie a choice and she wanted to move to the table Valerie’s computer was on, so we cleaned the whole area spotless. Nothing. It appears the motherboard fried in the computer Sadie had been using. So I need to go through the old computers I have neatly stashed out of the way, either rebuilding or swapping so they have one. We’d already discussed consolidating down to a single shared one for them. Or I can give them a spare, really old one to abuse, and a somewhat better one.

We’re going to move them anyway, so the computer thing being in flux matters less, apart from Sadie’s sheer obsession with drawing in Paint and especially Paint Shop Pro. I need to make some time alone with her to show her some art books and maybe comics.

Friday we received approval for MassHealth, a week after I’d faxed all the paperwork and a letter explaining what happened and wondering how they never got all the info originally. I am certain that means we technically were covered the day of Henry’s appointment, when we paid $100 and the doctor made the stuff that would have been extra go away. If we’d managed to get past check-in without paying, he’d probably have made the whole thing not exist as far as the billing department was concerned. Which is a good reason not to have worried about all the times we got charged a full visit for a nurse blood pressure check, or got charged an extra visit because he happened to check one of our blood pressures while a kid was there for a checkup, and the BP notation was enough to trigger the billing process.

Since the original impetus was to cover the hospital for Henry’s emergency retroactively, not sure how that works. That’s gone to a collection agency now, and for all I know the MassHealth thing got dropped by HFI because once that happened it was too late.

I keep having my giant laundry list of things to do completely disrupted. Apart from cleaning and organizing needed otherwise, we had a couple of pantry insect incidents sufficient to mean I need to clean out the cabinets, check, purge, sanitize, and take the excuse to reorganize.

Then there’s the whole work-hunting thing.

Right, the gas and electric. You may recall our fundraiser and juggling, where we had to come up with $1425 and then make a payment plan. The payments are $200 a month until it is paid, informally, to be paid alternating with the current bills. Which should be lower for 2-3 months than they were in the last one, which they tell me only looked like August, and was actually July and may have included some of the tiny use of AC we had. It’s still too high for that to be it (over $200 electric for the month, our largest bill hands down of the past 13 months), and it coincides with having increased our use of compact flourescents (the first month we started using a few of those, we went down 20%, so for it to leap…). We went down in computer usage. We went down in fan usage, if only because they keep dying and we can’t afford to buy new ones, if we’d bother late in summer anyway.

In our conspiracy imaginings, power is being sucked away by grow lights the 3rd floor uses for their indoor farming venture. But chances are they are not tapping our power, or it’s an accidental wiring thing and maybe some of their AC or tools in the cellar is what we paid for this summer. However, I had a UPS that was probably deployed around the time out usage first went higher, that followed some odd behavior by dying. A UPS can consume extra power, depending on design and what the problem is exactly. I’d like to think it is that, and we will drop dramatically.

Anyway, we still can use all the help we can get, and it’d be fun to find someone had used the info over on the right under “light the power” to shrink our arrears (now $1225) (you’d have to specify it’s for that) or give us a lower monthly bill along the way. I added bizosphere.com to our sites available for ads, priced it high in keeping with its Page Rank, and already have enough there to cover the arrears, all else being equal, which can’t be counted on.

At that point in this post, the fact I have kids and domestic tasks reared its head. It’s impressively long, as these things go. It’s Monday morning now, rather than Sunday afternoon, so let’s see if I can recall anything else I meant to add here.

Did I mention Henry climbed onto the kitchen table for the first time? I sort of got pictures. That is, starting from the time he was established successfully on the chair, staging for his attempt to reach the computer on the table. They are likely to be posted later.

Funny the last thing I had typed here is about bizosphere.com, as it’s the blog I fret about the most, with probably the biggest money potential, and the home of the defunct – essentially, even if I did a memorial edition here or there – CotC. Someone DM’d me on Twitter later, about my plans, so that’s going to need to be a serious reply today. Link ads there sell for a shocking amount. I could probably generate a grand a month from the one blog by posting regularly, without seriously pushing. Or by figuring out how to populate it automatically with selected feeds.

Henry seems to have acclimated and improved a lot with age. We have a lot of meals he shares directly now. Pasta with red sauce was a little bit strong, but he thought he was in culinary heaven. He seems to be able to have peanut butter. A few days and I’ll test that in more of a clean scenario. Yesterday he reacted strongly, but it was probably from apricot preserves that have corn syrup as their second biggest ingredient. Part of ADM’s consipiracy to make us all fat while collecting from us via both grocers and Congress, you know. Might have been the fresh ripe pear, but probably not, considering he can eat any amount of canned pear halves in heavy syrup with no reaction. He’s eaten as many as seven or eight halves in a sitting. After his first bit of a tiny bit of sandwich, a smear of peanut butter sat on his lower cheek for most of the meal and might as well have been mud or something else completely inert. He broke out after he went back to the sandwich and smeared himself with jam.

In any event, most of this seems to be skin based. Contact. The salicylate thing is real but seems to have reduced. I’d be unsurprised if that heightens the independent skin sensitivity.

He thinks tuna sandwiches are the greatest and doesn’t react at all. Just tuna, mayo and bread, no pepper, celery, garlic powder, onion, relish or pickles, or cheese involved. Of course, he can have the garlic, onion or lettuce, no problem, and tomato with little or no problem. He reacted strongly to relish, which is both up there on the no list, and has unfriendly food coloring.

The kids have rediscovered their love of butternut squash. Yay for being in season!

Sadie seems to have developed an unexpected love of rice. An ideal meal for her is burger, ketchup and rice. Maybe she would eat some corn or sqush, sometimes even other veggies, but the meat and usually rice will be devastated. Both girls ate small adult sized burgers last night, plus almost half of my larger burger, and part of Deb’s large burger. Of course, a couple days ago I cooked five hot dogs for lunch and got half of one for me by the time they were done. Henry eats half of one. Oddly, how well he does seems to depend how well it is cooked (frying may be better, and brands vary but we always get milk-free, more “premium” sorts), so when I microwave them I give him the part that’s more well done. Juice-borne paprika in the hot dogs is what will affect his skin.

A particular favorite is grilled cheese and tomato soup. Sadie eats half a can of soup, easily, and a substantial amount of a full sandwich. Henry loves tomato soup, which seems to sit okay with him, no worse than ketchup. Val eats a lot less soup than Sadie, but she will eat all of a full sized grilled cheese sandwich.

Henry seems to do okay with canned pineapple in syrup. He seems to do okay with a small amount of dried pineapple, which is like candy. Sadie picked out white grape juice when we went to Wal-Mart, and we tried giving him some water spiked with 1/5 or less of that. It seemed to be okay, though we’d limit the amount.

Anyway, time to see what the kids are up to. I wasn’t intending to turn it into a “what he can eat these days” post. Also, started the cabinet cleanout last night so I’d have to continue, and should get back to that. Surprising amount of expired stuff. Ooh, I need to look up how long rice vinegar keeps after opening.