Enemy of Entropy
Archive for May 2009
YAY!
Current Mood:
Esctatic
We were fairly sure of this right after I finally had my Social Security hearing last month based on the very positive statements from the judge, but I didn’t want to jinx anything. We got the official letter in the mail today, saying that the decision was “fully favorable!” SQUEE!
It will still take some time for that decision to bounce around the bureaucracy and get monthly payments started, much less get the back pay from the SSA. Because the onset date was years ago, I should be eligible for Medicare right away, but I’ll need to talk to the attorney about that on Monday.
I really needed some good news, so the timing is marvelous.
This process has been an insane endurance contest. The fact that the SSA has been absolutely obstructionist throughout (and I know my experience is far from unique!) is ridiculous. The system demands that people who are most in need of help are least likely to get it in any timely fashion, because it takes so much persistence, jargon, and inside knowledge to get anywhere. If you can do all those forms and gather all the records and so on by yourself, I don’t know that you should count as disabled! Even people with good support in other ways don’t always have someone willing, able, and persistent who can and will spend the hours and hours of time to push a claim through.
I started the filing process for one reason: I needed stable access to healthcare so that I could get well enough to go back to work. Five years down the line, I’m not at all sure that I will be able to return to work, because my health has deteriorated so much that it may not be possible to get back to an “abled” state. How many years of productive lives are being in the U.S. wasted for lack access to healthcare?
I get annoyed every time I hear a talking head refer to plans to “insure” everyone. That isn’t what we need! Plenty of people have health insurance and still don’t get the actual health care they need because they can’t afford the co-pays, or the insurer won’t cover a particular drug or therapy, or there are pre-existing condition problems, or…
We need health care. Not divided up by age (this for kids, that for seniors, something else for working age people, oh, right, the disabled here) by universal car, the same care for everyone, for the whole body, cradle to grave. (Who ever decided that eyes and teeth should be separated out, anyway? That’s stupid.)
I read an artcle about San Francisco’s health program last week – if I can find a link I’ll add it later. It does just what I described, from what that article says. I don’t know how much it costs to join, but apparently there’s a lot of outreach to people who are otherwise uninsured. There are no pre-existing conditions.
Does anyone know of programs like San Francisco’s elsewhere in the U.S.?
excitedNifty! Know a girl aged 8 – 11?
Via the inestimable ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ideageek: Teaching girls to program
“Kids learning to storyboard, brainstorm, critique, design, pitch ideas, psuedocode, actually code, and make toys do things.”
bouncyDollhouse Fans? TV stuff
Do any of you maybe record Dollhouse? We don’t do cable, so Katie and I have been watching it streaming on Hulu. This coming Friday’s episode isn’t going to be streamed, though, and we don’t want to miss it. Any chance of some help? Pretty please?
It’s fairly amazing how much you can find to watch online now. Legally! I used to get the CSI DVDs from Netflix when they were released each year, and watch the whole season in a marathon. Now we watch all three CSI shows on the CBS web site. The same goes for NCIS and Numb3rs. While the site says you can see full episodes of The Mentalist, I haven’t found a way to do it. ABC has The Unusuals and Castle streaming. Burn Notice, Chuck, Bones, and Lie to Me are all on Hulu.
There’s another show we watch once every few weeks, um, Legend? Legends? Something about a Seeker. I can’t handle more of it than that, because the plots rely heavily on stupidity. That’s too annoying, and while there are pretty people running around in nice scenery, it isn’t enough to make up for the stup.
Comcast keeps sending more and more plaintive offers, trying to get us to subscribe to their cable TV and telephone service. When we did subscribe to cable, we didn’t get around to watching much. We don’t channel surf or just leavve the set on for noise, so it was wasted money. I suppose if we’d also gotten a Tivo or something similar, we would have recorded the shows we watch. But we didn’t, so we still watched them online when we did watch them.
We can still use the television to view shows, thnks to a nifty cable Sam procured. That’s better than watching on a computer monitor, and we can watch together. (It isn’t much fun watching alone.)
recumbentTime Flies
I used to get so annoyed when my mother would say, “Twenty years from now, nobody will know the difference.” She was wrong in a sense — I certainly still know the difference, about so very many things.
On the other hand, I do understand the longer view much better now. Twenty years seemed like such a long time then, and now? It’s so very short.
In any case, Katie did get home from her trip to the great northwest. She had a marvelous time and thinks she has found her school.
I’m really proud of her. She planned this trip, to a place neither she nor any of us had ever been before, all by herself. She went without a qualm, had a marvelous time, managed her money marvelously, and made some great new friends.
Since then she also went to her first LARP. Again, she had a marvelous adventure, lots of fun, and found a new thing she enjoys. I think we need to acquire camping equipment.
Sam has started playing Burning Wheel with a group of local people. He really enjoys the game. I’m glad to see him getting out and having some social time with others.
I had a big thing happen, but I’m going to stay quiet about it a little longer, ’til it’s also a sure thing.
In the meantime, I’ve found a nice outlet for my OCD urges as a “librarian” at Good Reads.
