Calm before the storm

Of course overshadowing any weekend recaps is my mom losing her job on Friday.  She was not alone, in total they laid off seven people that day.  Basically business has been in the crapper for quite a long time.  Mom had expressed concern about the stability of her job to me over the last few months but I never thought it was a real possibility.  Mom is good at sales.  I guess I figured that was enough to insulate her from the chopping block. I was wrong.

Of course mom is very upset.  Mom said the last time she was “fired” from a job was when she was 15.  She now finds herself in the middle of a pool of uncertainty which does not sit well with mom who is most comfortable in an established daily routine.  She already started the ball rolling by filing for unemployment.  I was surprised to find out that no matter how much money you make, the most you can collect from unemployment is around $250-$275 a week.  Imagine if you were a six figure middle manager in a company and got laid off? 

Of equal if not larger concern is how to handle the health insurance issue.  Mom can pick up Cobra to extend her health benefits.  However going this route is very expensive, in fact it could potentially eat at least half of what she could collect via unemployment.  Luckily, Ali heard about one of the side benefits of the monster stimulus package.  There are now provisions that will subsidize part of the Cobra expense, up to 65% of it which would be a huge help.

Of course the ideal sequence of events would be Mom simply finds another job that pays around the same amount of money.  Three or four years ago that would not have been very hard to do.  Today it is a very daunting task.  Her job was a great fit for her in many ways, it offered a hefty salary instead of being mostly commission, had good hours (for sales) and was very close to where she lives.  Finding those qualities in her next employer will be tough.

On the positive side, Mom has a decent stash in her savings to supplement what unemployment doesn’t cover.  She is getting two weeks severance pay and supposedly they will cover her under their insurance until the end of June.  If Mom would happen to be unemployed for a prolonged period of time she found out that starting in November she could start collecting social security benefits which would further help lessen the financial pinch.

Of course whatever we can do to help mom out during this time will be done.  It would be great if she got lucky and managed to snag a new job sooner rather than later.  However if it turns out to be a long term situation we will find a way to work it all out.  Mom’s biggest issue may be not going stir crazy without a job to go to 5 days a week. 

I decided that I was not going to mow the grass this weekend despite it starting to take on a jungle appearance.  Instead I wanted to wait and mow it just before we leave.  I figured it was a more efficient use of the effort.  So Saturday morning I knocked out a bunch of outside chores including tending to the garden.  I pulled a massive zucchini out that was hiding under some big leaves.  I couldn’t believe the size of the thing.  We also have some massive squash coming in.  One of them is about the size of a nerf football at this point.

I called mom and asked her if she wanted me to stop and bring over Subway for lunch. Ali was staying behind because she was sick.  I wanted to get over to her place to set up a laptop that she could use for internet access. Yes my mom actually is accustomed to using the internet now.  It’s something she finally got to get comfortable with at her job.  My plan was since she lives in a condo complex, there surely has to be some open wireless internet routers in the vicinity.

When I first fired up the laptop I saw no wireless networks, shit.  Then I disconnected the power cord and walked to the front of the condo with the laptop and scanned again. Bingo, it found an open network although the signal strength was very low.  I was able to connect to it but the signal was so marginal the connection kept dropping out.  Mom suggested we try out on the lanai since there are houses out that way.  I saw a different wireless network there and thankfully once again it was unsecured.

I was able to get a solid albeit slow connection.  I set up mom with an email address off my duf.net domain space.  We reconfigured her Facebook, set up her home page and verified she understood the process of logging on to the laptop.  The internet will be a big help for mom as far as the job search process goes as well as getting answers about the unemployment and Cobra process.  I asked mom if she wanted to come back with me and hang out at our place.  She was worried about catching what Ali has and being sick for her visit out west with my sister.

Mom thanked me for getting her online.  I reassured her that things will work out and not to worry although I am sure the worry on her part is probably non-stop.  It doesn’t make me happy to see mom bent out of shape like that.  I can’t help but have a rather large chip on my shoulder towards her former employer for reasons I’d rather not throw out into the public airwaves.

Ali had been resting for a good portion of the time I was away.  She has been sick for a few days.  Everyone knows it isn’t much fun to be sick or be in the house with a sick person.  Of course first of all I am crossing my fingers that I don’t catch what she has.  It would suck to be behind the wheel of the party van 8-10 hours a day while feeling like shit.  Second when you are sick you are generally miserable.  When you are miserable there is a good chance that anyone else in your close proximity is going to have some of that rub off on them.  It’s no fun for anyone.

Well I unfortunately had to call Ali into duty to help me repair another screen panel in the pool cage that ripped along the spline.  Another reminder of the shitty work that we paid 17k for.  I needed Ali to be the screen holder while I pressed the new spline in place.  Luckily since we replaced 5 panels a few months ago the process went smoothly.  I even thought to reattach and tighten the tension wire before securing the bottom spline in the screen to avoid getting any slack in the screening.  Ali was not happy being out there with me because she felt so shitty.  I appreciated her help.

Even though she was sick, Ali had plans to make a fancy eggplant parm with ingredients that were almost entirely out of our garden including eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, and potatoes.  The last time Ali tried to incorporate eggplant into a dish she had a hard time getting the bitterness out of the eggplant.  Well this time she did a fantastic job, it turned out great.  We both enjoyed it.

Saturday evening even though I was quite tired from a day full of activity I wanted to fire up EA Active and get a workout in.  I knew that in order to meet my goal for the week I had to get some work in.  I have been feeling residual soreness from doing EA Active.  The arches of my feet are very sore from doing tons of running in place up on my toes.  My legs and knees are feeling it as well after doing tons of lunges.  I was not very happy when I saw that one of the exercises in today’s workout was explosive side to side jumps.  I am hoping as I continue to use it regularly my lower body starts to catch up with my upper body. 

I got to run through the baseball activity in the game.  Unfortunately unlike Wii Sports there is no option for lefties so I wound up having to do everything right handed.  I am mildly ambidextrous so doing so was not that difficult.  There are fielding, pitching and batting drills.  They are fast paced, simple and fun.  I can’t wait until Ali gets healthy again so we can go through some workouts together.

My Sunday was not all that busy.  I put new wipers on the party van as well as scrubbing off  the residual bug guts on the windshield from the trip to Orlando.  Over the weekend I also vacuumed the van out, had Ali wash the bedding and removed one of the captain chairs to give us additional storage space for our copious amounts of junk that will accompany us on the trip.

I finally got around to watching Caprica, the 2 hour tv movie from the creators of Battlestar Galactica.  It is the start of a new series.  The backdrop for the show is roughly 50 years before the Cylons nuke mankind.  The intent is to document the events that lead up to that moment, how the Cylons came to be and what turned them against man.  When the show first started I was scratching my head a bit, I had no idea how what I was seeing had anything to do with the creation of cylons.  However it didn’t take too long until the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.  By the end of it I had that familiar yearning for it not to end like I had from the BSG series.  I really am looking forward to the series starting in the fall.  With the announced death of the Terminator TV series it may be the only thing on TV that I REALLY would want to see.

Ali made another homemade creation on Sunday, again using ingredients grown from our property, an apple crisp.  This year our apple tree has been putting out apples much larger and mature looking than in years past.  They are full size.  However we have a problem.  Once they start to turn red they are like a magnet for the birds that love to fly in and help themselves, damaging the fruit.  They do the same thing to our lemons.(homemade lemon juice was used in the dish too)  Ali decided to snag a bunch of big apples even though they were still mostly green.  When I tasted a few pieces while she was preparing the dish there wasn’t much sweetness in them, I was worried it may make for a less than ideal desert.  Well once again Ali did a bang up job, the final product was very good.  She gets an A+ for her cooking creations of the weekend.

I’ve been sucked into the  Jon & Kate fanfare.  I find it interesting seeing episodes from the original season and comparing them to this years run.  Kate has obviously run herself through the glamour mill since season 1.  The first season they were in the old house, Jon still worked his IT job (he later quit to become a full time reality star) and they had not isolated themselves from many of their friends and family as they have done now.  Yea Kate is still a bitch back in season one.  It’s easy to see the seeds that have lead up to the present day situation with Jon banging something on the side and Kate being more worried if her Victoria Beckham hairstyle is intact than if the kids are ok.

A couple years ago I posted about a tape I sent in to America’s Funniest Home videos was aired.  In the clip my ex-wife’s family was over and playing pinata in the living room.  The little girl took a big swing and instead of hitting the pinata she hit her uncle in the jewels.  Well evidently that clip is now in the all time funniest pinata montage rotation.  Last night we were watching the $100,000 finale show for this year for some reason. (we never watch live tv normally)  Well here comes a pinata montage.  Instantly I recognized the preceding clips and excitedly told Ali that my clip should be coming up once again.  A few moments later there it was, on national tv for all of two seconds.  I am simply amazed that something I shot around 20 years ago is still getting aired on the show.  Damn it where are my residuals?  If you would like to see the poor “shooting a camcorder at the tv” quality rip of the montage I did before you can see it here, it’s a Windows Media file. 

Being on Facebook has allowed me to find out what has been going on with old classmates, teammates and friends I have not seen in ages, as long as two decades or more in some cases.  You never know how someone has turned out.  Sometimes things go as you imagined they would.  Sometimes the script is totally flipped from what you would expect.  I have one such case now.

I used to play baseball with a guy both in high school and summer leagues.  He was a very cool kid with good looks, a smooth demeanor along with being a good athlete.  I had not seen or heard from him since I took my last steps off a baseball field in the late 80’s.  If you would have asked me how I expected he would turn out I would have guessed as someone that would be a professional making six figures that spent years enjoying the swinging single life before settling down with the model quality wife years later.

Well once we reconnected via Facebook I saw things had not gone anything as I imagined.  He has been a minister for the past 10 years or so and a very outgoing, spread the gospel at every opportunity sort for that matter.  Many of his Facebook status updates are religious in nature spouting  praise of Jesus.  After one such post I made a comment that went like this “Odd place to profess it but I’m glad you are comfortable with your relationship with a higher being.”

There was no ill will meant by it, I just thought it was sort of bizarre to be professing this sort of stuff via Facebook status updates.  Well it triggered responses from both him and other people that were on the same plane as he is.  Most of it was very verbose and filled with more of the same sort of gospel.  I then simply asked if he had been born again. I suspected he was because based on my experience, born again individuals are often the most zealous when it comes to professing the word of the Lord.  That started another long diatribe that never really got me the answer I wanted.

Finally when I clarified my question by asking if he found God as an adult or was raised as a religious person I got verification that he came into the light as an adult.  Now of course anyone that knows me to any degree (or reads my blog) knows that I have a very skeptical view of a magical man in the sky that has his fingerprint on everything that happens on this planet.  However I don’t try to impress my feelings about it upon others.  If you want to worship Jesus or any other divine figure that is fine with me.  If doing so brings you happiness, contentment and security even better.  I just prefer to be going through the world with no seat belt in that regard.  Although it would be nice to have something good waiting for me when  clock winds down I just don’t think it is the ultimate reality.

The point of this rant?  Um I don’t know, I guess that it is an odd feeling to fast forward instantly in time in the life of an individual that you knew 20 years ago to present day.  All you have are the two points of reference with a whole bunch of white space in between.