You can find this week’s Objectivist Round Up at Trey Givens’ blog. I’m looking forward to reading Kate Gerber’s Is there a “Work-Life Balance?”
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Since we had Sammy, I’ve been running a lot more plastic through the dishwasher. It seems obvious now, but I couldn’t figure out why the ceramic and glass would come out dry and the plastic would always be wet. Answer: Ceramic and glass are better heat conductors and therefore stay hot longer and get drier than plastic. Duh!
Since that mystery was solved, here’s another one. Why doesn’t anybody make a lightweight children’s step stool taller than a measly 8 inches? We have stools all over the house, but have yet to figure out a good solution for the bathroom sinks. Right now, this is what we have to deal with in our tiny powder room:
If you look closely, you can see that the stool blocks almost half the doorway. It is a tiny space and I can’t imagine keeping it like this as long as Sammy needs a stool. She has to stand on the 2nd step and she can just barely reach the handles to turn on the water. She cannot reach the soap because of that completely non-functional sink. (For the life of me, I cannot understand why anybody would ever buy a pedestal sink. There is no storage and no countertop space. But that’s another mystery altogether.)
Anyway, this is a mystery I haven’t been able to solve. Any ideas out there?
This week I reorganized Sammy’s toys and play area. I put away a lot of baby toys for SS (Sammy’s Sibling) and bagged up all of the Happy Meal crap that had accumulated to give away. I also moved things around. Her dolls are on a shelf instead of in a drawer. Her easel and table have switched places. Almost all of the stuffed animals are in a trunk and their old places on the shelves occupied by games and puzzles. I do a playroom reorg every couple of months or so, but this was a major one.
The biggest change I made is that I brought all of Sammy’s art supplies – scissors, crayons, glue, paper, clay, markers and paint – out from the high places I used to store them, and put them in a set of drawers that she can access whenever she likes. She’s pretty responsible with these things, but I haven’t been willing to monitor her closely enough to allow her free access until now. I’ve noticed such a huge change in her since she started Montessori that I thought now was a great time to give this a shot.
She’s been spending a lot of time with her washable markers and the glue. She had never used glue at home before now, so it’s new and exciting. This is great because she gets very involved and I get lots of time to do my own thing. She has shown no inclination to draw on the walls or glue the cat to the dog, so I haven’t had to do much monitoring. I do have to interrupt my own activities, though – not to stop her from doing something wrong, but to respond to the constant cries of COME LOOK, MOMMY! I GLUED IT BY MYSELF. COME LOOK! I MADE A TRIANGLE. MOMMY! MOMMY! I MADE YOU A PICTURE.
That reorg was a couple of hours well spent.
I’m fascinated by social norms – unofficial rules that people obey without the force of the law to back them up.
A friend of mine recently started working as a nurse at a hospital and realized she had broken a social norm when a co-worker said to her, “Oh! I thought you were a doctor when I saw you from behind.” My friend realized that she was wearing the “wrong” kind of lab coat for a nurse and quickly corrected her mistake.
Recently, I read about the Dutch town of Drachten where they have removed all traffic signs and signals. People have come up with their own methods of sharing the roads with other drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, and they actually have less serious accidents now. People drive much more slowly and cautiously, but there is less traffic and you get to your destination more quickly. I haven’t verified these facts, but it is an interesting experiment. Take a look:
I’m enjoying one of the social norms at Sammy’s new school. When the weather is nice, we pick up the children at the school’s playground behind the building. We park in the large parking lot, get out, and collect our children. I have yet to see 2 cars parked directly next to each other. Everybody leaves a space between cars. It means walking a bit further, but it also means that there is always enough room to open the car door and maneuver the child into the car seat. A parking lot full of spaced out cars is also much safer. Reversing out of a parking space can be difficult when there are two huge minivans on either side of you. With all the kids around, it just makes sense.
This is a great example of Ayn Rand’s principle that there is no conflict of interests between rational men. It is selfish to cooperate with others in this way. Safety is a greater value than convenience, in this case. (It would not be a greater value at Target on a Saturday when you might have to walk a mile if only every other parking spot were used.) Any parent who decided to break the “rules” by parking next to another car just to get a bit closer to the playground, while counting on others to follow the rule so he could reap the benefits of it, would be seeking the unearned. This is not selfishness, but dependency.
It’s nice to see a group of people acting rationally and selfishly in such an everyday way. These are the Little Things that I love to pluck out of my experience and savor.
I finally got started taking photos of my pregnant self. Here I am at 7 weeks pregnant. (For the uninitiated, being “7 weeks pregnant” means that you conceived 5 weeks ago. A pregnancy is dated based on the first day of your last period. Your due date is 40 weeks from that date.)
That belly you see is just my usual fat self, but I have gained 5 pounds and my clothes are too tight. I’m determined not to buy any maternity clothes until I absolutely have to. This is not because I don’t like maternity clothes. As a matter of fact, I love maternity clothes! The only time I get to wear a lot of new things is when I’m pregnant because I’m the kind of person who normally spends about $100 a year on clothes. Maybe $200 if you include shoes. $250 if you include jewelry. Seriously, my budget is $20/month.
So anyway, the reason I don’t want to buy anything much in advance is that last time around, I grew out of clothes before I had a chance to wear them. I was due in September, so in March I went out and bought a lot of summer things. That year in Michigan the warm weather didn’t come until June, and by that time I was too big for some of the stuff I bought. You’re supposed to just buy size ”small,” “medium,” “large,” etc. based on your pre-pregnancy size and, just to be safe, I bought a size up from that. Still, I had to keep buying new things cotinuously. By August I had grown out of every single thing I owned and had to buy a whole new wardrobe (ok, that just means a few pairs of pants, really) for one month of wear. I had to shop in the fat womens’ maternity section, and I’ll tell you, it was really hard to find anything at all that fit me. I went from an original size of 6 to bigger than 14. That’s not about the belly – that’s just the hips and thighs and the rest.
Even with all of that, I really loved the big belly. I never felt “fat.” Well, there was that one photo that clearly showed all the cellulite on my thighs (shudder). But really, I loved the whole thing, including the maternity clothes. Yesterday, I went into my closet and looked at all those jeans that feel so tight, and I thought, “I’m going shopping!” The thought of buying stretch pants was a thrill. (I know, I’m sick in the head.) But I came to my senses. In the meantime, I’m going to go shopping in those boxes of maternity clothes that have been in storage for 3 years. Yipee!
I just completed a nightmarish 4 day saga of deciding which prenatal diagnostic tests to have. I got no real help from my doctors or the support nurses in the Future Moms program I am participating in. I finally decided to stick with the Nuchal Translucency screening, which was what I did in both of my previous pregnancies. It involves an ultrasound and a blood test and it looks for markers that indicate a higher likelihood of genetic problems such as Down Syndrome. It does not test directly for these conditions, but just gives you an indication that you might want to take a definitive test such as an amniocentesis. There is a pretty high rate of “false positives” – results that indicate higher risk when there is no actual abnormality present. So you have to be prepared to get a scary result, take another test, and then wait about 10 days for definitive results. I can live with that. The NT screening also tests for neural tube defects and congenital heart defects, which CVS and amniocentesis do not, unless they are part of an identified genetic condition. (I can’t find anything that tells me exactly what is tested for, just these broad outlines.)
Because the problems with my first baby were detected through ultrasound, I like the idea of this direct “looking” at the fetus. The 20 week ultrasound will be the most important one, but the NT screen will give me a measure of comfort if the results come back negative. I also like that the test is more comprehensive, even if less definitive. My situation does not lend itself to looking for any specific problem since the cause of my first baby’s problems is a total mystery. I want the most comprehensive testing possible.
All of that was the easy part of the analysis. The hard part was trying to compare the costs of each procedure. Health insurance co-pays are supposed to signal costs to the consumer – something that has been lost in our insane collectivized health system. (Of course, the current proposed “reforms” of health care would make this problem worse, but I’m not going to get into that issue on my blog.) My insurance company, however, makes it impossible to figure out what something will cost me ahead of time. I spent 4 days making phone calls trying to figure out my portion of the costs of these tests, and ended up knowing nothing at all. Finally, I gave up. I’m going to rely on the fact that there is a yearly maximum out-of-pocket expense that I can pay. I’m going to budget that full amount and be prepared to spend it. I still have to be careful, though, because if I neglect to get a pre-authorization for a procedure that requires one, I’ll have to pay all the costs and my maximum won’t apply. How do I know what requires pre-authorization? I have to guess, and then call the insurance company for every single thing that I suspect might require it. What clues do I have to go on? Nothing. Wish me luck!
The next thing that I decided to do was to get a flu shot. That took over a week of work. First, I had to figure out where I could get one under my insurance. That took a few phone calls and hours in front of their web site. Once I figured that out, I found that all of the places giving the shots would get a small supply, use it up, and then have nothing for weeks. I had to keep calling different clinics and pharmacies every day to see if they had any shots and how long the wait was. One time, I raced out to a CVS in the next town over, only to find that there was a wait of over 2 hours! I got lucky last night and got my shot at my local supermarket pharmacy. By just showing up and asking, I think I cut in front of dozens of people on the waiting list (they were waiting for a phone call from the pharmacy), but I could care less. I’m supposed to have some kind of priority because I’m pregnant anyway, but I don’t know how I was supposed to exercise that priority.
I’m still debating about whether I’ll get the H1N1 vaccine when it comes out in a month. It is recommended for pregnant women, but I’m nervous that it is a new vaccine and that it was “rushed.” I’ll think about that next month.
The bureaucracy of health care is one of the biggest stressors in my life. Every single time I consider going to a doctor, I become confused, angry, and sometimes I just shut down. I don’t trust the doctors, who are more concerned with liability and getting ripped off by regulations than in my health, my insurance company is my enemy, and I can’t stand the arbitrary rules, paperwork, and processes. None of this bothered me at all with my pregnancy with Sammy. The birth center I used was not part of the medical establishment and I didn’t use insurance, but just paid for it out-of-pocket. I need to find some way to deal with the medical world this time, or else it’s going to suck all the joy out of this pregnancy. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to do that.
Sammy just drew a picture, rolled up the paper, handed it to me and said, THIS IS FOR MY BROTHER OR SISTER.
This week’s Objectivist Round Up can be found at Reality Talk.
Aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for all of those government employees who make so little money, and are sacrificing their own financial security to serve us? Haven’t we always heard the jokes about the government workers in the cheap suits, who have to live in the slums, but who serve a noble calling?
I live in Fairfax County. It’s a suburb of Washington DC. The main industry here is government.
Average earnings for full time, year-round, male workers in Fairfax County in 2008 was over $100,000! Total median earnings for all workers (including part time and seasonal, presumably) was over $70,000.
In 2008, the average assessed value of detached single family homes was $617,541. The average for all residential properties in Fairfax County was $459,228, but it varies widely by area, from $332,879 in Lorton, to $1,017,799 in Great Falls.
Compared to the rest of the country, we’ve had a very small correction in housing prices, but these prices are still notably lower than they were a few years ago. I think the average drop for Fairfax County in 2008 was 3.38%.
Where is all the money coming from? We do have a strong technology industry here, but much of it serves the government. I suspect that a lot of the money is coming from outsourced government work, but it’s hard to get good data on that. The money for that government work comes from taxes. I’ve been told that government and military retirees get pensions and retire early. Many of them continue to work as consultants (usually indirectly working for the government), effectively bringing in two salaries, neither of which is pay for productive activity (at the macro-economic level). Northern Virginia is an example of a massive redistribution of wealth.
Still, Fairfax County is a nice place to live. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I like it here. I just hate the constant reminder of the size of the federal government.
(source: Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs.)
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