Newcomers and Lurkers Welcome!
Izzy is your host..
Coffee & Tea under the window.
Goodies on the platters.
Goodies on the platters.
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Newspapers are in their regular spot next to the door
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Please recommend (and unrecommend the Cafe/Lounge from earlier)
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May the 4’s be with you
Is it really maryb’s birthday today?
According to my mother. And she should know, right?
If she’s wrong, too bad. I’m not giving any of the presents back.
I just followed you over from the last café!
Happy Birthday maryb! (view large)
I’m late to the party, but I wanted to give you some b-day love!
{{{{{{{maryb}}}}}}} and :*’s
Thanks Olivia. And yellow flowers are my favorite. I like them in combination with blue/purples. Someone sent me an arrangement in those colors that I’m looking at right now.
Happy Birthday, maryb2004!
(This seemed appropriate for someone born so close to St. Patricks Day!)
http://actionalert.blogspot.com/2006/03/hr-1606-online-freedom-of-speech.html
the house is voting on HR 1606 – the online freedom of speech act – tomorrow!
please call your reps and spread the word. and remember – you can fax via the internets:
http://www.tpc.int/
p.s. read my sig
: p
Thanks for the info and links!
Do I have the right amount of candles?
(big breath … blooooooooooooooooooooooooooow)
I usually just go with one big candle. But that was fun too.
Happy birthday! Now presents!
Izzy, you shouldn’t have. But now that you have, I’m happy you did. Thanks!
Made it to work Wednesday…found a nice corner to hide in! Trying to get some work done…then sneak off home to another nap.
Please send that sunshine our way…getting frog web feet from too much rain here in Northern CA.
Have a great afternoon everyone!
Thanks! Hope you get some sunshine soon. I’ve only got it here in the cafe as well.
Happy B’day Mary.
Just for you, we bought in a world famous mixologist.
Who when he not mixing drinks, he out back, uhhmmmmm mixing.
And while he’s always has a big hug for friends.
He can take time out to wish you a happy B’day.
So, have a birthday cupcake from our Froggy Bartender.
Better yet have two.
This was taken last weekend along 17 Mile Drive.
Brunch sounds good! Meet me at the Village Corner!
Just had a great phone interview with a prospective new employer in the LA area!
I’m outta here! Woohoo!
Beautiful photo and congrats on the interview! I’ll keep my fingers crossed!!
Great picture and Woohoo on the job interview.
Thanks and thanks!
Yes, it’s good to feel wanted after this abysmal experience…..
I really happy for you mythmother. Now you can start putting that whole bad experience behind you.
BTW don’t forget to bring them a bunch of cokes to drink after you’re gone. 🙂
But what is she going to take pictures of now? Smog and traffic jams? 😉
Once they see her pictures, she can become paparazzo and make a mint.
A mint sounds good!
Thankfully, she still won’t be far from that lovely coast.
Seek & ye shall find, I always say
😉
True!
My husband gave me my clever little digital camera for Christmas in 2002, and I went around snapping and snapping until I discovered that I could take really great flower photos at Farmer’s Markets. So I have about ten kazillion great flower photos, not sure what to do with them, except take up lots of space on my poor old Power Mac. I was never much good at scenery until I came up here where it’s almost impossible not to take a totally great photo! But… there are SOME pretty places in LA…. you just have to drive in traffic jams through smog to get to them!
And to think I complain of traffic during quiting time in a town of 5000. 🙂
Just a thought, mythmother — but if you have the type of program that allows you to reduce the size of images files (like Photoshop), you can help the memory situation.
I’d certainly love to see your photo pix, btw. You’ve truly got the artist’s eye!
Please keep sharing whatever you like — your beach images have been a balm to this chilly northeasterner!
photo pix = flower pix.
(See? Chilly brains, too.)
is great — fairly easy learning curve, runs about $100, and has all the essential stuff from Photoshop without all the bells and whistles that 90% of folks would never use. I swear by it (though lately I’ve been swearing at it…it runs s-l-o-w on the Intel iMac; waiting impatiently for the Universal version!)…
Hmmm, those frogs are mixing, eh? And here I thought they were playing leapfrog.
You say tomato, I say mixing. 🙂
Hey there, all! Greetings from the snowy, sunny Catskills!
Happy Birthday, maryb!
May the new year bring you all the warmth, color & sweetness your heart can hold.
That’s just too beautiful of a picture WW.
Gee, thank you, FM! The daffodils are my favorite cultivated flowers up here (as I’ve shared before) — they’re the first to appear when Spring’s truly sprung. They enhance our celebrations!
🙂
Thanks WW — I love daffodils! Ours are blooming up a storm right now. Winter is definitely over.
Wow — that truly sounds wonderful to me, maryb.
Alas, as of today winter still hasn’t left the Catskills ..
Generally we don’t see our daffodils ’til about April 20. How lovely to have them blooming on your birthday!
That’s beautiful! I like how you captured the falling snow.
This really is a pretty spot, SN — which is why I’ll put up with our -20 wind chills & all the rest of the wintre doldrums, sure enough.
I used flash to catch the flakes.
Congratulations on a new beginning, mythmother!
I’m exceptionally pleased for you! We’re with you all the way.
Thanks, wilderness wench! Couldna done it without the Boo-Team in my corner!
share them widely!
Peace
.
oh and they do a little dance! I especially like the period. That’s great dada. Thanks!
We’re getting all of our winter rain in March instead of January….aaacckkk!
Although the Tahoe ski crowd is really happy! 12 feet of new snow in the last 3 days at some resorts!
Rainy Day escape!
Argh. My son is in northern Nevada and can’t drive home until the passes are clear. New-ish driver, first road trip — I’m worried. And I have a feeling we won’t be seeing him until July.
Natl Weather Service
Roads over the passes should be clear this weekend…check out the link to National Weather Service. Cal Trans is pretty good and if he drives midday roads should be good.
Thanks so much for the link! Now if only I could get some sort of transmitter placed in the kid…
Hi everyone, I just put up a Welcome Wagon, tell us about you diary. Go on over and write something about yourself.
Thanks mythmother. Yes, St. Pat and I are close, very close.
I love the evil look on the first frog’s face. It’s because his life is too focused on “mixing.” I can tell.
Thanks FM! The sugar high from those cupcakes is going to last for days.
Took our pup to her first ever snowy day on monday. She had a great time, very silly. Wouldn’t hold still, there was just too much of that weird white stuff to hop around in.
One of her few still-enough-for-pictures moments:
She’s really cute!
Thanks! Unfortunately, she knows it, too!
She’s considerably less cute when she chews random things — lately, it’s been books. Last week, she ate Lolita. So at least she’s a sort of literary dog.
One of our dogs ate Wolf Brother…
Well, that looks like a blast! She looks like quite a sweet pup, too — despite literary tendencies.
She’s obviously not alone, though. My young feline friend has the same tendencies. This week it’s Melville.
She’s super sweet, she’s just still got that puppy thing that makes her listening abilities selective and her teeth in need of constant activity.
I can’t wait until she’s a grown-up dog, though I have to admit that it’s really hard right now to ever picture her being “wise” or whatever. She might just keep her intrinsic goofiness.
And the snow is great in the sierras right now… we’re going back next weekend with snowshoes. It was just too deep most places we wanted to go to do much without them. I stupidly walked right into a drift that put me in up to my chest this last time, which is now very funny but at the time involved a whole lot of snow falling down my pants, followed by repeated cursing.
I hear you on the cursing, Spit — I’ve done the same, involving a 25-year snowfall & the end of a 4′ porch.
About your sweet pup: I wonder if some sort of healthy, massive chew-toy would help her evolve?
She has an amazing number and variety of chew-toys, actually, all of which are super fun until we leave the house. She just really loves paper products for some reason. I’m thinking I may have to spray a few sacrificial books with bitter spray and leave them around for a while… unfortunately, books are something we just have too many of for us to be able to put them all out of her reach or whatever.
I considered that suggestion, but I figured your book space was like mine — insufficient.
One wonders if the appeal’s in the paper, the glue or the sensation ..
Just a thought: maybe if the book-chewing’s a ‘home alone’ kind of thing, she’s actually keeping her comforting connection with you that way, since books pick up smells so well.
You might try sacrificial shoes instead ..
Sorry to ‘worry’ the issue as I do, but I’m the type who’s actually pained to see books mangled. It’s the one thing I really don’t like about my kitten’s habits.
I used to be a lot more protective of books, too, but working at the bookstore for so long kind of cured me of it. Plus, she’s oddly not all that interested in shoes. The only other bad things she consistently eats are the trash and my poor, decrepit (and usually thankfully empty) wallet… both literally and figuratively, I suppose.
My girlfriend’s old cat used to eat photos all the time. They were his favorite thing, and he could find them no matter where they were hidden. So she’s got all these albums full of photos with corners chewed off, teeth marks on one side…
Ah yes, they sure do love using their hole-punchers.
My sweet cat Zena — now up in spaghetti heaven, bless her — had an incurable taste for cigarettes. She also managed to open up a contact lens case & eat the lenses (pre-disposable).
Thankfully, she eventually moved to a Wisconsin dairy farm & freed herself of her toxic habits.
As for your pup, I guess we’ll just have to hope that she does, in fact, mellow with age ..
thinking about it, I think it’s more that she’s very savvy about what she can get away with when she knows we’re not watching. She’ll be perfect about just about anything until the moment I go to pee or something, too. Then I come out to trash scattered, cats terrorized, sofa in disarray. All of which she knows are bad.
So I don’t know if paper chewing = comfort, or if it’s just something she figures she’d better do while we’re not lookin’.
About paper chewing/comfort, it might not be an either/or sort of thing.
After all, lots of us do things to comfort ourselves when no one’s lookin’.
😉
Heh.
Very good point.
My new kitten loves paper products as well. It is not unusual to be sitting in the living room watching tv and see her come downstairs dragging a chewed up tampon by the string. New thankfully. Somehow she gets in the cabinet and goes wild between those and the extra rolls of TP.
Y’know, I’m not surprised about that — they love strings (the rodent predator thing) & if you’ll forgive me, used tampons smell rather .. meaty.
With cats, I definitely think part of the appeal of paper is in the kind of noise it makes. Back to the rodent predator thing.
Btw, does kitty have a name yet? If not, I sympathize — my 5-month-old kitten doesn’t quite have a name yet, either (though I think we’re narrowing down the possibilities).
Maybe you should call her Stayfree 😉
Forgive me, SN — you did not say that kitty’s tampon-toys were used.
Obviously, my mind is truly in the gutter (or toilet).
Next thing you know I’ll be talking about presidential erections .. (thank you, Gilda).
Thank God for indoor plumbing! My new kitten does not have a name yet. I feel so bad, we’re just calling her kitty. We really need to decide!
to support censure and investigation!
http://actionalert.blogspot.com/2006/03/support-conyers-impeachment.html
stick it to the bastards!
trying to get a new prescription for my sons braces for his clubfeet and the best I can muster so far is that the guy who made the ones that are too small now (because kids tend to grow) feels so bad that if I drive to Pensacola tomorrow he will do what he can to make wearing them all day at school bearable until somebody hates me so fucking much that I get a prescription for new ones! This fucking country’s healthcare system sucks so fucking bad I can’t see straight right now…..and it doesn’t matter what kind of coverage you have written on paper because that is just more fucking writing on more fucking paper. It physically accomplishes NOTHING! Nobody has any phone numbers to anybody within the system who can help you…Humana is a big idea in the sky who watches over us, kind of like God! Doesn’t matter that we have full coverage. Nobody has my son’s records and as of mid day the nurse handling my sons referrals still hadn’t even pulled his records and got to meet my husband in person…..I’m sure she wasn’t expecting that. If I were to wipe my ass with the my insurance policy I would probably being doing the most useful thing possible with it…..I might as well starve to death at a chili cookoff with my hands tied behind my back and my mouth taped shut and my son right there beside me though he probably won’t be able to stand! Every single time he needs something, it’s like it is the first day he was born. Nobody at Lyster Army Hospital has his records and their not sure who is qualified to see him and they aren’t sure about referring him to REAL DOCTORS who turn around and ask for his records because doctors tend to need fucking records for patients….but for some reason when making a referral the whole records thing gets ignored and just ties up the system for another week or maybe even two. Fuckwads! It has to be deliberate otherwise why is it this way every single time?
My heart goes out to you, Military Tracy! You are absolutely absolutely right about our totally sick and fucked up so-called health care system. My son has had no pituitary function since age three, and we have gone through endless endless frustrating aggravating heartbreaking expensive futire nightmares trying to make sure he always had the medication he needed. This was a good vent, hope it helped! Come on in and vent any time, we are totally with you!
and just recently I discovered how important pituitary function is……kind of like “you’re not here anymore” without the stuff your pituitary puts out. You are done, finished, kaput! And he is child damn it….saving all these fetuses is the biggest fucking deal of the fucking day and here is a child, healthy so long as he has the hormonal building blocks and dead without them. Let’s ignore him though and focus on somebody else’s fucking fetus and somebody else’s fucking vagina and somebody else’s fucking sex life and somebody else’s relationship commitments. Makes me fucking nuts living with these psychos right now!!!!! Just out of my mind and I don’t have my old backup of other parents of the disabled that I used to have. We swapped phone numbers and we swapped plans of attack and by fucking God we would gang up on your ass if you were hurting our kids. I don’t even know if they have such an underground system here. Everybody seems to COMPLY here or die trying!
When he first got sick I started working at a hospital so I could learn how the system works. The first thing I did was inpatient insurance billing and at that time (mid-1980s) HMO was still a relatively new concept. However, the worst companies to bill were the HMOs and the military insurance, I forget what it was called. Even then it was clearly a racket that was set up to deny and delay payment on the tiniest excuse.
Can you imagine what it must be like to work for that kind of an organization? The people who answer the phone when we call them are probably at the bottom of the corporate food chain, getting paid minumum wage while trying to feed a family of five. They probably get docked everytime they actually process a payment or provide a service, with a slight bonus for every time the aggravate and frustrate a customer, patient, or patient’s parent. Can you imagine how cynical? But they probably have some cute Orwellian name for the procedure, like Accelerated Customer Service.
Hang in there and breathe, MT! One of the things I had to learn the hard way was to separate the anger that was part of my grieving process for my son’s loss of perfect health, and the aggravation and rage that resulted from trying to deal with a heartless, corrupt medical system.
I’m so sorry you’re going through this, Tracy. ((((hugs))))
It is deliberate. You’re right. I’ve run into a lot of the same sorts of things. The HMO’s started it in the 80’s with some corporate theory of how X percent of people wouldn’t appeal and it would save XX amount of dollars. It’s just spread from there and it’s unforgivable to do this with people’s lives and health.
Yes, I agree that it is deliberate. They obfusticate and delay providing service and insurance companies obfusticate and delay authorizing and paying for services since in the end it saves them money. It is a form of “gatekeeping” since they go by a formula that makes sure they will profit. Once my son needed to fill his growth hormone perscription (since his body does not produce any) which is very expensive, about $2,500 per month and the insurance carrier tried to delay filling the perscription for TWO MONTHS since they knew my employer was changing carriers after 12/31. It made me so angry I was about to explode, but the fact is after years and years of being dicked around you reach a kind of emotional numbness and exhaustion. Out of that you have to pull a temper tantrum to finally get them to take any action. It is an endless struggle with a bunch of truly heartless money-grubbing villians.
Who wants to even risk having a child with these fucks in charge. If it has problems look at what happens to it and look at what happens to the parents. Oh the sonsabitches!
That’s why I get in such a rage when I hear the phrase “Right to Life.” I see red and my blood just boils!
They really are fuckers, the wingnut right-to-lifers who are first in line to make sure our kids don’t get the health care they need in order to survive!
That sucks. That something that should be relatively simple should be made into an impossible bureaucratic nightmare. Don’t any of these people even care about others??? How much screaming does it take to get people to do anything?
Sorry if I’m stepping in your rant here, but moving a kid up to the next size braces shouldn’t be hard.
It is tough when a child is disabled, instead of witnessing the system doing this every now and then it becomes a way of life. I’m about to go “Colorado” on their asses and I think they all know it. I find out how, where, who and why and eventually I get done what needs done and I make damn sure that the door is wide open the next time. The fucking bastards though for doing this to someone every single time they have to move in the military. You have to learn how to be a total bitch and often even a Cunt in a brand new environment that you tried so hard to be excited about moving to cuz you are moving one way or the other!
Don’t go and do a “John Q” Tracy.
A week before I got the word my son “could have surgery” I was about to go and sit in protest at the hospital.
We were even told Wesley could DIE while waiting for dental surgery. Die from blood poisioning due the infection from waiting with 2 root canals needed for THREE MONTHS. THREE MONTHS!!!!!! Die due to dental matters????!!!
This country is so fucked up.
okay breathe..
Tracy, have you thought of calling a radical reporter to come with you to the hospital?? Know of any? Anyone here know??? I wouldn’t protest, sit in at the hospital as they might foster your kids. YOu know… but if you take a reporter in with you… who knows. Just an idea.
They would rather our kids die than do their job. Hell the meat industry wants us all fat and sick with cancer so their buddies at the pharm industry can sell us drugs.
How I have handled this in the past is they pull the crap on me…..I cry…..I clean something…..I go to bed. I wake up and a new plan of attack has been born in my noggin and I pick up the phone and dial again. I have had three or four days of this in a row at times in the past. I can almost feel sorry the idiots because it has to exhausting for them, I’m fueled from the heart.
Infection stops an independantly beating heart…..not getting your heart medication stops an independently beating heart. Oh the insanity of the insane these days.
Christ in a handbasket, MT — I definitely hope you & your son make it over this particular hurdle as quickly as possible.
Absolutely true: the ‘greatest nation in the world’ –with its quality-of-health care rating at #28 world wide, seems absolutely inundated, from top to bottom, with incompetence & lack of human awareness in those employed to serve our most basic needs. Additionally, the entire systemic machinery is decrepit beyond repair.
Good luck to you in straightening this out, against unbelievable odds.
is figure out who has been placed in the “road block” job and then report all of the “blocking” to whomever it is supposed to matter to. If that doesn’t work, then I end up in the waiting rooms of the therapy clinics for special needs kids putting up my name and number and requesting other parents having problems to call me and then we pool resources and anger and usually get things done…..at least for our kids, they note our names and faces and when we are around they actually do their job and just screw everybody else over I guess. When I end up going past your office though everytime I’m in the hospital to say “hello” and make sure I introduce myself to every poor sucker sitting in your office when I’m there and making note of their name……that is when Tracy has graduated to “cunt” and I have gone that far once so far in being Joshua’s mother but that nasty evil woman sitting behind her desk making every person’s life hell that she could manage needed to meet me at my cuntiest.
Tracy, I know. I truly know. You know Wes’ dental nightmare.
Everyone… the military DOES NOT provide adequate care for our disabled children.
This is why we left the Navy when it was apparent Wesley was disabled.
Everyone… we shouldn’t force moms to BEG to get health care.
Let Bush have a fucking bake sale for his Pig War and let mothers of the world fix and heal this planet’s greatest treasures. The Children.
Tracy, let me know if you want me to spend time on the phone for you. Anything I can do. Anything. And if you don’t let me know, I will hunt you down and give you a … purple nurple. (((XOXOX)))
We just spent 7 weeks(!) trying to get my daughter’s HEART MEDICATION filled. The insurance company will only pay for 3 refills at a pharmacy then you MUST do it through the mail. Her doctor faxed them the RX per their instructions and we waited a week. Then we called and they said they didn’t get the fax. So I called the cardiologist and he faxed it again while I was still on the phone. A week later when we still hadn’t received it I called insurance company again and they said they hadn’t gotten it! Then they said they got it and they don’t know why it hadn’t gone out yada yada yada…so we had to have the cardiologist CALL in a prescription to a local pharmacy and get it filled that way but PAY for it….grrrrrrrr!
See, that’s exactly… ARGH! I don’t even know what to say anymore, but I’ve been through so much of that same kind of bullshit. Anyway, you guys probably have already figured this out, but a couple of things that have helped me (pre-volcano stage) are using the broken record technique combined with the phrases “that’s not acceptable” and “that’s your job.”
It’s very important to, as they say, stay on message. I figure out one phrase beforehand, such as “I need this prescription now” and just repeat it over and over. If they give me excuses I just say it’s not acceptable and repeat my goal phrase. If they tell me to do stuff I just tell them that’s their job and repeat my goal phrase.
It’s very important not to get sucked into side arguments or start making helpful suggestions about how they should fix it. It doesn’t always work, but it does a surprising amount of the time. Oddly, no one seems to care that you’re not actually engaging in a rational conversation. It also saves a lot of emotional energy since you’re just ignoring everything that’s not constructive.
I love my husband because he is all over that “it’s your job” thing. I’m always all over “that’s unacceptable”. I heard every excuse today after my husband left her office about why nothing had happened yet. She didn’t know his feet hurt….I said not true and repeated my initial conversation….so she said that she didn’t know his feet hurt that bad…..this is going NO PLACE fast. He can’t concentrate in school he needs new braces now. He can’t concentrate in school he needs new braces now. He can’t concentrate in school he needs new braces now. I can already tell though that after tomorrow and his braces have been made “bearable” on my nickel and my driving mind you……some how he will end up on the bottom of the pile and I can already foresee one more visit from husband during his lunch hour and at least one more ass riding phone call from me the day after tomorrow after I have returned from Pensacola!
Hmmm…. brunch time is for those who get up at noon, is it not? Right coast, right time, but where’s the eggs benedict? All there is seems to be a bunch of birthday cake crumbs and some remnants of champagne cocktails.
Happy Birthday to you, MaryB2004, and congrats to mymother.
Now, I think I’ll have me a coffee.
Must go read the Annotated New York Times. That is, read NYT with my copy of “Censored News” next to it. (Is Russ Feingold putting out a paper as well? “Censured News?”
liberal catnip gets a visit and a comment from CENTCOM
That was a wonderful reply catnip. 🙂
I’ll be on the radio with another CodePink Goddess as spokesperson stuff talking about CP and the war. 🙂 This Friday. Drive Time. OMFG!!!
So damn happy!!!
That is great! Congrats!! Do you know what station and is there an internet link?
They are cool, too!
KBOO
Bread & Roses show,
>>>> on Friday night? To talk about CODEPINK and the women’s >>>> convergence?
I’ll let you know of the exact time. The first email said drive time. But I’ll get more information from the other CodePink lady
Oh, good — it’s got a link to listen online! IIRC, I think radio drive-time shift is 4 to 8, but I could be misremembering. I’ll count on you to give us an update. Yay!
You’re kidding about the KBoo, right? 🙂
Nope that’s what it’s called 🙂
okay – 6-7
can also be heard here Feminista Factor
Very cool.
Thanks (CabinGirl) they’r ethe ones who air Democracy Now here 🙂
This is great, great news, DJ! Absolutely looking forward to hearing you, if I possibly can.
Rock On, woman! 🙂
This cafe’s getting a little full, so I’m off for a minute setting up a new one — be right back.
Okay, everybody. We are sooo done with brunch. The pub is now open.