Happy birthday to Laureen

Happy birthday to Laureen

Well, it’s a crazy day.

1. Today is Laureen’s birthday. Since I’m a gentleman, I’ll refuse to divulge how old she is.

One of the things Laureen wanted for a birthday present was to have her BURP (Babies and Understanding the Realities of Parenting) mommies and babies over on Thursday. Sounds easy enough, right? Clean up the house, yada yada yada.

Uh, no. Nothing’s ever simple. Let’s see:

We’ve decided that since the big downstairs TV isn’t doing so well (needs a new power supply and there’s a couple of hotspots developing on it), we’re just going to move the entertainment center out of the house entirely. We still have a TV in the upstairs bedroom (ours), and, thanks so much to Darrell Anderson for helping to rewire the house, we have a satellite connection to that room.

Note that this is all AFTER we moved the king size waterbed frame upstairs and the queen size bed downstairs in order to be able to put Jacob in his crib in his room. We eliminated one tier of shelves underneath the master bed, so it works pretty well in the room. The computer (ugh, see below) also came downstairs.

We did the rewiring a long time ago, but yesterday was the first time we actually tested the satellite connection. Amazingly, it worked.

We (okay, I did it; Laureen was rearranging the garage to create space to put stuff in it) moved all of the stuff out of the entertainment center and rewired things upstairs. By 10:00 p.m., it was working.

Then I started to pull stuff out of the desk which was in the living room. The master plan is to take the green-covered couch and put it against the wall where the desk and entertainment center were, thus opening up the downstairs a tremendous amount and making the great room a truly great room.

Of course, Jacob decided that he wanted to wake up and play, so at 11:00 p.m., we had to call it a night.

This morning, we moved the entertainment center, the semi-working TV, and the desk to the garage, ostensibly to be sold or given away at some point in time.

So that’s part one of Laureen’s birthday present, waking up early to do the furniture moving. We’re disassembling the New York puzzle and storing it for the time being; since it was placed on the entertainment center, it no longer has an accessible home.

2. Here’s a note for all Texans: this year if you itemize your taxes, you’ll be able to take off all of the state sales tax you paid. There will be a table for estimating how much you’ve paid if you haven’t saved every receipt. Read here for some more info.

3. It’s election day, hoorah hooray. I’ve already voted. My position on the entire election mess has been a quote from Jim Hightower: “If God had meant us to vote, he would have given us candidates.” I’m not particularly happy with the incumbent, nor am I terribly pleased with Kerry. I feel that both candidates have way too many corporate interests hooked onto them. I am, however, more displeased with the level of Republican rhetoric and its tone than I am with Democratic rhetoric.

For me, neither politician has addressed a few things that seem to matter:
a. the federal debt (not the deficit) is huge. Why aren’t we attempting to retire some of that?
b. social security is a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse.
c. our dependence on oil is going to bite us in the tail very, very soon. We’re talking Canadian or European costs per gallon. Efforts into research into other forms of energy seem to be limited.
d. in my belief, certain areas of deregulation have only created larger empires than expected: instead of competition, you have mergers creating supercorporations. Look at the telecommunications industry and tell me that SBC, Verizon, and a few others aren’t as powerful as old Ma Bell. As it stands, most major media in the world is controlled by 7 companies: Vivendi, Sony, Disney, News Corp., AOL Time-Warner, and two others whom I can’t remember off the top of my head.

4. The power supply ordered from Newegg isn’t working, thus the computer is down. However, if you want to see (and/or order) some really cute Jacob pictures, email Laureen or me.

Sigh. Gotta get back on the stick. Happy birthday, love of my life.

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One Response to Happy birthday to Laureen

  1. Happy birthday to Laureen!

    Thanks for the good tax info., hadn’t heard about that.

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