Year: 2015

So it’s been a few months, and the promotional pricing on my CenturyLink internet is winding down. I called to renew the promotion, which of course doesn’t exist any more, and was told that I could sign up for a one-year commitment at $39.99 per month.

I plan to switch over to the Longmont gigabit internet in a few months when it comes to my neighborhood– don’t tell CenturyLink that!– so I didn’t want to sign up for a full year contract. I asked if there was a month-to-month option instead.

Yes indeed… and the price is $37.00 per month.

Hmm. So CenturyLink is willing to give me a monthly contract I can cancel at any time for less money than a year-long commitment? I’m not sure who came up with that, but I was secretly grateful. I took the deal, and now I’m just counting down the days until I can get some serious high-speed data!

So when you’re a kid, you always think about the awesome stuff you’ll be able to do as an adult, like eat all the cookies and candy you want, and play video games all day, and sleep in, and…

But then you become all grown up, and realize not all of those things are as awesome any more. Take candy, for example. About three months ago I was at the grocery store and decided on a whim to buy a big five-pound bag of Skittles. Because, hey, I’m a grown-up, and who doesn’t love Skittles in large quantities?

Apparently, me. It’s been three months and I still have a pound of Skittles sitting in the bottom of the bag, slowly decomposing into whatever Skittles decompose into. (What’s the half-life of candy like this, anyway?) I took out a handful today, munched on them, and decided it definitely doesn’t have the same appeal it did in college, when I’d down an entire snack-size bag of Skittles at once and laugh while brownish drool oozed out of my mouth because I couldn’t keep my jaws together. Ahh, good times.

So maybe sometime in 2016 I’ll finish off this bag, and then I won’t have any more Skittles whims.

Zack was cleaning off the Accord today, and there was some ice on the back window, so he decided to take the ice scraper and bang on it to crack the ice. Well, he cracked more than the ice– he shattered the window and put a big hole in it.

I suspect the glass was more brittle than usual– it’s been about 15 degrees for almost two days. But still, hopefully he learned a lesson about banging on icy glass.

Here’s a cool shot of what shattered safety glass looks like up close:

I hate the state of our health insurance system with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

I just received notice from our insurance provider that the state of Colorado is shutting them down, effective at the end of the year, so we have to shop around for a new provider. Of course we loathe the American health care system in general, and my libertarian mindset has a real problem with the fact that every citizen is forced to purchase health insurance.

So with a heavy sigh, I went to the “marketplace” and did some preliminary shopping, where I found that the absolute cheapest plan available is going to raise our health insurance costs by 39%. Thirty. Nine. Percent. How is this “affordable health care”? Disregard the fact that we never use our insurance policies; in almost twenty years of being a family, we haven’t once asked our insurance providers for money… we’ve paid untold sums of money in premiums (well over $100,000) and never received a dime in services. But to see our rates climb year after year (25% in 2013 and 45% in 2012) is staggeringly frustrating.

Argh.

I saw this the other day and liked it.

(with credit to the Lunar Baboon comic strip)

I felt like I should get some more mileage out of the sweet tri-corner pirate hat I bought for Halloween. I only had a chance to wear my costume twice. So tonight, we headed over to Red Robin for dinner and I wore the hat.

I called it the “urban pirate” look.

Our friend Rocio really wanted to take some senior pictures of Kyra. She’s not a professional photographer or anything, but she’s worked with a few of Kyra’s friends and their pictures turned out nice, so a few days ago they went out together and had a photo shoot.

I’m not really a huge fan of senior pictures, but of course when it’s my own daughter I’m probably a little biased. I think these are pretty great, and of course Kyra is beautiful. I love her long, flowing blond hair.

This week Alex was able to send some photos to us. Here’s one of him looking all official: he’s wearing his missionary name tag (Elder Schroeder).

And of course he managed to sneak in a “frowney face” shot as well. Apparently the guy on the left end didn’t get the memo that it was a goofy picture.

I saw this snippet of C code on Github:

So evil! If you know C, or even a reasonably similar programming language, you’ll understand why this single cruel line, slipped into an include file somewhere, would drive code testers to the brink of murderous insanity.

Last night was our annual Halloween party, and it was fun as always to put together a costume.

Kyra and her friend Chaille decided to be Sponge Bob and Patrick, who are apparently a sentient kitchen sponge and his friend the starfish. The idea sounded a little shaky, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how Kyra would be a huge sponge or Chaille an enormous starfish. But their costumes actually turned out pretty sweet:

That’s (Girl) Alex in the middle, dressed as Bucky, the arch-enemy and ex-friend of Captain America. It took me a moment to figure out that costume.

I was a little short on ideas this year, and a few weeks ago I aborted my Zorro idea in favor of a generic pirate costume. I picked up a sweet tri-cornered hat and “pirate wig”, made a red sash, and reused some of my props from last year’s Dread Pirate Roberts outfit. I even grew out a bit of a beard.

Voila!

I love my sword and it typically gets a lot of attention– particularly from kids– but I kept running into things at the party, or people would plow into it, so I eventually had to retire it.

The party was fun, of course, and I already have my idea for next year’s costume. I suppose I’ll need to start working on it in a few months…