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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…

In our family photo shoot about a month ago, we ended up with some hilarious pictures of the kids and yesterday I decided to have them printed to replace the framed photos in our family room. Those pictures were about fourteen years old.

The result was awesome.

Yep, those are our kids.

In the latest installment of What My Kids Do All Day, I took a picture of Zack sitting on the couch playing with a Rubik’s Cube in between a few pages of his comic book.

Sometimes, that’s pretty much a summary of his day.

To his credit, he’s been working hard on learning how to solve the Cube, and he’s become pretty good at it.

Off to the races…

And he’s got it!

Meanwhile, Kyra was demonstrating what she does all day: reads young adult fiction novels on her tablet.

She’ll burn through a novel every few days. Laralee is much the same, and they’re always talking about “you should read this…” and “I didn’t really like how that happened…”

Laralee has a huge dry-erase board on the side of the refrigerator, and it’s where she keeps her various shopping and to-do lists. Since the board is so big, there tends to be a bit of space on it. A few days ago I decided to add some artwork.

So I created three limited-edition pieces featuring various animals:

Breathtaking, I know.

Zack saw the snake and thought it looked like a dude with a long tongue, so he took the liberty of adding his own artwork to the board:

I think dry-erase art could be a new medium. Before you know it, the major galleries will feature some of this stuff.