04 February 2010
The semester has gotten off to a rocky start this time. On Tuesday, our baby-sitter cancelled, and today, Owen had pink-eye. Jennifer called me this morning (I was already at work) wondering what we should do. I decided to come home and be with Owen while Jennifer went off to her classes.
Jennifer called Owen’s pediatrician and he was kind enough to simply call in a prescription to the pharmacy for Owen’s eyes. Around 1:00, Owen and I went to pick up the prescription. The technician who assisted us said she had no record of our insurance or prescription coverage. She asked me a bunch of questions (date of birth, social security number, etc.) and entered it all into her computer. She took our insurance cards and said: “I’ll have to call in to your provider and get some information, so can you just have a seat and wait for a while?”
I told her that, instead, that we would go take care of another errand and then come back.
When we returned, I pulled up to their drive-thru window and was assisted by a different person. He knew nothing of our story and had to keep walking away to speak with his co-worker. Eventually, he said they couldn’t find any information on our prescription coverage. He just kind of left the conversation hanging, so I asked: “Well, can I just pay for the prescription out of pocket?” I figured that if he said anything less than $50, then I would just pay for it and forget all the hassle that comes with insurance companies. He said: “Sure, but that will cost you $14.99.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, “here’s my check card.” As he was ringing up the bill, he kept telling me I was welcome to return with the correct provider information and that he would then credit my account. I just nodded politely but, really, what a waste that would be. I’m sure the co-pay for the medicine would be $10, so I only spent an extra five bucks. And since I can submit it for reimbursement through pre-tax dollars…I don’t think it’s worth the hassle of returning to Walgreen’s.
Is going to Walgreen’s ever worth the hassle?

05 February 2010
Today was a good day. First, it was payday, which always makes for a bittersweet occasion, but I also got reimbursed for last semester’s college class. Wow, it’s hard to believe. I took a class at Hamline University, and my employer paid for it. Wow. Just wow. Jennifer also received a check in the mail for some of the work she’s done for the Mama Campaign and she got a letter in the mail congratulating her for being on the Dean’s list at her college.
We celebrated by going out to dinner at Macaroni Grill, where we both opted for the “create your own pasta” meal and Owen entertained us by using practically the entire table cloth as a canvas for his crayon drawings. Then we went to Target and bought a pop-corn machine.

06 February 2010
This morning I spent about an hour and a half sending out fifteen emails. I was trying to clean-up my in-box and take care of all sorts of stuff. I sent out emails regarding troubles with the photo quality in the MN Atheist newsletter, my membership with the Minnesota Home-Brewers Association, a short film that my friend Ryan and I began about two years ago that I’m finally trying to wrap up, the possibility of taking a class on documentary film-making, the possibility of getting a minor in history, some boring stuff relating to book-publishing, and even correspondence with my cousin commiserating on my grandfather’s rudeness towards his non-cult-member grandchildren.
Later, we went to Cub Foods. Cub has got to be one of my least favorite stores that I actually go to. I mean, I pretty much hate shopping anyway, but I can usually avoid the stores I really hate: Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sears…these are stores that I have been to three or four times in the past decade. But Cub (and Walgreen’s – see above), is one of those stores that keeps calling me back. But it’s dirty, crowded, smelly, the customer service is, well, nothing that even qualifies as “service,” and there’s nothing particularly note-worthy about the store itself. We only go there because it has everything. Well, not everything, but some of everything, I should say.
When it comes to buying groceries, I much prefer Trader Joe’s, Mississippi Market, and Valley Natural Foods.

01 February 2010
This morning I woke up feeling kind of sick. My throat was tight, and I had to blow my nose more often than I care to do so. I was tired all day, and this culminated in me emailing my supervisor to tell her I’d be taking a sick day tomorrow. This actually works out quite well, as my wife is going back to college tomorrow, and the baby-sitter we had lined up (her sister Roberta) cancelled on us.
I did the taxes tonight. The final piece of paper we needed arrived in the mailbox this afternoon, so there was nothing stopping me. I am pleased with the results. At one point, I closed up the booklets and announced to Jennifer that we’d have to pay to get them done, but after looking on line to see the exorbitant costs places like H&R Block charge, I decided to go back through it more closely. I figured it out. Each year it gets slightly more complicated: one year I had to account for rent, later I had to figure in college tuition, then mortgage, property taxes, 401k donations, and then a child. Basically, I just copy from each year, but add in whatever has changed. Now I just need to rewrite everything in pen.

02 February 2010
Jennifer is back in college today. She was gone all day. I woke up pleased to discover that, though I was still weak, I was not as sick as I thought I’d be.
I picked Owen up from preschool today. When I got to his classroom, I saw these projects made out of construction paper taped to the door. They kind of looked like rats emerging from eggs. But, on the way home, I asked Owen about them, and he said they were groundhogs, and the black oval shaped on the bottom half were their shadows. Ah yes…Groundhog Day! How could I forget?
I bottled my other batch of beer this evening. So things are looking good for my semester (which starts tomorrow): I have about 60 bottles of beer waiting for me. Whatever I don’t finish before the semester’s over, I’ll drink the morning before the final exam.

03 February 2010
My college semester begins today. I’m only taking one class at a time and, this sememster, that happens to be a class called “Textual Studies and Criticism.” The title of the class is a baffling to me as it is to you. The professor already sent out an email a few days ago with two short stories attached as PDFs. I read them during lunch today…so I guess that takes care of the ‘studies’ portion of the class, now I just have to go and criticize. I’m hoping that comes as easy as it sounds.
I’m not too excited about a night class that goes from 6:30-9:30. In a way it’s good, because I can easily get in my 40 hours at work each week. On the other hand, it’s gonna make for some long Wednesdays. I just counted on the calendar, though, and it’s only 15 Wednesdays, so that can’t be too bad.
I plan to get there an hour before class starts as I plan to meet with my advisor. I want to ask him about the possibility of getting a minor in history, which was suggested to me by last semester’s professor.
So we’ll see how this all goes…

30 January 2010
A few days ago, I solved the problem of our eye-sore bookshelf.
You see, we bought the bookshelves you see pictured here nearly two years ago. I boldly declared that I would ensure all our books would fit onto this shelf and, that should we acquire new books, I would get rid of old ones to make room for the new ones.

So this assertion fell flat on its face. We simply own too many books, and the number constantly rises. Soon, the shelf you see here featured books laying on their side stacked on top of the original books. Very ugly.
But then I had the lamest epiphany in the history of epiphanies: I can stack the wicker baskets on the top shelf, thereby freeing up room for books up there. Then I can reorganize my books the proper way.
What you see here is the end result. I took our set of stone bookends, placed them on the top, and removed thirteen “general knowledge” books from the shelves (think Guinness books and almanacs). My wife insisted they be placed in size order for aesthetic reasons, so I complied even though I saw no rationale. Then, with about 12 inches of freed-up space, I set to work organizing my books once again, as they had been two years ago. My wife go in on the action, and together we pulled about a dozen more books off the shelf to be taken to Half Price Books, where the cheap-skates there will probably give me 75 cents for the books.
Today, I finished the project, including realigning our secondary shelf off to the right (that one houses fiction and cookbooks, so I generally shy away from that one).
In case you’re wondering, I keep the books in order of subject, like the Dewey Decimal System, only better. My books are in order of importance. By “importance,” I mean: if aliens came down to our planet and wanted to know what we knew, they could start at the top of my shelf and work their way down. Or, put better: if I forgot everything about the world in a horrible (but strangely appealing) freak accident, I hope my wife would have the good sense to say: “Well, all you have to do is read these books, beginning at the top left and working your way down to the bottom right.”
The ranking (from most- to least-important) is as follows:
General knowledge
General science
Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
Cosmology/Cosmogony
Astronomy
Geography
Biology
Zoology
Baby/Child Care
Language/Etymology
History
Biography
Art: Painting/Sculpting/Drawing
Art: Photography
Art: Film
Television
Music
Computers
Humor
Religion
Fiction
…Okay, okay, I know you can make solid arguments here, such as that music is more important than TV, but besides ranking by importance, I also try to flow from one topic to the next. For example, drawing kind of flows naturally into photography, which flows naturally into film, which flows into TV, relegating music to a lower position than it should have. Also, I agree that a book on taking care of a human baby should trump a book about black bears, but in that case I work up the “ladder” – books about plants come before those about fish, which come before those about mammals, which comes before humans.
Don’t like it? Don’t worry. I don’t let people borrow my books anyway.

31 January 2010
So here I am at the end of the first month of the year. This is, for me, nearly a repeat of the final day of last month: my wife and son went to bed unusually early, and I am staying up late taking care of selfish pursuits.
Today started off rather slow. Owen and I watched some videos on YouTube. Then we had breakfast. I finished reading a book I just obtained a few weeks ago (try finding the gap in the books above to determine the subject of the book I was reading). Around 11:00, Jennifer said it would be a good day to get some work done around the apartment. So, since I guess we’re gonna live here for a while more, we rearranged some things in Owen’s room; we moved his chalkboard and his kitchen, and made room for a shelf that had spent the last year in our room. We organized some stuff in our room, too, and got to vacuum some areas that hadn’t seen a vacuum in a while.
We left the house around 4:00 and drove to Mississippi Market. There, we bought a few things to use with dinner this coming week, and I finally purchased this cool handmade wallet I had been coveting for about a month now. We next went to Cub, which is always such an unremarkable adventure I’m not sure why I’m wasting such a long sentence discussing it. Then we went to a Minnesota Atheist meetup. Today’s meetup featured an all-you-can-eat spaghetti buffet, which we attended partly because we had nothing else to do and partly because our friends Chad and Mindy would be there. I’m glad we went – our friends showed up, we met some other cool people, reconnected with some people we’d met at the Children’s Museum a few weeks back, ate a lot of food, and let Owen tire himself out running around with a bunch of other little heathens.
There you have it. One month down, eleven to go.

27 January 2010
Between yesterday and today, I’ve been checking out houses for sale. My wife finds houses that look decent, and then sends me the links, and I tell her what I think of them.
We’re gonna try to buy a house this spring. While I like the idea of living in a house, the whole process of getting approved for a mortgage, finding a realtor, driving around looking at houses and making offers on houses is very unappealing to me. I’ve done it too often; more than I thought I would have. One reason why it annoys me so much is because we always seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. To put it in simple terms, it’s as if all the good houses are at least $150, but we can only get approved for $100. So we look for houses, and see that there’s nothing nice for less than $120. So we make an offer, which gets rejected. I hate it.

28 January 2010
Tonight, I went into Owen’s room to say goodnight to him and he immediately stared crying, saying that he wished our cat Oliver hadn’t died. This was somewhat of a repeat of last night, when he said that he was worried that he was starting to forget what Oliver looked like.
Oliver and Owen were pretty much best friends; we have lots of video and photos of the two of them playing together. While our other cat initially viewed Owen as an outsider competing with her for the attention of the adult humans in the home, Oliver warmed right up to Owen and accepted him as just another person in the family that could pet him.
Oliver died last June, not quite making it to his seventh birthday. Owen’s sadness regarding this loss has recently been renewed, I think, because our other cat, Emmaline, has suddenly decided to start sleeping on Owen’s bed. Oliver used to do this all the time, and Owen felt very special because of it. I’m not sure what made Emmaline suddenly decide to pick up where her littermate left off (cold weather?), but when she hops up on Owen’s bed, it immediately reminds him of Oliver.
I told Owen he could pretend that Emmaline is Oliver when he feels her down by his feet in bed like that, but he pointed out that Emmaline doesn’t stay on the bed as long: “She only stays on my bed when other people are here,” he said, which is his way of noting that Emmaline sometimes jumps off his bed when my wife or I leave Owen’s room for the night.
Owen says he wants another cat, and I feel the same way. The problem is, cats are expensive at first, and there’s a good chance Emmaline won’t like the new cat, or that the new cat won’t sleep on Owen’s bed, either.

29 January 2010
Remember the other day when I whined about our bad timing regarding all major life events? Well, this morning, as I was leaving for work, I picked up my cell phone and saw that I had a voicemail. It was the woman who we’ve been working with to get our mortgage. She said that she took a closer look at our paperwork and realized that our short sale was only two years ago. “You need to wait three years after a short sale before buying another house,” she said.
This really took the wind out of my sails, to use a cliche’. As my wife pointed out later when I spoke to her on the phone, there is no way this mortgage lady didn’t know about this before; in several email and phone conversations, we had told her the date of our short sale, and she said nothing to correct us.
This pisses me off because, ironically, after complaining about our bad timing in a previous post, my wife said that at least our timing in buying a house is good this time around.
Well, if it seems to good to be true, it is (sorry, I just used another cliche’). Interest rates are low, housing prices are low, I have ample vacation time to use, and a new home would be the perfect place for Jennifer when she has the new baby.
Now it looks like we’ve gotta wait another year. I’m sure the interest rates will double in the next year, and housing prices will soar, meaning 12 months from now we won’t be qualified to buy anything nice. And is it possible to have a home birth in an apartment? I guess I shouldn’t care if we make a lot of noise on that day, none of our neighbors seem to care about their volume.
So what’s gonna happen next? I don’t know.

25 January 2010
A few days ago, an agent wrote to me saying that she had read my entire manuscript (she had previously requested I send her the whole thing). She had some very nice things to say about the manuscript, though she said the first half dragged a bit. Halfway through her email, she told me she regretfully could not take me on as one of her clients. She cited the economy as a reason.
Today, I wrote back to her sympathizing with the current economic climate. I told her of my plan to have the book professionally edited, even asking her if she would be willing to specify what she feels would be an ideal length for the first half. A couple of hours later, she responded by saying something like: “James, I was being honest when I said I couldn’t take you on as a client right now. Ask me again in two years.”
This seemed odd to me, as I was unsure how she could’ve mistaken my words as an indictment of her honesty. (Shouldn’t reading comprehension be one of her strong suits?) Weird.
This seems to be something of a theme in my life: I go to college after moving out on my own and getting married, I buy a townhome when the price of housing is skyrocketing, then buy a house when the market is even worse. When I got hired at Lenscrafters, it was an employer’s market, and I was chronically underpaid for the first five years I worked there. Now I’m shopping a book around when no one is buying books.
My timing is all wrong.
Maybe I should invest in a newspaper business right now. Or buy stock in a VCR company.

26 January 2010
Speaking of timing…
My wife and I are about six months away from having our second child. Yes, that’s right, I have once again infected my wife with that sexually transmitted disease known as “life.”
We had an ultrasound a couple of weeks ago, and they checked to make sure everything looked normal. (Looks can be deceiving though: I guarantee that little fetus has OCD.) That’s about the only sort of ‘medical’ thing we’re going to do, though. I think of having a baby as just another thing a body does… it’s natural and there’s no need to interfere. I mean, of course, things can and do go wrong, so I’m grateful to live in a country that has outstanding (if unaffordable) medical care.
Today we interviewed our fourth and final midwife. The idea of a midwife is to come to your home when you’re about to give birth and provide any support that you need. Notice: this is different than the doctors, nurses, and midwifes at hospitals, who are there to provide any support they possibly can. Ideally, I wouldn’t even want a midwife there, but I suppose they’re kind of like a car mechanic. Yeah, that’s right, I said a car mechanic. Let’s say I plan to drive across country – I can do it. I know I can do it. Sure, there’s bound to be some necessary maintenance, such as refueling and checking the air in the tires. And there is the remote chance that something will go very wrong. So I’ll hire a mechanic to sit in the backseat and ride with me. He’s not going to interfere unless he really has to. And I mean REALLY has to; if there’s just a flat tire, or if I need my battery jumped, I can handle that. He’s just there for the very unlikely stuff.
I hope that makes the idea of a home midwife understandable to the men who are reading this.
At any rate, at the ultrasound we asked not to be told the gender (which probably was nearly impossible to tell this early anyways). So who knows? A boy? A girl? We don’t know. This means we have twice the work: we have to pick out two names. The upshot is that we have twice the number of names we can immediately cross off: James AND Jennifer.