Posts Tagged ‘politics’

30
Sep
2021

Will the government actually stay open this time?

categories: personal; word count: 419 words

It should be concerning that I have to write the phrase “I’ve lived through several government shutdowns at this point”, the one most affecting us being the one in 2011 because both of the kids were on WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and that isn’t mandatorily funded. Everyone who was on it was advised to use their debit cards or vouchers at the start of October because most states had residual funding and could continue the program with it until they ran out of funding, which is exactly what I did… I went to the WIC store in my city and got all of the staples that we could get. All of the other benefits and services that we get fall under mandatory funding, which is affected by the debt ceiling — and oh, we’re bumping up against that. Wonderful. It looks like October is going to be a positively wonderful month for my family. It truly will be.

Meanwhile, I am continuing to homeschool both of the boys in spite of our state funding virtual schooling again. Only 10% of the district’s students can be enrolled in it, which means that there is never a guarantee that either of them would be selected, and there is no prioritizing for disability. The school also has to have or exceed a certain grade to be permitted to homeschool… or maybe that’s the district in general, which makes things even more of a toss-up if I were to consider it. And then there’s the fact that both of the boys would have to go to their respective schools to take the state test, and we know for a fact that Bub is not testable. So they would literally have to go up on campus where the schools and the districts can not mandate masks by executive order from the governor, which means that there is a risk of exposure to COVID-19, and then they could bring it home to each other or give it to me. At any rate, though, even with accommodations (assuming that the school actually gave them), if they did not get or exceed a certain grade on the test, they would not be permitted to continue virtual schooling. I know for a fact that Monster has a confirmed intellectual disability because he is more testable in that regard. If he does, Bub has to. Homeschooling for the long-term just makes more sense in our situation, and it is working well for us. I swear I have ADD or ADHD, though…

18
Jun
2021

Well, they never got around to fixing the energy grid.

categories: personal; word count: 254 words

We are being asked to conserve energy in this state and to prepare for the possibility of rolling blackouts as the demand for electricity has increased due to the high temperatures. One would think that the governor of this state would have learned something after the winter storm that we had in February, but it appears that he hasn’t learned anything at all. He’s been grandstanding about other, unrelated things on social media — bills that he has signed — in an attempt to distract from this after we as Texans were initially informed, which actually makes matters worse. I have been keeping my phone plugged in whenever I haven’t actively been using it due to this, not wanting the battery to be depleted in the event that a rolling blackout actually hits my area. And I wish I were rich enough to afford a generator, but I’m not. I’m nowhere near that rich…

Is it seriously too much to ask for an even slightly more competent governor at this point? Is it?

If a rolling blackout actually hits this area, I’ll be sure to write about it in here once my Internet connection has been restored (even though I do have a Wi-fi hotspot on my phone that I can activate if ever necessary, I try not to use it unless circumstances leave me with no choice or I really, really have to; I have 10GB of data).

Things like these make me wish that moving costs were cheaper and that moving was easier, though.

06
Dec
2020

Another one bites the dust, round… what?

categories: computer gaming, personal; word count: 285 words

The fan in this computer has resumed being… louder than it should be, even though I’ve made sure that the computer is clean (at least on the outside where I can see it), used compressed air on the side of the can near where the fan would be and at the bottom of the computer where I know the compressed air can reach it to some extent. Although I thought that the compressed air helped it out for awhile, it didn’t help it out as much as it should have, so I’m back to square one with this. At some point I’d like to have the laptop looked into and see if the fan being cleaned with the bottom of the computer… temporarily not on the bottom of the computer can help things, and if that doesn’t significantly help matters out, begin looking into a replacement PC laptop. It sure would help things out a lot if we had already been given the second stimulus check that lawmakers and politicians had been promising that they “would find compromise on”, but that hasn’t happened, and I honestly don’t think that there is even going to be a second stimulus check at this point.

Prove me wrong.

Just like I was pleasantly proven wrong with the results of the Presidential election.

Meanwhile, I need to add things to our Amazon wish list for Monster’s fourteenth (!!) birthday and Christmas. I had added some things to them in the past, but I have a very bad habit of buying those things that I put on our wish list, so… there you have it. Right now, I think there are only a few things left on the whole entire list…

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