My last "mostly free weekend" wasnt spent doing as much as I wanted, mostly because I'm broke.
Friday I stayed in and watched movies and chilled out.. The Proposal, GI Joe and Superbad.
Saturday, I pretty much slept all day long. I was out of soda or anything caffeinated, so I was completely burnt out.
Mike came over and we went to the movies, he paid, lol. I think they lowered prices, it was only $6.50 each to get in to an evening show. Usually its 9 something, so that was nice! He also brought me 2 cokes and a cherry pepsi, what a sweetie!
After that he dropped me off and I had finally heard from ATC after he'd been gone hunting most of the week, so I went over to his place and we watched, Being John Malkovich. Uhhh very weird movie, we were both thoroughly confused through most of it lol. He had to work at 6 but I slept in after he left until 9. I forgot how totally awesomely comfortable his bed is.
I went and saw my 4 month prego Stephy up at her mom's house. She's so cute, I took her the 2 blankets my mom made for her, and she loved 'em! So glad. Told her that I would start getting baby coupons and buyin diapers and stuff for her to be stocked up on, which walgreens is having a sale on right now too! She finds out in 2 weeks what she's having, so that will help me narrow down boy or girl things! We're all hoping for a girl!
Her mom was setting up their xmas tree and decorations already! Crazy! lol. Her sister Randee also called while I was there so I got to talk to her on the phone. I'm planning on going out to see her in June for her wedding in Georgia. Hopefully.
After an hour and a half with her, I headed to Cindy's to get my hair done, lightened it again and put some nice golden colors in it. Looks really good. I wanted to get it done before I start at Macy's, which is this Tuesday. Yes I'm starting 3 weeks earlier then they originally said, which is fine with me. So Tuesday I go from 5-9 for some group training, and then Sat I do 3 hours of training, and then 3 hours on the floor, and then all day sunday Ill be out on the floor and I guess good to go! So I'm looking forward to getting paid weekly, but not so much for being tired. But hopefully I'll manage.
I'm bummed I missed bingo at fridays this weekend, but hopefully next weekend Ill be able to hit it up.
I did get SOME cleaning done around the house, cleaned the kitchen, did a LIL laundry and put new sheets on my bed and cleaned up the bedroom, so I was slightly productive. However I fell asleep watching SNL online, planned for about 20 minutes, but woke up 2.5 hours later.. whoops.. but I still had some energy and managed to go through the paper and get all my coupons and check the ads, so Im ready to hit up some stores soon.
I've gotta get to sleep soon now, hopefully. I'm watching season 2 of Deadliest Catch on netflix, should lull me to bed soon. Finally pulled out my humidifier so maybe in the AM my nose wont be ready to bleed.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Super model Molly & the Haight
I had allot say on this shoot and then I had allot of nothing to say..
Took inspiration from a few old school paints, some French
documentaries , Childhood, youth, death, and coming of age..and Maria
Callas, sempre Libra ( for the black and white hair toss)
Thanks to the lovely Molly @ Ford
. Great day to shoot and great people, this is the reason I love San
Francisco, who would have though such a beautiful location would be
smack in the middle of the Haight.. the smell of pot was in the air and
spirits were high.. the Highlight of my day, a passerby saw us shooting
and blurted out : " that's some awesome white trash" haha you'll see
why.And Special thanks to Oliver and his owner Linda who saved the day!
can't wait for part two with the deer hounds!
http://www.crikey.com.au/
5 . Rundle: a win to Obama, but the Senate battle awaits
Guy Rundle writes:
President Obama has won a first, though hardly decisive, victory in the health care campaign, with the passage of HR 3200, the Affordable Health Care Act 2009, through the US House of Representatives.
Passage of the bill is the first stage in reforming the US non-health care system. Importantly, it contains the all-important "public option" -- a state-owned health insurer which can offer coverage at lower rates than the private carriers, thus forcing their exorbitant premiums down.
Other provisions within the 2000-page bill include a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance, new controls on provider (ie doctor and hospital) charges, huge funds for integrating and computerising health care records across the country, and much more.
The bill seeks to limit the ballooning cost of health care by making cutbacks in "Medicare" -- the open-ended 65+ public care which half of the "Obamahitler" protestors are covered under -- and bringing in some controls on the ludicrous amounts big Pharma can charge the government for drugs.
However the bill only just squeaked through the House, with a majority of 5.39 Democrats voted against it, and only 1 Republican -- a Vietnamese-American from Louisiana, pretty much the unhealthiest state in the Union -- voted for it.
While getting any sort of a majority is seen as a triumph for speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the vote occurred on Saturday night after a week of near round-the-clock arm twisting -- there were serious misgivings about some of the deals that had to be made.
One in particular, which excluded abortion from public insurance or from any subsidies to private insurance, was an exceptionally bitter pill. Since non-emergency abortion is scarcely available under public provision currently, the amendment does not make coverage any worse, but it now makes termination an even more "special" case than hitherto.
Others are whackier still -- an amendment (supported by Republican Orrin Hatch and previously by the late Ted Kennedy, for negotiating purposes) that allows public funding for spiritual healing -- ie Christian Science intercessionary prayer at $20 a pop.
Mad stuff, but the bill is through, and as Mark Steyn notes -- ruefully -- that's the important thing. To get something passed in the House is further than Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 bill got.
Now however, there's the Senate. Pelosi had about 38 Democrats she could lose (with a 77-seat House majority), and some of them were released from the whip, so that their Big Insurance backers can be assured they got their moneys worth, but the Senate is on a knife-edge.
Ted Kennedy hasn't been replaced yet, and slimy Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Dems on social issues, has indicated he won't support a bill with a public option in it. He won't even support "cloture", the vote that prevents a filibuster, and allows the bill to go to a simple majority vote.
That leaves the Democrats with, at most, 58-41, against a filibuster, and needing a 60-40 split. Their best bet is to convince Maine's moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe over, and one or two others from godknowswhere.
But that presumes a 100% Democratic whip, and that looks unlikely, with a half-dozen "blue dog" Democrats having already vowed to vote against a public option.
Should they be able to persuade the Blue Dogs to vote for cloture, and then against the bill, the bill will come to a majority vote and pass around 53-46, and the Blue Dogs' blushes will be spared.
But if they can't get them to yes on that, the Democratic leadership has another option, which is to make them perform an actual filibuster.
Currently, all you have to do to filibuster -- ie to prevent the bill from coming to a majority vote -- is for 41 senators to indicate that they would filibuster it if required.
That removed the need for senators to stay on their feet reading from cookbooks, Dickens, etc, with a series of explicit rules governing their behaviour (no leaning on surfaces, no physical support by other senators, no toilet breaks).
The automatic filibuster dramatically changed the nature of American governance, but by stealth -- the Senate became a de facto supermajority chamber, an inherently conservatising option.
However, at any time, by a simple majority vote, the automatic filibuster can be removed -- and the minority opposition would have to talk the bill out to the end of the current Senate session.
The advantage of this is that the US public would see the filibuster for what it is (the word comes from a dutch word for pirate or 'freebooter'), a mad obstruction tactic being executed by people desperate to hold back change.
Will the Dems go there? Or will they observe what has become a sort of collective Senate alignment against the House - that it is in the interest of all Senators to keep the automatic filibuster, and hence their vastly increased power within the bicamera.
The look-out is that they won't even let the bill come to the floor before the Senate breaks for 'the holidays', as the Christmas season is very multiculturally called. This will allow the Democratic leadership to craft a complex "trigger option" -- one where there is no public option immediately and lowcost health care is provided by non-profit insurance co-operatives effectively, big insurers pool resources to offer more basic coverage at cheaper prices, on a sliding scale that ensures near universal coverage of some description.
The problem with co-ops is that they would have no power to affect the prices health insurers set for their regular premiums so individuals and businesses continue to pay a mozza for cover. Worse, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out in Counterpunch, this would be combined with a mandating system, similar to car insurance, where you would be required to have health insurance -- effectively the state would be holding the gun while Big Insurance picks your pocket. Only in America.
The trigger option would allow for a rollout of a public option if, after three-five years, average premiums had not come down to set levels. Since they wouldn't, this is a public option by stealth. It would allow Republican Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine to support it, and one or two others, while able to save face with their constituents and soft-money corporate donors.
Should that fail, there is a final option, which is to abandon HR 3200, and roll it into the 2010 budget bill as a series of provisions -- it is then subject to a "reconciliation" vote, which is a straight majority in both houses, and guaranteed to pass. The White House could then argue that the will of the people was expressed in the HR 3200 and the Senate obstructed it -- reconciliation is then in the spirit of the original vote. Indeed, that may be the overall game plan.
Whatever the case, HR3200 is an enormous victory, the first serious universal health care bill to get through a House of Congress ever. The Senate will be tough, if not insurmountable, but this has months to run. Quite aside from the manifold improvements any sort of serious bill will offer in American life, it will give Obama a victory he can go back to his base with, and fire them up anew for the Herculean labour of making change in America.
- 14:12 Love getting my hair done. So relaxing. Not so bad being a girl sometimes.. (: #
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Rupert Cornwell: Why can't the US learn to love its government?
Out of America: Suspicion of rulers dates to the founding of the nation – and even Obama is unlikely to change that
What is it about Americans and government? The tea-party crowd were back in town the other day – more than 5,000 of them, gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol to rail against the historic healthcare reform bill that the House of Representatives is expected to pass this weekend.The passions the measure has generated among its Republican opponents have been remarkable. One Republican Congresswoman has declared that health reform was a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism, while John Boehner, the party's leader in the House, urged the protesters to join Republicans in "defending our freedom".
A neutral observer would not know whether to laugh
or cry at this so-called "Super Bowl of Freedom", featuring inter alia
a giant banner describing the proposals as "National Socialist
Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945". Yes, the tea-party movement,
currently touring the country, contains more than its share of cranks
and nutters. But the fringes, too, can express political truths. This
particular truth is that Americans just can't bring themselves to love
government.
When President Barack Obama came to power, the stage seemed set for government activism unmatched in decades. The parallels with the early 1930s were palpable. Talk of a second Great Depression was everywhere, economists were urging a "new New Deal", Franklin Roosevelt was suddenly back in fashion. Nine months on, however, the urgency seems to have vanished. And why this cooling of reformist ardour? True, the economy has improved (though not by much, as evidenced by the news that unemployment last month rose to 10.2 per cent, the highest level in a quarter of a century.) The huge deficits being run up by Washington are also legitimate cause for concern. A more important reason though is America's ancestral suspicion of government.
The governors' elections in New Jersey and Virginia last week, in which Mr Obama's Democrats were soundly defeated, were largely local affairs. But in so far as they sent a message to the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, the message was plain: slow down, the voters said, don't force change down the people's throats. With a young and charismatic President who won power by promising change, it's easy to forget that the US is a conservative country. Mr Obama triumphed in 2008 not by harnessing a vast tide of liberalism, but by persuading the wavering centre that he was a better bet than another four years of discredited Republican policies. In Virginia and New Jersey, exit polls showed, the centrists (moderates, independents, call them what you will) changed their minds and decided to put on the brakes.
A fascinating Gallup survey last month found that despite the Democrats' victories in 2006 and 2008, fully 40 per cent of Americans, more than ever, describe themselves as conservative, while 36 per cent call themselves moderates. Only 20 per cent are avowed liberals. It's not a question of government having failed the country. It's just that Americans aren't comfortable with the beast when its role, as now, threatens to expand – even when the deficiencies of the unfettered free market have never been more glaring.
Mr Obama secured his record-breaking $787bn stimulus package last February, albeit with virtually no Republican support. But that might be it. Yes, the House will probably pass a version of healthcare reform, but the measure could yet founder in the Senate, where party discipline is weaker, and a 60 per cent majority is required to pass anything of significance. If it does fail, it will basically be for fear that the reform amounts to a "government takeover of healthcare". The most contentious part of the bill is the "public option" – whereby a publicly financed scheme would be set up to provide some competition to rapacious private insurers. But that option now hardly dares speak its name. Leading Democrats prefer to speak of a "consumer option".
And health care is but one of three massive public policy issues on the table, beside a green energy programme to combat climate change, and regulation of the financial markets, aimed at preventing a repeat of last year's crisis. But there's no guarantee any of them will get through. For Europeans, all three would be no-brainers: assured health coverage for all (or rather almost all), steps to reduce both pollution and imports of costly foreign oil, and curbs on the excesses of Wall Street. Not so in the US – because each implies a substantial increase in the role of government.
And it has been ever thus. Suspicion of government is as old as the Republic. The movement that turned up on Capitol Hill again last week takes its name, of course, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Americans like to see their War of Independence as a revolution against government – back then the far-away government in London that taxed the colonies without allowing them representation – and the habit has never died.
These days, one thing unites every presidential candidate: a readiness to denounce the federal government in Washington and all its works. That the candidate in question might have made a long and comfortable career in that den of corruption and iniquity makes not a scrap of difference. Usually – as now – the sentiment works to the advantage of Republicans, but not always. Sometimes, the beneficiary can be a genuine outsider like the eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot, who in 1992 came closer to winning the White House than any independent in 80 years. Sometimes it takes on the hyperbolic aspect of the tea-party crowd, and last summer's raucous town-hall protests against health reform. And on occasion it spills over into tragedy, into the raw hatred of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
No one is more aware of how distrust of government is part of America's collective political DNA than Mr Obama. Whether he can tame it is another matter.
Two things happened this past week the left me kind of sad. First, my oldest son, who is seventeen, swam in his last swim meet. He made the regionals which were held in Tallahassee and we were holding out hope that he would make state, but even though his times were good, they just weren't good enough to move on.
My wife and I have known that it was going to be a sad day ever since the swim season first started. We've been going to his meets for the past three years and we have made some pretty good friends with the kids and their parents, not to mention the coaches as well. Donna took tons of pictures and we cut out every article that was in the paper, but when the last meet was finally over it left us feeling empty knowing that it was all done.
Now, he is playing soccer. Again, we are going into it with excitement, but with trepidation too, knowing that it is his senior year. I'm just not ready for another one of my kids to graduate high school.
The second thing that happened was more on a personal level for me. The regional swim meet was on Friday, so the team went to Tallalhassee on Thursday to spend the night. My wife got the day off and went with the team (I couldn't get the day off, but managed to leave work around 2:00 and get there for the finals). This left me and my youngest son, who is thirteen, at home by ourselves on Thursday night.
Every time in the past when my wife had to go somewhere overnight my son would be all excited because he could sleep with me. To be honest, I like it too. I know he is growing up and to have him ask to sleep with me somehow makes me feel like he is still little.
Anyway, when bedtime came around he didn't make mention of sleeping with me. It sounds selfish, but a part of me was crushed over that. In an instant I suddenly realized that my youngest child was no longer... well, a child. When I went to bed that night I went with a heavy heart.
My kids are growing up and I can't do a thing to stop it.
Around here, most of our Christmas wishes are just that - wishes. We do not have very much money around here, and so we rarely, if ever, purchase Christmas presents. This year we have a few wishes, but are pretty skeptical that any of them will become reality in the first place. For instance, we have the digital cameras that BFL and I both want. We know this is not going to happen. If digital cameras show up for Christmas there will be only one of them, not two, and it is a guarantee that it will be BFL who gets one, not me, as it would be her mom who would be buying the present.
Another thing on our wishlist is a Wii. Not because we really want a Wii, but because our favorite Nintendo games such as Mario Kart, a Nascar Kart game, Legend of Zelda, etc are now being made for Wii only, and nothing for GameCube. *sigh*
Also on our list - a PS3. We doubt highly this one will show up at all, nor do we think there is a slight chance at a Wii. However, I do still hold out hope for a copy of Windows 7. :)
YAY!!!
Went to see Avenue Q again tonight. Definitely enjoyed it the second time around. It was interesting to compare tonight with the first time I saw it, as the performance in Melbourne was in the opening week with the Australian cast. Although the first time was really good, it was very much a copy of the American show. Tonight was so much better in that the actors were more comfortable with the characters and the puppets.
Now we just need to convince Canberra Theatre to install cocktail glass holders. :)
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