A good Hollandaise makes my toes curl

A good Hollandaise sauce does it for me. And I hadn't found one at a restaurant here in the Denver metro area until today.

We had brunch at The Delectable Egg in Westminster this morning. I finally got brave enough to try their Hollandaise sauce - I was starting to think that Denver had a different definition of Hollandaise than the rest of the world, cause everywhere I'd had it it was sour or clumpy or way too runny, so I've been avoiding ordering anything with Hollandaise sauce unless I really trusted the kitchen, and even then it was bad (shame on you, Racine's!). This Hollandaise was divine - every mouthful had me closing my eyes to savor it. I could have eaten two plates of Quiche Lorraine crepes, it was so good.

Is it bad when the only nice thing I can say about my bank is that, since I've had to go in so many times to fix things they've done to our accounts, find out why deposits haven't been credited, why accounts are locked, etc., they know me by name enough to cash a check for me when I can't find my wallet?

A sign your kid watches too much Food Network

"Welcome to Iron Chef America. Today we're going to make carrot soup and learn about the color black."

I actually got a call back from a Kaiser administrative assistant straight up at 8 am this morning...who unfortunately wasn't able to help me. She said she would have a rep call me back by mid-morning. It's mid-morning, no call back. So I can't run any of the errands I needed to run until they call back, I can't even go out to work on the yard since our cordless phone is on the fritz (one of the errands I needed to run today was to pick up a new one).

Why did I put this off until a few days before I needed to have this taken care of, you ask? Well, the goal was to get this done last week, but I had to go out of town for the funeral of my great-uncle. He was a wonderful man, and he is loved and missed by everyone who knew him. How many men do you know who would take on the full-time care of two great-grandchildren? He brought a smile to the face of everyone he met. He volunteered as transport for the sheriff's office, and took the opportunity to minister to the over 1,000 inmates and juveniles he transported for the county - but he never came across as preachy, at least not to me or anyone else in my family. He co-founded the mounted police for his county, and they were gracious to retire his MP number upon his death. Uncle Bob, you are missed.

Update: after a few more calls, I got a call back from a rep who was actually HELPFUL! And who answered my questions! Thanks, Stacy!

Kaiser Permanente customer service

We're switching our insurance from Pacificare to Kaiser Permanente since the insurance rate is about to go up to $1115 to insure the four of us. That's $1115 a month, not $1115 a year. Kaiser will still be taking a chunk, at $871, but it's not quite as painful a chunk. Our season tickets to the Colorado Rapids for all four of us, on the center line of the field on the fourth row, so close we can spit on Fernando Clavijo, don't cost as much as one month of health insurance.

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to how long it will take me to get someone on the phone at Kaiser to answer questions about coverage so we can plan our flex bux and find a pediatrician? It's been 20 minutes so far. This includes three transfers and a hangup.

This isn't much worse than the service at Pacificare, though - I've spent at least an hour on the phone with Pacificare over the past two days trying to figure out 1) why they just withdrew payment on an urgent care visit last January (they don't have it in their system that they withdrew payment, but the explanation of benefits they sent says they withdrew the payment), and 2) why they haven't paid two claims that have been submitted twice, rejected once, and ignored the second time - which they also say they don't have in their system, including the rejection.

Been on the phone for an hour now, been transferred to nine different people, been hung up on twice, been told I couldn't be heard twice. Left a message in one person's voice mailbox, got transferred to another voice mailbox that hasn't been set up to receive messages yet but said their office closes at 5 (it's 4:55). I've tried just waiting

I'm not much for government interference in much of anything, but right now I'm all for requiring automated phone systems to deliver a caller to an operator when the caller presses 0, at least during their regular business hours.

Hour and twenty minutes. Reached someone in appointments (person number eleven) who said to call appointments tomorrow and have someone transfer me to benefits, because the main customer service line is nothing but a loop. But benefits closed at 5:00 pm. Lovely.

CNN is so cute

Headline on CNN: Education law leaves children behind.

How cute.

Of course, nothing in the article reflects that the No Child Left Behind Act is what's failing the students. NCLB requires teachers to be certified proficient in what they teach. It holds states accountable to parents and the federal government for the quality of their school systems. And it expects schools to show that they are improving academically. How this law has left children behind is beyond me, but CNN thought they'd be smartasses and make it look like the feds should take the fall.

Several states didn't even make an effort to meet their NCLB requirements. I'm becoming more and more convinced that school districts are trying to fail the NCLB requirements on purpose because the act was put in place by a conservative president, and can be cited as a failure since schools aren't passing it. Never mind that it makes the school districts look like idiots - they can't even bother hiring teachers that know the subjects they're teaching, they don't utilize the federal money available for tutoring, and they whine about standardized testing instead of recognizing that the standardized testing covers the most basic of knowledge. Anyone remember the tests that were required in school during standardized testing days? Some of us took CAT tests, some of us took ITBS, but I think most everyone would agree that they were fairly easy. I remember thinking the tests I took in high school really only covered material that was taught in junior high, and I wasn't in some fancy-schmancy suburban school district. Where do these school districts get off thinking students don't need basic reading and math skills? Where do they get off thinking they're not expected to do their jobs? Where do they get off thinking that our tax dollars don't need to be spent educating our children?

I thought part of the protest today was to not spend any money, to bring our economy to a screeching halt.

If that's the case, then why were corn and pork rinds being sold at the protests at the Colorado State Capitol?

Showing me a picture of plumber's butt is not going to do anything to improve my opinion of illegal immigrants.

Update: Hey, they changed the picture. I guess someone told them to cover up the crack. Is it shadowy journalism to change part of your article (i.e. a picture) after it's been published?

Boo is furious with the Easter Bunny.

This morning, Boo and Rich went out to gather Easter eggs. I thought I had hidden eleven, but only ten came back. Boo wanted to keep looking for the last egg, but we told him that the Easter Bunny probably just needed a snack while he was hiding his Easter eggs. Boo pitched a fit, demanding that he wanted his egg back.

I'm so looking forward to Easter next year. We had a difficult time getting Boo to sit in the Easter Bunny's lap for pictures - he said he'd rather wait until Santa Claus came back. With any luck, next year Boo will kick the bunny in the rubber parts.

Am I sleep deprived?

Last night I woke up to find myself hitting the snooze button to get Mudbug to stop fussing.

Questions kids ask

When a child walks up to you and asks you out of the blue, "Where did your baby come from?", the correct answer is, "Where did your mother tell you babies come from?"

This correct answer hit me about thirty seconds after being asked.

More teenage blackmail material.

Since we've all been sick forever, we have a large number of ear thermometer probe covers lying around the house. They look like this:


Boo has observed me pumping breastmilk for Mudbug with my Medela pump, whose breast shield looks like this:



He walked up to me with two probe covers stuck to his chest and announced that he was going to pump milk for Mudbug too. Such an act of love has never been shown by a big brother for a baby sister, I think.

"An Evening with Kevin Smith" is on, and he's discussing Chasing Amywith a lesbian who thinks it was a bad idea for Banky to make his "serious deep dicking" comment, while Smith is arguing that Banky was the movie idiot, and everyone should have recognized where the comment came from.

I bought my mom's partner a copy of Chasing Amy a few years ago, not because she's a lesbian or because I think it's a movie about lesbians, but because she liked Clerksand Mallrats. My mom ended up watching it. She's now convinced that Kevin Smith is quite the homophobe, and specifically mentioned that line when she was yelling at me for bringing that trash into her house. All I could respond was, "It's not a lesbian movie, and anyway, I didn't buy it for you."

And why doesn't the View Askew Store sell hockey jerseys with the number 37 on them?

TurboTax is lovely.

I was making some last-minute changes to our return, when I noticed that health insurance carried on the self-employed is tax-deductible. I put in the deduction (I am self-employed, I just don't bring in nearly the income I did when I held a desk job, and am carried on my husband's health insurance but we have to pay out the nose for it), then decided I should ask my neighbor, a tax attorney, if it was a legitimate deduction. He said no (since it was paid for with pre-tax dollars), so I went to remove the deduction. Went to deductions, all I could find were pages that said a deduction had been applied but no way to remove it. I sent a support question to TurboTax.

Their answer was to delete my return and start over.

Yay TurboTax! F%$^ing morons. Is this the answer they're going to give to some poor soul at 11:00 PM April 15?

Colorado Rapids vs. Houston 1836...er...Kansas City?

Why it's a bad idea to change your team name after announcing your moniker with much fanfare:



I guess the reason we...weren't playing at our peak was because we were saving up for the game against Kansas City later in the evening.

PPD or rose-colored glasses?

I'm not sure what's causing it, but I don't think I'm enjoying this baby (current nickname is Mudbug, thanks to her looking like a crawdaddy propped on Alton Brown's shoulder one day when I was burping her) as much as I did Boo.

It could be rose-colored glasses - I distinctly remember wanting to ship Boo back to wherever he came from about a week after he was born. It could have something to do with my in-laws moving from Colorado Springs to Oakland, so we don't have the immediate help available. It could be that I'm generally down during winter. It could be that I had all these fantastic expectations for a baby girl, but since I wasn't much into dressing up dolls as a child, it's not holding much appeal for me now, despite having gone out to buy $200 of pink clothes as soon as we found out Mudbug's gender. It could have something to do with the fact that, after having been on modified bedrest since October, and on full bedrest since Christmas, I expected to be able to get around better, but I have lost most of the muscle tone I had built up before the pregnancy, and it's a heck of a lot more effort trying to go places with two kids instead of one.

And it could have something to do with the fact that we've all been sick since Christmas with one bug or another - I think we've had a total of about two weeks that one of us hasn't been sick. Today it's me with strep and the flu. We've actually managed to use every dime of our cafeteria plan benefits in the last three months.

Apparently the Alabama church fires are due to hurricanes and the war in Iraq - at least according to Jim Cavanaugh of the ATF:

"I think there's probably some stressors in their life: Family, relationships, work, the economy. The region's been devastated by a hurricane, there's a war in Iraq, there's a lot of terrible things going on."

How long before the some moonbat at the DU attributes the church fires to President Bush? Oh, wait, it already happened.

I went to our friendly neighborhood Target pharmacy* to pick up Sudafed for me and my three year old a few weeks ago - I was IDed, entered into their database, and had to sign a log. I was told that I could not purchase more than two packages in a visit, or products containing more than two grams of Sudafed a month.

My guess is that the 96 pack is going away since it contains almost three grams. A 48 pack is a six day supply for an adult.

Is this some conspiracy against the Catholics and Mormons? Three grams is not enough to treat two adults for a week, let alone their kids. If everyone in a household with, say, four kids, gets sick at once, someone is going to have to go without. And if their household is anything like ours, at least two weeks out of the month someone is sick.

And what about the ramifications of taking away millions of dollars, probably billions, in sales from Pfizer? What is this going to do to their bottom line? It's not like their product became obsolete. Why isn't the NRA pitching in on this, since Sudafed doesn't create drug addicts, it's just sometimes used to create drugs?


*This isn't sarcasm, I get wonderful service at our nearest Target from pharmacists who know me by name and are familiar with my family and their prescriptions.

Boo is convinced he has a baby in his tummy too.

Yesterday I was informed several times that the baby in his tummy was getting hungry or thirsty. And this morning, when I asked Boo if he wanted to feel the baby kick, and I told him to put his hand 'right here' on my belly, he raised his own shirt and put his hand in the corresponding spot on his belly.

Let's run the conservatives right off campus

Is professor an earned title, that continues to be applied to someone even if they retire or leave the academic community, or is it an indication of employment by a college or university as a teacher? If it's the latter, it seems that by signing his email "Prof. John Daly", this Adjunct Instructor (not a doctorate holder, teaching zero level English courses) was using his position as a 'professor' at Warren County Community College to intimidate a student, saying "I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won't dare show their face on a college campus." Aren't most community colleges state and federally funded? Is he expressing this as a government employee?

I'm glad to see Daly has resigned. No permalink to the statement from the president of the college, though.