Heath care reform news

We spent the afternoon meeting with political representatives.  We learned some things about health care reform that directly effect us.

Every employer must offer health care...only if they have 50 or more employees.  That surely excludes every farmer I know.

Medicare patients no longer have a co-pay for routine visits.  If they go for a cold, that is not routine, they will have a co-pay for that.

There is something in the bill that says all working people must pay for health insurance.  That is only people that show a net income above the poverty level.  Quite frankly, most anyone who is self employed can re-invest into their business until they are below the poverty level.

If your insurance company raised your premium by like 20% and says it's due to the health care reform, you might remind them that their expense in it will not take effect until 2014.  You might also ask them what their excuse has been every year in the past.  I know my insurance goes up 10 to 15% every year.  There should only be a 2% increase due to the new bill at this time.

Blue Cross has shouldered the entire expense for "high risk" patients.  Other insurance companies can refuse people with a "pre-existing" condition or will charge 3 times the normal rate for the first 3 years.  I already knew that because I have a son who had heart surgery 9 years ago and I pay 2 times as much as anyone else for health care to blue cross even though he has had a clean bill of heath sense.
What I did learn is that now all other companies have to take us without charging us their 3 year "high risk" fee.  I will get some quotes next week and see how that's going.

Pasture

For those who are more interested in my farm than my kitchen, I went to a farm meeting Tuesday.  While I was there we talked about my ideas to have my cows on pasture and planting conventional corn.  Terms you will need to know are:
GMO or Stacked corn - corn that has been modified by a scientist to kill bugs that try to eat it.
Corn - all the rest.
Conformist - a person who changes with the times, no matter if it is a good thing or not.


 I have been told in the past that if I plant Corn I will need to plan on losing money.  Also, I should tell people that they will be drinking nasty tasting milk due to the bugs and weeds that my cows are eating.  Was milk gross when my grandparents were farming?

A conformist told me that any farmer that has ever gone to pasture use has gone broke.  Maybe pasturing had nothing to do with those financial woes.  How crazy is it that two of the guys at the meeting have cows out on pasture and have money. 

Tuesday I was told that some of the farmers there are really planting Corn like our grandparents planted.  It also turns out that all that stacked corn is meant for farmers that actually have bug problems.  We rotate our crops so we don't even need their silly stacked stuff.   So why would a supposed trained salesman try to sell it to me?  Could it be that stacked corn is twice as expensive as just corn and he gets a commission?

I will not be a conformist!

Do I go farther?

I am so happy to see this hood vent come down!

Glenn is happy to run the saw for grandpa.  He wants this old kitchen to transform as much as I do.

Then we took the entire peninsula out.  I can't believe how much better the kitchen looks with all that gone.

So now that I have all this stuff gone, I think I'm going to keep going.  I like a kitchen that is open and has antiques against the walls.  I'm just not a fan of all these built in cupboards.  They look good in kitchens, they just aren't my personality.

Out with the old

    My workers are proud to have the stove gone, and so am I.    That empty hole behind Sadie was were that dreadful oven as.

     Then we had to tear down the cabinet that it went in.  I want a real stove.

Now we have a big open space waiting for some flooring and a new stove.

I am dumping this kitchen!

I have been working in an outdated, sub-standard kitchen for years.  All it took was my microwave breaking down to push me over the edge.  This lovely hood vent will no longer catch my hair in it, block my view, or be the sharp corner that I smack my head into!  Even though it was nice in 76'.

Notice it hangs low enough that when people walk in that door, I can't see their face unless they stand under 4 feet tall!  Look at the band on the left.  It is my hair catching on that stupid strap that pulled it away from the hood.  Painful, and I don't want hair in my food!

Okay, so I can't figure out how to turn this picture, but here is my too small wall oven.  It is too small for many of my pans.  Some of my best pans have been sitting in the pantry feeling useless!

And the fact that the knobs have aged so much that they disintegrated under normal use.  It is time to move on.

So today the wall oven found itself sitting in my garage!  Feeling useless!

Fun with Aunt Cherie

Aunt Cherie was up before the sun baking for her big "decorating with the kids" day.  We always put the nanny, Miss Pearl to work with them.

The kids frosted pumpkin cupcakes and stuck in paper decorating toppers.

They frosted and sprinkled mini Brownie cupcakes.

Oops!

They made chocolate fingers on a stick or pretzel.

Now we have a feast of treats to eat!  Thank you Aunt Cherie!

All this high tech stuff!

On one hand, I really use and am glad to have all this modern technology.  I use texting to send quick notes to people, but I try to use proper grammar and spelling. ( Although if you read my blog much you will notice I misspell words all the time.   Most of the time it is just a typo)  I use the computer a ton for my farm record keeping, on-line banking, email, and obviously blogging.  I don't know that a fax machine is high tech by today's standards, but I think I send a fax at least once a week.  It saves me tons of gas money and stamps.

On the other hand, I am not really great at it and that makes it scarey sometimes.  The last two weeks have been "techno crazy" for me.  First I upgraded away from this darn Windows Vista to Windows 7.  That took about 4 days because it is such a huge down load.  Then I had to move all my files from the old program to the new program.  Again it was very time consuming.  Not to mention how scared I was when I first realized all my stuff was not on my new Windows 7 program.  A few moments of panic before I decided it had to be here someplace.

 Then with a couple calls for technical help and wha la.  I was on the phone with the guy long enough to know all about his family.  His mother is American, his father is from China, she speaks fluent Chinese.  They have 2 children, my tech and his teen sister.  They own 4 hectors in California and grow sheep, make candles, and grow Dragon Fruit.

After all that, my hard drive was full!  So I ran to town and bought a 1TB external hard drive.  Today I moved everything I could over to my new drive.  Another long tedious task.  And as I type this, I am deleting all my pictures off my C drive. That alone will clear up 400 GB of my hard drive. I am fairly confident I will have them on this new external hard drive, but I will say it does make me nervous.

So after using my spell check, I find out that "texting" must not really be a word yet.