I saw this last night, but did not care to comment until I thought about it for a while. A 71 year old man decides to have a gender change operation. While I am a conservative, I am not appalled at this...that is until I read that the man is a substitute elementary school teacher. That, my compadres, is what makes me say, "Hmmmmmm". Sorry, most of those kids are just too young to handle that. Mind you that is my opinion and YMMV.
When I saw the pic, all I could think of was a man in drag. Then I thought, "71? Wow,what took that person so long? They are on the down side of life's mountain. If that is what he/she wanted, then maybe he/she should have started the process earlier? Weird.
On to the blessings. Bills have been getting more expensive, my rate of pay (and my wife's) has not, we have incurred more bills, lowered the interest rates on others, but the net result is that we were going to be short each month unless we paid just a tad over the minimum amount do on a couple of our loans. We normally pay $100 more than the minimum, but we had to stop that on the van payment. We just round up the payment to $400, instead of the $500 we were paying.
Yesterday, I looked at my earnings statement (online check stub ... we do not get hard copies unless we print them up ourselves. It actually saves our company a chunk of change) and noticed it was 5% higher than normal. I investigated and come to find out that since I changed departments, I now qualify for "on call" pay. I am not sure if that is going to show up on every check or just on the week that I could/should be on call, but it is money I did not count on and I am praising God for the gift. At least I can get my oil leak fixed.
The other blessing has to do with our electric bill. At this time of the year, our bill goes down due to the increase in gas for heat and the decrease in A/C usage. We had signed on with an electric company a little over 3 years ago that locked us in at a very sweat rate (7.9 cents per kwh) in return for a 3 year contract. The rate was the same as the cheapest tiered rate TXU (the Texas regular gas and electric company), but to get that rate, you had to use A LOT of electricity, which we normally do not. Long story short, our contract was up in January and we just got our first bill with the new rate. They are still charging us the old rate! That rate (7.9 cents per kwh) is just about HALF of what TXU charges. So my bill was only $40 dollars instead of the $80 I was expecting. If that can hold for a while, we may be able to get out of debt! Thank you God!
I have a theory on why this has happened. 1-2 months before our contract expired, we got a letter in the mail telling us what our new contract rate was for a 1-2 year commitment. There was a typo on it (I assume) and when my wife called about it, the CCR told her that the best rate she could offer us was 15 cents per kwh (1 cent cheaper than TXU's lowest tiered rate...just like 3 years ago). My wife told her that we had an offer for 7.9 cents per kwh and while she knew that was most likely a misprint, she had hoped for a compromise. The CCR at Direct Energy told my wife that she was sorry, but their rates were cheaper than TXU and she could do no better. We knew we had no choice, so we signed a 1 year contract at 15 cents/kwh. My theory is that the rate did not change because the system has a date/rate wrong somewhere and the letter we received was sent because of that. We shall see.
I am adjusting to a Linux life. I have been researching and found out the eye candy I was playing with was a hack, so to speak that was buggy and is now not really being supported. Newer and better hacks are being coded and are much more stable. The biggest issue with the xcompmgr and my Linux install was the desktop system. I prefer Gnome and this hack was not really compatible with Gnome. The newer one is. I will wait. In the mean time, it is possible to use Kwin and Gnome together to overcome the old hacks issues and get neat Vista-ish effects without the crash. You have to give up the ability to change themes, but it is stable, or so I have heard. I guess I just got too interested in eye candy. The performance I have now is just fine. I can wait until the newer hacks are done.
My wife an I left the house at 7:30, getting me to work after 8 AM. I was not mad, but I would really like to miss as much traffic as possible. When we leave at 7:30 AM from home and leave the offices at 8:00 AM, we hit the bulk of the traffic and neither me nor my wife like that...oh well.
I called my BiC, Mickey* last night to see how he was adjusting to his new house. After a long day at work on oil / gas rigs, he is pretty tired when he gets home. He had ordered naked DSL for his house but it was not working Saturday as expected. He called and they did not have the service turned on yet for him. After a few minutes, it was active. He then grabbed his router and started to configure it but networking is not his strongest area. He can troubleshoot PC's pretty well, but he does not like to play with the networking. I tried to walk him through the setup, but he was tired and a tad cranky and to be honest, he did not need to be messing with that ...he needed his rest. I told him I had a 50' CAT 5 cable he could have if he wanted to swing by and pick it up on his way to or from work. I told him I could come up Saturday if he wanted me to and we could fix his issues.
He is one guy I like to help. No pretenses, what you see is what you get.
*Not his real name
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