Category: Life 2016
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Financial management on a fixed income
My stepmother says that retirement is just another stage of life. After two years of retirement I’ve learned that she is right. It’s definitely a new stage of life for my wife and I. Many of the old rules no longer apply. For one thing, the rules of managing our finances have changed pretty drastically.…
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Medical robbery
Apparently it’s quite legal to get away with robbery in the United States, at least if you are a health care provider. I imagine the health care providers don’t see it this way when they send you threatening bills saying you owe tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars. Curiously most of us don’t know we…
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Spending spree
Merrill Lynch has relented. For months they put up hurdles that kept me and my siblings from getting money my father left us. You can read the irritating story here if you want. Sometime in mid June though they seem to have surrendered and the funds bequeathed to us finally started to flow. The last…
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Happy Fathers Day to me
This year for the first time in my life there is no father to call. No father to send a card to. No father to give an unneeded tie to either. So today has become something of a bummer of a holiday for me. Yet it is a bridge we all must pass in time…
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Stuck in Merrill Lynch beneficiary hell
It sure is nice to inherit some money. Good luck in collecting it, at least at Merrill Lynch. My father passed away on February 1. Some weeks afterward our stepmother told us we were beneficiaries to some of his accounts. It turned out to be a fair amount of money, considering there are eight of…
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It’s not easy being large
People tend to look up to us taller people, both literally and sometimes figuratively. With two otherwise equal candidates in an election, the taller is much more likely to win. Being tall has certain advantages. Seeing the full screen in a theater is rarely a problem. It’s easier for men to find a mate when…
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A shameless plug
After working with a couple of agents and being told her book was very good, just not marketable (because homosexuality is normalized) my daughter decided to self publish her fantasy novel Godspeaker. So please consider getting your own copy. It’s available for the Kindle ($4.99) or as a paperback ($12.99) from Amazon, but it’s also…
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Brave new carless world
Her graduation gift (if the over $100,000 we spent on her college education wasn’t enough of a gift) was the title to her car. It was a 2005 Toyota Prius, with about 110,000 miles on it. She had the mis/good fortune to have its battery go out on it a few days after delivery. It…
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Time in a bottle
I fell in love all over again last week. Curiously I fell in love with my daughter, who I already love. My daughter is 26. Instead, I fell back in love with my daughter, ages 10 months, one, two and a half, four, five and ten. This was because those old dusty VHS tapes of…
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Time zone madness and sanity
The Washington Post recently published an article on a proposal by an economist and professor of physics and astronomy to create a single time zone for the entire planet. Those of us who travel regularly know that time zones are a hassle because adjusting sleep cycles is rarely easy. Their plan is to use UTC…
Occam's Razor 