Tim and Valerie

“Ignorance is bliss until they take your bliss away.”

So yeah, Happy New Years and all.

I tweeted on the 15th of January that this year has not been a good year so far, and up until that point it wasn’t too hot. As silly as it sounds now, I didn’t particularly enjoy the Georgia Tech loss to Iowa in the Orange Bowl on the 5th and then subsequent Green Bay overtime loss to Arizona the following weekend. Yeah yeah I know, they’re just football games, but contrasted to how uplifting the seasons had been up until that point, it was mightily heartbreaking. Then couple that with a realization that work inadvertently gave me a 5% pay cut when they stopped outsourcing their Human Resources department and brought it all in-house. So far they have explained to me that it was an unintentional mix-up and that the pay discrepancy will be fixed, but it was not a heartening sight to see that money missing from my paycheck I’ll tell you that much.

Life hasn’t been all bad news though. David’s 2nd birthday bash is coming up, and he’s been quite the entertainer recently. He repeats everything you say, and he masters all sorts of complex stuff seemingly out of the blue. He also successfully used the potty a week ago, dropping a thunderdump that had Valerie and I in shock. (Don’t worry, I got video of it after the fact. Yes, I said video. Gotta have something to torment the boy with when he gets older.) Valerie and I have been making small cosmetic updates to the house these last two months in preparation for selling it this spring. This weekend I got it on my task list to replace two horribly decrepit faucets with some shiny new ones (on sale too!). On deck, some painting, patchwork on some ceiling water damage, and a good carpet cleaning and home de-cluttering right before the list time, which hasn’t been set in stone yet and is still kinda nebulous (we’d like to time it for when the weather starts reliably warming up).

I’ve also started working out again, this time shifting my regimen to an early morning workout routine 4 days a week before heading into work. This involves me waking up and out of bed at 6:00 AM, on the road by 6:15, at the gym by 6:30, workout for an hour and then shower and ready to work by 8:30. So far I’ve been doing it for 2 weeks and I’ve been really encouraged at how well I’ve adjusted to going to bed a bit earlier at night and resisting the temptation to sleep in when the alarm goes off and it’s still pitch black and freezing out. My plan it to make it 3 months then re-evaluate my situation then (also my gym membership expires in April, so I’ll be forced to reconsider my workout routine anyway). My original plan was to follow the p90x routine of 3 months of muscle-confusion based workouts, sans the buy-ins for nutrition junk, but I didn’t realize it was a program designed for the person without a gym membership who works out at home. So instead I’ve kinda loosely adapted the training pattern and principles to my morning workouts, without following the program step by step. I think that will work out just fine for me. And don’t worry, I didn’t pay for anything, I just happened to find some p90x information floating around in some noted pirate waters, if you catch my drift. 

In other awesome news, I got Assassin’s Creed 2 for the XBOX 360 for Christmas, and it’s a phenomenal game. I wouldn’t shut up about it to a coworker of mine and HE ended up getting it and “playing it until it was so late that my eyes were watering and I was half-falling asleep.” Good times. I just bought Mass Effect 2 (and dropped WoW) and gaming on the HD television just got awesome again. Valerie has been clamoring for me to buy a Wii (and the New Super Mario Bros. Wii and a Wii Fit and everything else Wii-related, she’s really entranced with the system and the games available for it), but I’m holding off until the Wii 2 is  supposed to be released this year with full backwards compatibility and native HD output.

Last bit of awesomeness to share. My new music hotness is Them Crooked Vultures, a supergroup consisting of ex-Nirvana and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl on drums, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on bass, and Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on guitars. I’m damn near addicted to their self titled debut, and I challenge any rock fan to listen to the album twice, and by the third listen if you’re not bobbing your head then you must be deaf. Seriously. Yeah, it’s got a Queens-ish vibe to the sound, but it’s looser and more jam-influenced and it’s been my workout mix of choice thus far.

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Howdy folks. Welcome to your monthly edition of “that Tim don’t post much on that thar website of his” type update. I promise that this time I will actually annotate something worth reading, like updates and poignant observations and such.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Valerie and I took David on his second-ever flight up to the Washington D.C. area to spend some time with Valerie’s brother Matt, who works in the Alexandria area for a government contractor. The flight was somewhat similar to our first time flying with David, in November of last year up to Chicago for my grandfather’s funeral, except for a young boy that was a bit older and a flight that was a bit shorter. Both flights were uneventful, with David sitting on our laps for the flight (which you can do with small children), and the only pain point was the check bag fees for Delta ($20 a bag each way). With us checking two bags to head up there and the same two bags to fly back, that was $80 that Delta managed to squeeze out of us for a 4 day trip. Outrageous. If Southwest Airlines, who wisely doesn’t charge a bag fee, actually flew into Atlanta, I’d fly with them in a heartbeat. But alas we’d have to drive to Birmingham to achieve that, and that sucks.

As we are aught to do every Christmastime, here is an obligatory picture of our Christmas Tree. A simple motif, silver-themed and clear lights, and the extra hassle of keeping David from playing with the ornaments (actually not as big a deal as we were fearing).

As requested, here is a link to my Amazon wish list for Christmas. Yes, I realize that its only 2 weeks until Christmas, so let me help all of my family and friends out that are planning on getting me a gift this year (since I’m apparently difficult to shop for?)

• I need clothing. Nice clothing. I’m a mens medium in shirts, and 32×30 in pant sizes
• If you see an item on the wishlist, they are there more as ideas rather than concrete examples of exactly the item I want. You can be creative if you see something on the list and go “OK, he wants something like that, I think I can find something similar.
• I accept almost any xbox 360 video game as well, including THIS GAME RIGHT HERE. (hint hint)

In other news, we have not jumped onto any new TV show bandwagons other than Mad Men, which is, and I’m not understating it, the best written show on TV. The ONLY shame is that this show isn’t on HBO or something, because then they could REALLY push the content. Other than that, I got a few ideas of shows to catch, but a reminder here or there wouldn’t hurt.

Merry Christmas everyone, and let us know your plans for the 1st! 2010 here we come!

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Post about important stuff? Updates? Stories of David or the family or other stuff going on in our lives? Nah, that’s too tough. Here are some funny pictures instead. They draw more traffic to the site anyway.

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First off, congratulations to Taylor and Anita on their expecting of a little one. Exciting news, isn’t it? It reminds me of when we were expecting David, way back in the day, before he had a name, or gender, or a room, or anything. A time when we would wake up in the morning and do… what? What the hell DID we do with our time before David? Before diapers, naps, snacks, playtime, all that stuff? It’s hard to imagine now, seriously. I guess we just sat around and picked our butts, because I am at a loss. I DO know that I didn’t have the chance to shoot the video you see here, and is one of best videos I’ve shot of him to date.

Having babies also reminds me of the doctors visits, the confusion at getting insurance coverage setup for Valerie and David when he came, the deadlines and questions to get it all done, verifying if the paycheck deductions matched up and if we had the correct coverage with deductible… it was a freaking PAIN. And the worst part is that it’s STILL a pain in the ass to deal with.

Take this last doctor visit for David. It was his 18 month checkup, with a bevy of immunizations and height and weight checks, normal routine stuff that hasn’t differed much from the first visit a week after he was born. This time when we went in, we were handed a clipboard that had some basic questions on it (Can your baby listen to verbal instructions? Can they point and describe objects? That sort of thing). We filled it out and went over it with the pediatrician, no problems, all looks good.

A month later we got a BILL for the questionnaire. The pediatrician charged the insurance company $20.00 for the questionnaire, and the insurance company decided that it was not fully covered and paid $5 of the total and we got billed for the remainder. How ridiculous is that? In my humble engineering opinion, if there isn’t a good enough reason that our medical system is broken, this highlights it EXACTLY. We weren’t under the impression that filling out a 1 page questionnaire would incur costs to us, because it was never explained to us. The office went ahead and charged the insurance company for the document, expecting payment for it. When we called the pediatrician’s office, they mentioned that “yeah, we’ve had some issues with insurance companies not reimbursing the cost of the developmental questionnaire in full, we’re not sure why that would happen, and we’re really sorry, but you’ll have to take it up with your insurance company for repayment.”

Why does it have to be this way? Why did the doctors office feel it was okay to charge us for a basic skillset questionnaire for our child? Why on God’s green earth did it cost $20 freaking dollars? What was the justification for that other than an attempt to nickel and dime some money from the insurance company? I’m totally with the insurance company not paying the charge, but now the onus is on the patient to pay the remainder of the bullshit charge once the insurance company washed their hands of it. I thought that was why I paid for insurance, to cover medical costs, but when the costs charged are bullshit, what recourse do I have? Switch to another insurance provider, away from my employer offered health care coverage, and pay an extreme premium for the privilege? Switch pediatricians to another one that no longer has a rapport with my child and probably commits the same type of fraud my current one does? How would I go about being an informed consumer on this? Do I straight up ask the pediatrician “hey, do you routinely charge a patient’s insurance provider with bullshit charges in an attempt to squeeze more revenue from a broken system?” Would you expect them to answer honestly? C’mon here.

And another thing, why did I have to fill out a mandatory MUST REPLY IMMEDIATELY mailed questionnaire from my health insurance provider that made me list out any additional coverage I have for my wife or my child? Why should they care if I have one insurance policy or 100, and whether or not it covers them? Why is it enough to deny me coverage if I don’t fill it out? It’s the same deal with pre-existing conditions.

Both of these events are just a little taste of what you have in store for you when you have kids, that is, unless something is done to make the process a little more SANE and STRAIGHTFORWARD.

Sorry for the rant there. Hope you enjoy the video! (There, there is a positive ending.)

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7 things. GOGOGOGOGO

1. Went to go see Incubus last Friday, thanks to my brother who got tickets from pre-ordering their greatest hits album. Drank more alcohol than I can remember drinking in a long time, but the show was great. Incubus churned through most of their big hits, did a 3 song encore. It’s been a while since I went to a concert, and this one was a blast.
2. My dad has been helping me tear down and rebuild my deck. I’ll post up pictures of the teardown and reconstruction after it’s done, alas it’s rained all week so progress has halted. In two hard 8 hour days last weekend we managed to destroy the entire thing, haul off the old wood, purchase the new wood and get the base down and anchored. Gotta put up the railings and door and it’s done. Total cost $250, with a free truck rental from Home Depot. Totally worth the work, as the old deck was horrendous and had never been taken care of by the previous homeowner. It NEEDED replacing, and I can’t wait for it to be finished.
3. Valerie’s brother got a job working for a government contractor out of Alexandria, Virginia, and so we’ve booked tickets to do a D.C. sightseeing visit during the Thanksgiving week. We’ll swing by his place and eat there and take David around to the landmarks and such. It’ll be a fun trip, and it can’t be any colder than the senior year spring break roadtrip we did through the great Canadia, right?
4. My birthday is coming up, and I so desperately want a Zune HD. I told Valerie that I would sell my iPod and Zune to help defray the costs. OLED screen FTW.
5. I had my secondary hard drive die late last week. It was the hard drive that held all of my home videos of David (over 70 GB of raw video), plus all of my movie and television show downloads. I use the Mozy Home client to backup the home videos at least, and finally got them all redownloaded from Mozy (30 day retention). Thank GOD for Mozy, or I’d have lost all that video, because I KNOW I wouldn’t have been diligent enough to copy it off to an external hard drive. And before you say it, yeah I could have run an application or automated the copy to the external, but that requires the external to run constantly, decreasing it’s lifespan. I’ll just stick with Mozy.
6. Work has been slow. David climbs on EVERYTHING. Once my replacement hard drive is in, I’ll put up some new video of him goofing off.
7. Who would like some free stuff? You? GOOD ANSWER. If you click THIS LINK RIGHT HEREremoved, it will load up an image for a coupon for free AXE products. I’ve printed out 10 of them myself (at work) and so far have collected 4 free AXE products from various retailers. I keep a coupon on me so that every time I’m in a grocery store or Target or something similar I can pick up another shampoo bottle or shower gel (it works for the shower gel too),  and it works like a champ. Who cares if you don’t usually buy AXE or think it sucks, it’s FREE! FREE! Coupon expires at the end of the month, so get printing and start shopping!

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