10.24.2008

Universal healthcare is pro-capitalist

Via BoingBoing, 10 ways to court nerd voters (or at least one nerd voter). Most of them are issues you might expect - more boadband access, revamped copyright law - but #2 surprised me:

Universal Healthcare. Everyone I know that freelances or works a day job and wishes they could quit and follow their dreams of launching a company complains about the lack of healthcare. Whenever I used to talk about freelancing at tech conferences, the first question was always about healthcare coverage. I've heard that in places like Berlin where you don't have to worry about where your healthcare is coming from or how much it costs, up to 35% of working age adults are freelancers. It may sound crazy and anti-capitalist to consider healthcare for all, but if we flipped a switch tomorrow and everyone had health coverage I swear a million small businesses would launch overnight. I know lots of people that keep a job just to get healthcare that are wasting their creative talents because they had a cancer scare or were born with a defect or otherwise are deemed uninsurable on their own.

I never thought of it this way before!

10.19.2008

I'm a model, ya know what I mean ...

And I do my little turn on the catwalk.


Yeah on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah, my mom takes blurry cell phone pictures of me on the catwalk.



So this is the bridesmaid's dress I'll be wearing in my sister's wedding, sort of. (They didn't have any red dresses in the store, so I had to try on a purple one and have the red one shipped.)

It's a very pretty dress: one I would feel comfortable wearing again, which is unheard of in bridesmaid-dress-dom. I got a compliment from a random girl in the dressing room, too, which is always nice.

My mom sent these photos to my sister and got a reply to the effect of, "I can tell she likes it; she's doing that little Kelly smile."

10.16.2008

Food is weird

Right now, I'm drinking a brew made from the roasted, ground-up pits of a cherry that grows in subtropical climates. I do this almost every morning, and so do hundreds of millions of other people - enough to make it among the world's most popular beverages. You'd be hard-pressed to find a restaurant or bar in America that doesn't offer it.

Some people like to flavor their roasted-ground-up-subtropical-cherry-pit brew with a solution made from the dried seed pods of one of three species of a rare orchid. (These orchids don't self-pollinate, so in order to get the pod, you either have to trust the pollinating power of insects and wind, or go around harvesting the pollen and brushing it onto the flowers' pistils yourself.) This flavor is now so widely used that it is sometimes used as a synonym for "dull."

Isn't that crazy?

10.06.2008

Surprise!

Yesterday I drove up to Columbus for a surprise engagement party for my sister. Her fiancé had told her they were going out to dinner, but he needed to stop by a friend's house first. When they walked into the back yard, we all yelled, "SURPRISE!"

And boy, was she surprised!


As she looked around and saw all her friends and family, she kept making great new surprised faces. This one was the best:


I think that's when she saw Katie G., a friend of hers from high school who also drove up from Cincinnati.

OK, since I posted that picture, I am obligated to show you one where she looks like her beautiful self:


We had a toast. (My family is constantly wandering around with upraised glasses of whatever liquids are available, searching for someone to clink with. Of course we had a toast.)


And then we got down to business - "business" in this case meaning tables and tables of food. I finally met my sister's friend Ali, who brought these beautiful little cookies (and is totally welcome to grab this photo for her site if she wants, BTW).


I heard rumors that one of the treats might even be considered "healthy," but I was too busy digging into chili and salad to investigate.

Here's me, my lovely sister, and Katie G.


After the party, not even making the dull drive down I-71 for the second time in one day could get me down. (The new CDs I had bought for the trip helped, too.)

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