Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Susan and Meredith are supposed to leave tomorrow in the morning for Lincoln, Nebraska, to the roller-skating National competition, and they will have to work really hard to be ready by then. I worry about Susan burning the candle at both ends mentally and physically with this trip, but there’s darn little I can do [...]
Thanks for all the good wishes, prayers and thoughts! The pain in my left foot is a LOT less, and I now have my roll-about knee walker, so I’m more mobile to get around inside the basement and out to the driveway – but it’s hot enough that I don’t much feel like doing so. [...]
Susan and Mere are doing a rummage sale today (Friday) at at our house: 577 Hitchcock, in Lisle, IL. (Roughly IL 53 and 55th/Maple Avenue.) I will either be inside hiding from the heat or outside in my wheelchair; Susan and Meredith are running the table, and selling more of the boxes of books I [...]
My daughter Meredith is a competitive roller skater, and her skating club is doing a big rummage sale Saturday and Sunday at the Lombard Roller Rink in Lombard from 9-3. I will not be there; Susan and Meredith are running the table, and I had an operation earlier this week and in no shape to [...]
..very quick one. In a fair amount of pain from the operation (and doped up with T3), which went well – lost a pint of blood, and assorted parts of my left foot. Can’t use it at all – very strict doctors orders. And for all those asking, no, I won’t be going to the [...]
This year, we consolidated our bank stuff from three different banks to one local credit union; two of those banks had just been eaten in big-fish eats littler-fish takeovers (one of which was handled by the FDIC as the bank went bust), and we were paying a hideous amount of money in fees for sneezing [...]
I’m really tired of the rumbledy-toss of big banks buying small fry – and then going under due to hilarity at the home office. We use two banks and a credit union; the latter is WAY out of state, and I’d transfer over to that except that we’d never have a local bank. Bank #1 [...]
It’s early evening on Friday, and I’m slogging tthrough a ton of paperwork that’s built up; the washer is re-doing the blankets for our bed, and I’m getting tired – today was my first day back at work, and the last couple before that were ‘hi, I’m groggy!’ “Hi, Groggy!” Today, Susan and Meredith (Susan [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
I don’t take my Kindle everywhere, but it has gotten a lot of use, especially when i know I’m going to have to sit and wait somewhere. (Like at the hospital.) Susan and Meredith have used it a little, as has my niece Kay and my mother-in-law, and it looks like we’re getting another Kindle [...]
The workmen are out in the back of the house, digging the French Drain thing for the drainage project; I hear a steady thonk-thonk-thonk (there seems to be a total of two guys to do the digging and all, and man, that’s got to be killer work by hand) and will have to go off [...]
Post from Nate Silver pointing out how people are economizing: no dry-cleaning, no Starbucks, brownbagging lunch, buying generics, cutting out bottled water and bringing water bottles, cancelling subscriptions (magazines and newspapers), and so on.
Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend. And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem [...]
More about Daley’s efforts to sell off city parking meters and other property, and how his idea of ‘quick money now so I can keep services going now and the heck with the future’ isn’t working so well. Also, there’s the damage that the Olympic bid will do to the parks system, and Daley’s pledge [...]
This year, I’ve had to do a lot of wrestling with contractors on house-related stuff; presently, there’s a whole deal with trying to fix our perpetually-flooding backyard through a proper French Drain setup. The present problem isn’t that contractor, much to my surprise, but the costs presented by another contractor for the dirt fill / [...]