Muckush

From experience I know parents are sometimes the only ones able to understand their children. Every once in awhile it takes time for Amber and I to figure out what they are saying. About a year ago Sebastian kept running around saying "Patonna, patonna, patonna". We had no clue for the longest time what he was saying. Then we were getting a pinata for his birthday party and he said he liked the patonna. Mystery solved.

Now we have a new word we can't figure out. Both Siennah and Sebastian use it, Muckush". They cook it for us and when I take a bite from the spoon, Siennah says, "No, pretend". I believe it is a soup, but I am not sure. Does anyone have any ideas?

Milky Houses

I was taking the kids to my mother's house this morning so I could go back to the hospital. Siennah looks out of the window and says, "Daddy there's milk on that house!" I look around trying to figure out what the heck she is talking about. Then I realize it is the frost on the roof. I told her is was frozen water and it was also all over the ground. She said, "No, it's milk." Okay, I know when I will not win an argument, so I agreed it was milk.

The Importance of Health Insurance

Now is the time of year when most employers have benefits enrollment. If you ever considered not getting insurance, don't. If you don't have the option of getting employer based insurance, I would suggest finding an individual plan. If you can't afford a full plan, I would strongly suggest just getting an insurance plan for cancer/heart attack/stroke.

I have always enrolled in insurance and for so many years paid into it more than I got out. As many of you know, this year we needed the insurance. Our billed medical expenses this year were over $157k. The insurance plan negotiated this value down to about $92k. We still ended up paying almost $7k, but could you imagine if we didn't have insurance? I am not writing this for sympathy, but I want this to be an example to the people I know who don't have insurance.

Two points I want to make; first - hospitals jack up the payment for the services and the insurance companies put a cap on the service rate, second - from my example, the insurance company pays a great deal of the cost.

Even with this, I am not advocating socialized medicine, even if I had to pay double for my insurance. My experience of living in the UK for 6 months showed me socialized medicine is only good if you are always healthy.

Layoffs

Yesterday Mom asked me if there were chances of being laid off at work. I said no way. Well guess what? Today we had a mandatory meeting. They laid off 10 employees.....1 from the engineering group. From what management described, the machinists union strike at Boeing really hit us. They were on strike for 57 days, but management kept the shop operating, I believe hoping the strike would not last long. So now we have two months of inventory sitting in the aisles. They reviewed some of the scenarios with us and this was the least impact on everyone.

I'm sure there is more to the story, but it just reinforces my unfavorable opinion of unions. From my first job out of college of not being able to touch a tool in the shop to seeing how in some union shops, guys won't do anything, if it isn't their job.