Asymptomatic

I'll just say it plainly -- today sucked.

It started last night after the kids got home from Trick-or-Treat. I was reassembling my computer, which I had to take apart partially to hook the projector to my notebook. See, I was projecting a Halloween sign onto our garage door that told the kids to go up the street for candy. Perhaps I'll explain that more later. In any case, I was reassembling things when I noticed that, unrelated to my reassembly, my center monitor's backlight seemed to have blown out. This makes it exceptionally hard to log in.

It's kind of a strange puzzle. The center monitor is the only one on DVI, and the side monitors are both VGA-only. This might have been fine if I had a DVI to VGA adapter, but there were none to be found. So, it was time to order a new monitor, and with me being off to take care of Riley while Nana was on vacation, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to visit Best Buy and get that upgrade I've been considering. But then, events seem to collude to conspire against me.

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I guess there are training programs available for parents and no end of books on how to administer discipline of various sorts. I think we have a couple of those books around the house, even one with a title like, "How To Trick Your Kids into Behaving."

The kids are performing in their own ways these days, and I wonder many things about being a parent, how to get them to behave, how to get them to grow up to be good people, how to refrain from making every moment in life a lesson of some kind.

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Last night, an insurance broker visited our house and gave Berta and me some options for mortgage insurance. Basically, we were interested in having at least a portion of the mortgage paid in the case of our death. So we sat for his hour and a half presentation, and now I present some notes of the salient details.

Sometimes companies will offer "accidental death" insurance along with some other thing you're buying, like credit cards or bank loan or cell phone plan. These policie sound great for the money you pay, but there is a catch. They only pay out if the accident directly causes your death. So if you go to the mailbox and get hit by a car and left for dead, it pays off. But if you die in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, tough luck - that's improper medical care, not accidental death. After all, you weren't dead from the accident, right? (!)

There are a few plans to choose from, which are basically combinations of various riders. For example, you can just get a plan old policy - Pay your premium every month, if you die, the policy pays off, the end. But with a special rider, you can have all of your premiums paid back to you if you survive the term of the policy.

Essentially how this works is the insurance company holds on to your money for all that time and earns interest. They're happy just to make the interest, and give you your money back. It costs a bit more, but assume it costs $10 more a month on a $30 premium, you can either save $3600 and buy the insurance for 30 years at $30 per month, or you can spend $40 per month and get $14400 back at the end of the term. You can see how you'd never be able to turn that saved $3600 into $14400 just by investing it or putting it into a savings plan. And if you "activate the policy" - an insurance euphamism for "die" - then you get the full insured amount.

The odd fact of the matter is that only 8% of people who buy insurance ever use it. So there's a pretty good chance that we'd live out the term of the policy and get all that money back.

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On Saturday, we took the kids, Mary Ann (Berta's sister), and Ryan (her husband) to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Mount Hope.

We used to go every year, but it seemed like we were seeing the same show every time, so we haven't gone over the past few years. They have since added many new things, and have chagned the show a bit. But I think they may have started to give in to the commercialism of it a bit more than what it used to be all about.

For the uninitiated, the Faire is basically a 20-acre area that has all sorts of recreation from the era of the Renaissance. Everyone there dresses in period clothing and speaks with an accent. The actors are all quite friendly and usually try to immerse you in their fantasy. One of the best things about the Faire is that it's not just something you go watch, it's something to take part in.

But it seems things have changed a bit. Maybe it's just from my perspective, but it seems like a lot more people come to the faire and expect to be entertained rather than participate in the fun. It also seems that people spend a lot more time eating and shopping than they do at the actual attractions. This is not so surprising, since the joust this year was pretty weak, too.

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It's been a weird week, and hopefully I'll be able to tell you more about it soon, but for now, I'll just tell you how it was capped off.

On Saturday afternoon, Mom watched the kids while Berta and I went to the musical Wicked, based on the book by Gregory Maguire. And in perfect contrast to the showing of Chicago we saw, Wicked was wicked.

In case you aren't familiar with the idea: Wicked is a story about the Wicked Witch of the West from Oz. You're familiar with the story from the movie, The Wizard of Oz, right? Well, if you haven't read or seen Wicked, then you have no idea what really happened.

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