Day 2525

I stopped by a popular animal rescue event today. There was a big crowd and the weather was perfect. I used to work with this group a lot. Someone else does the marketing and promotions now. He does a good job. I saw a lot of new faces and a few familiar ones. It was nice to see that the group has prospered over the years. As I said hello to old friends, I kind of missed being involved. It was my choice though. There are other priorities now.

Maybe it wasn't a good idea to withdraw from almost everything. There's also the possibility that taking care of an old, sick dog has been the best thing that ever happened to me. Seeing Dot survive and even thrive long past her expected expiration date has certainly been its own reward. I'm working on becoming more patient and understanding. Everything seems to happen in slow motion now. The dogs control the flow of the day and how long I feel comfortable being away. The visit to the rescue event, grocery shopping, and filling the car with gas took a little over two hours. That was about right.

It was really cold this morning when I walked Dash. I've stopped wearing shorts on these morning walks and I'm going to have to start wearing a warmer jacket soon. I'm looking forward to cooler weather. I've got waterproof boots, several warm jackets, and some leggings for really cold days. The dogs love cold weather, so it should be easier to get them to walk. It costs less to run the furnace than the air conditioner too, so maybe our electric bill will go down a bit. I'm not going to get too enthusiastic though. Cold weather is fine. Snow, not so much. I'm not looking forward to snow at all.

I wonder if Obamacare is really going to get repealed? It would be easy enough to roll things back to the way it was before, but then a lot of people would lose their coverage and there would be a big outcry. Health insurance has always been confusing and a lot of the current narrative is just untrue. There have always been ways to get insured if you have a pre-existing condition. High risk pools were set up in most states for exactly this purpose. When I started my company, I was able to find good, reasonably priced health insurance. Then, five years later, my insurer pulled out of the Texas market because they thought they weren't making enough money. I had to start all over again and look for new insurance. I was older and it was much harder the second time around. To make matters worse, my doctor had discovered that I had Hepatitis C, which was considered a very expensive pre-existing condition at the time. This made it much harder to find new insurance. I was advised to join the Texas high risk pool, but I really wanted something better. I finally ended up leasing myself from an employee leasing company and then was able to get on the employee leasing company's group plan. As a leased employee, I paid myself minimum wage and was able to get pretty good insurance in return. The whole thing was an accounting nightmare, but it worked. The weird thing is that I thought I was paying a small fortune for this opportunity to join a group plan, but it was actually much less than most people are paying for Obamacare today. Good insurance has always been available, even to self employed people like me with pre-existing conditions. You just had to pay for it. It was only when the government decided to insure everybody, whether they could pay or not, that things began to get weird. Somebody had to pay, and in many cases, it turned out to be you.

I hope this nice weather continues tomorrow. The roof is dry, I don't have to empty the dehumidifier bucket very often, and the air conditioner isn't running constantly. In my world, it doesn't get much better than this.

Jada is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day