Kathy and Calvin's Home Page

My husband sent a letter to Congressman DeFazio about the 700 BILLION dollar bailout. He got a 3 page letter back stating why the bailout was a horrible thing. As I read through the letter, I can see DeFazio going around from town to town in the desert sand wearing flip flops. He has a message. Some listen but many do not. It ends in a disaster.

Sounds familiar?

Geez, sometimes I wonder if meek will really inherit the earth. If DeFazio is anything, it is certainly meek. The weird part is that there are some serious right wingers that like him. The lefties are very happy with him (although they want him to go further). And he is super safe in his seat. Good luck to the guy people running against him (*snicker*).

1. Who is that man? I like the cut of his jib.
2. Smithers, did I win the debate?

I've just sold my mom's house. My husband, brother, sister, and 2 nieces/nephews took several weekends and days to get it in shape to sell. We did all the work ourselves and even listed it on craigslist. Fortunately, our open house was on the same day as other better advertised open houses on the same day. We actually sold the house in 3 days.

In selling by ourselves, we used NW Realty Consultants to do the paperwork after we found the buyer. It turns out my mother bought her Turner home through For-Sale-By-Owner (NW Realty Consultants) and I used their services in purchasing my house 5 years ago. We also used NW Realty Consultants to sell our Albany home. We paid an hourly rate to do the paperwork (correctly). It went very smooth.

And once again it went very smooth. As a bonus, I worked with Ticor Title in both Salem (where the house is located) and Corvallis (where I could drive down the street to sign papers). Talk about handy.

After 2 years of writing lots of papers and 7 tests later, I have come to the point of starting student teaching. I begin the final phase in the quest of gaining elementary teacher licensure. The past 2 days I attended a reading conference by a Reading First speaker which was pretty good overall. At the conference I got to know my host teacher along with the new principal and other grade school level teacher better. They seem like a good bunch and are truly caring and even careful in trying to do right by the kids.

As our health care system is rather broke, I had a thought about the Samaritan Health Care system and the fact that they are sometimes tied to insurance. So what happens if you are a state employee and choose Samaritan Health HMO for your insurance but they end up sending you a "[we] find that we can no longer provide you with health care services" letter. Are you no longer able to get health care due to the fact that your insurance is tied to their services?

I suspect Samaritan Health doesn't do that for several reasons:

1. They have the emergency room and likely can't turn someone away in life and death situations
2. They have ethics
3. They can stand on their good reputation and a blogger won't faze them

The Corvallis Clinic has an Immediate Care and Ambulatory Surgical Center but those aren't really emergency rooms.

I also wonder if they can fire other family members, like my husband or my son. They are no longer treating my son as one of their pediatricians is pretty inept at diagnosing autism so that is not a problem. But I do wonder if they will stop treating my husband.

Time will tell.

I've used iggyshouse.com to list a house for sale and get it on the MLS for free. It worked pretty well, although truth be told, I think craigslist.com was really responsible for bringing in the buyers (3 of them).

In the past 2 weeks, I've been trying to list another house on Iggy's House but to no avail. The website is usually down. I did get it listed but now the site has been down for almost a week. This does not bode well. I will be considering owners.com - it might cost $385 and list the house in MLS for only 6 months but they seem to be up.

I had blogged about a medical establishment and thought I was getting a cease and desist letter. After thinking about it for a day, I decided to strip out their name and anything that might be taken as derogatory. The story still holds - and we still need to get rid of blood sucking, for-profit medical establishments that put their profits ahead of their patients. Good thing there is some competition so I could find another doctor.

Well the registered letter was just their official way of terminating me as a client. There needs to be respect between them and their clients and I was not respectful. I wonder if they were respectful to me when one of their doctors didn't know what autism looked like and questioned me as to why I thought my 2 year old had autism. Or the fact that they do not spend the 2 minutes needed to run screenings for some well baby visits. Or the fact that they are incompetent in drawing blood in children who barely move.

Well let me tell you that since I moved to the Mid-Valley Children's Clinic in Albany I've have no billing issues, no problems in drawing blood, and a doctor that not only listens but respects my concerns.

I am unable to get medical care from my doctor for a post that I've since deleted. They have dropped me as a patient for the blog post and offered to refer me to other doctors in the area. I hung up on the nice lady knowing this *FREE* country is, well, maybe not so free.

I'll try my old doctor's office back. I had no problems with them except that the doctor actually moved out of state and they did not find a replacement for him.

Apparently, Sara Gelser is voting for Hillary Clinton. I agree with almost everything Sara says and does, except for this point - and I won't hold it against her. Once Obama wins, she'll see the light. Or maybe not. I noticed Darlene Hooley, a sell out, used her super delegate powers to cast her vote for Clinton *before* Oregon voted. Nice. Did someone get a post in the Clinton White House promised to them?

Which makes me wonder. Did Sara get something promised to her for coming out in favor of Clinton? I'm a woman - and damn it, it's about friggin time a woman gets voted into the White House. But Clinton, an ardent supporter of Israel (not always at the best interest of the US citizens), and part of the good old boys club (read: corporations and lobbyists), is simply not the right woman.

Come on ladies - we can better. And that better is Obama.

About time. I don't like people losing their jobs but when the job involves taking money from people in the form of taxes and donations for a method of teaching that DOES NOT WORK, then I don't feel so bad.

Reading to children will not teach them to read. Yes, it might interest them in reading. Yes, it might be better than having the child watch TV. Yes, reading to children is considered quality time.

But no, it takes more than that to actually have the child read. For about $15, you can get the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Engelmann. You'll see what it takes to teach 3 to 5 year olds to read. With daily short lessons, any child can read. My son, who did not know all of his letter names, learned to read anyways because, well, you need to know the sounds of the letters, not the names, in order to read.

In having a 12 year old boy, sometimes you have to endure what you really don't want to. In this case, I was dragged to Seattle to attend a three day convention of nerds, costumes, rock concerts, and fandom in the form of Sakura-con, an anime convention with over 14,000 people.

Calvin likes Link (from Zelda), and so naturally he dressed as the character. Remember, this is not an ordinary Link costume - it is TOON Link!

He made his own shield which was unfortunately lost:

At the convention, almost everyone dressed up as a character:

Even the stuffed animals:

For the past few days we are, again, not receiving phone calls that connect. I answer the phone and the person on the other end just gets disconnected. Plus over the past 2 days I have not been able to make calls without getting many busy signals - yet they are not really busy as it was several different numbers - all that had answering services.

I am looking for another phone system that is somewhat reliable. Vonics is quite bad. I'd rather pay more and get reliable service. Any suggestions?

In picking through the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) website, I came across an article titled Helping Non-Readers Grades 4-12 - Introduction: Options for Reading Programs. From the face of it, you can't tell it is written for Oregon. It is.

The white paper outlines programs used in Oregon public schools to help 4th through 12th graders that are not reading at grade level. That can be anything from completely illiterate to simply a very slow reader. As you can imagine, a slow reader above 4th grade is a huge disadvantage as by that time kids are expected to read to learn. The learning to read should be done by 3rd grade. Just a side note - many poor urban school are able to get their kids to read by kindergarten.

Anyhow, article gives some interesting statistics:

http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_091907_education_mexican_curri...

Some Oregon high schools are adopting Mexico's public school curriculum to help educate Spanish-speaking students with textbooks, an online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided free by Mexico to teach math, science and even U.S. history.

If you wonder why - don't. It is because Mexico has common standards and less of a strangle hold on curriculum by big text book companies. Oregon is small so the textbook companies design specific texts to the big states: Florida, California, and Texas. Oregon gets a compilation of 47 other states - thus under one company Oregon's math book is 25% bigger than the big states.

What surprises me is that Mexico feels knowledge is so important it gives it away. We charge for it. The Education Complex - big and small businesses make money off of our kids. Does it really have to be that way? Well, no. Just look south to Mexico.

I've worked for the Oregon University System for almost 12 years. I finally quit in January. We were able to sell the boyfriend's house and pay off my mortgage so we have no house payments. I live in a (used to be) rat infested house so it is not fancy - about 900 sq ft. But not having the payment freed me up to quit my job and finish my elementary teacher certification program at Western Governor's University. This is a distance ed school based in Salt Lake City.

The first month felt like I was skipping work. I actually felt like I was cheating my workplace by not going in. Looking down the streets, I would look for my old boss afraid I would get in trouble. These little moments of panic soon subsided. Trying to lose weight, I started walking my dog each morning for an hour - pure bliss. It's nice to enjoy your surroundings and have time to think.

I have a couple weeks left now of WGU. With one test left and 10 papers, I will complete the academic portion. In August/September I will start demonstration teaching (student teaching) somewhere in Corvallis. The school has not been set yet.