Thanksgiving fun and airport not

I had a good time for Thanksgiving and I probably shouldn’t write this message now because I am currently all stuck and depressed in the South Bend Airport. My ridiculously early flight got delayed (at this point…likely to be canceled) due to mechanical problems so now rather than getting back to DC at 10 am I probably won’t get there until 5 pm. Phooey. I am currently rebooked on a 1:30 pm (rather than 5:45 am) flight out of South Bend. I am still hoping that they will be able to get our original plane in the air after all and I will get to Detroit sooner than that but there may not be much hope.

Ok, enough bemoaning. Rather than dwell on that unfortunate circumstance I will write a nice long post and tell you all about my Thanksgiving. The first question you make ask is, “What is Sarah doing in South Bend, Indiana anyway?” Which I acknowledge is a good question.

I couldn’t face the long trip back to Oregon for a brief Thanksgiving holiday so I did something else fun instead. I spent Thanksgiving with Nicole at her place. Nicole, for those of you who don’t know, is one of my very good friends from college and she is currently in the final stages of finishing her PhD in medieval literature at the University of Notre Dame. Hence she is located in South Bend. It was only a four hour trip from DC to Indiana so that was pretty manageable.

I got up bright (well actually dark) and early Wednesday morning and caught my flight to Indiana. That leg of the trip went fine, and Nicole met me at the airport. It was a nice sunny day so we toured the sights of Notre Dame and I learned some of the circuitous history of the institution that leads to a university with a French names being known as the “Irish”. (Basically a lot of the clientele that were interested in a Catholic university in earlier decades were Irish Catholics because that was a lot of the Catholic population in the US in the early 20^th century.) Nicole is there because they have a Medieval Institute for the study of all things Medieval which is a great fit for her interest in early English romance manuscripts (think Arthur and the Round Table). Then we went back to the house and I took a nap. That’s what happens when I get up at 3:30 in the morning. Nicole started the Thanksgiving cooking while I was out and I helped finish the pies when I finally woke up. I made the family recipe for refrigerator rolls too.

The next day we cooked any number of fabulous things including a very large turkey. We were going to have a proper Thanksgiving, defined as yummy food and lots of it. Nicole had actually invited a number of friends to come eat with her, but most of them had other plans. So it ended up being the two of us, Leslie Ann, one of Nicole’s roommates (they share a 3 bedroom apartment), and Tanya, a friend of theirs who is finishing up her dissertation for a computer science PhD. She is doing something with mapping and modeling social interaction networks, Suzanne, so she was talking about lines and vertices like you do.

We had a ridiculous excess of food and it was all good. This meant we could spend the rest of the week eating turkey leftovers which is a wonderful thing. Here are some pictures of the Feast:

And here are the four of us afterwards; “happy and full” is the operative phrase.

Sarah

Nicole

Leslie Ann

Tanya

The rest of the weekend was a chance to hang out and catch up with each other’s lives. We knitted up a storm, and with the example of Nicole and I, started teaching Leslie Ann to knit too. We also had a marathon viewing of the new Sherlock Holmes series. This is a new British series (only one season out so far) that sets Watson and Holmes in modern London. Of course this requires some updating, Holmes has a network of homeless informants rather than street urchins and he takes taxi cabs rather than hackney carriages. Watson is chronicling their adventures in a blog rather than a magazine serial, and he is an army doctor who was discharged after being injured in…Afghanistan. I guess some things don’t require much updating at all. That probably says something profound about human history.

Friday was another nice day so we spent the afternoon at the Potawatomi Zoo. Zoos are always fun but it was an excuse to get outside as much as anything. Here is a picture of the extra-silly looking Bactrian camels. They look twice as silly as Dromedary camels because they have two humps rather than one. I think that’s the only zoo picture I have actually. But that will prove we were there. They had an excellent flock of pink flamingos (looking just like lawn ornaments!), some really funny looking Egyptian cattle with gigantic horns, several rather depressed tigers, a couple of lions, and many other expected zoo animals. The river otters looked like they were having a very good time. They had a really big bull bison named Geronimo, and he just recently got a lady friend. So they may be hoping for a cute baby bison in a year or two. Actually they have quite a lot of animals for a small zoo. It is clearly a very kid-friendly one too.

Saturday required more sleeping in. Later I went for a run around the Notre Dame campus while Nicole did a little work in her carrel. It is basically a cupboard to keep a grad student in—she does have a door which is nice so you can leave things there but not anywhere near enough floor space to distinguish it with the name of office. You would definitely not want to close the door if you were inside. That evening we watched the obligatory Notre Dame football game while knitting and eating pie. ND was playing Stanford and unfortunately they were badly overmatched.

Then we got up really early and Nicole drove me to the South Bend airport (only about 20 minutes drive) to catch my flight. Alas for me, that part of the plan didn’t go so well. I got to the airport fine but there hasn’t been much reward for sitting here so far. It is almost 9:00 and all I have to show for myself is a ham and egg croissant from the airport lunch counter. Delta gave us vouchers for $6 to use toward breakfast but that really doesn’t make up for the seven hour flight delay!

I’ll post an update this evening when I finally do get home. Maybe the saga of the faulty turn rudder will have a happy ending after all (you can see why we didn’t really want the plane to take off, even though it made us all late, broken steering doesn’t seem like a good idea).

Update: Well they've completely canceled our flight on the schedule. It looks like a wonderful day at the airport for me.

Second update: Most of the other passengers managed to get on the 11:58 flight to Detroit. Alas I did not however. I won't be leaving South Bend until 1:30. I wish I had known this sooner, but there kept being possibilities of getting out sooner, but they all fell through for me. I don't even know if I can blame Delta, it's probably just bad luck, but I still don't appreciate it. 

"We're Number One!"

... some health policy ranting for the weekend.

Courtesy of Kaiser Health News, here's a brief summary of the Medicare "doc fix":

The Fiscal Times: Is There a Doctor Fix in the House….And Senate?
Last June, the Congressional Budget Office calculated it would (cost) $275 billion to maintain (Medicare) physician pay at current levels over the next ten years. ... it's likely that this year's fix - like last year's fix - will be a one- or two-year stopgap measure that uses ten years of savings from some minor limits on spending in other parts of the Medicare program. That’s right. Congress votes and the president signs a bill that counts ten years of savings to pay for one or two years of spending (Goozner, 11/23).

Yes, it really is as stupid as it sounds. This particular mess dates back to the 1990s when Congress had the, on-the-face-of-it sensible, idea that total Medicare payments to doctors should grow no faster than the rest of the economy. However there were two problems with that: one, aggregate (and doctor-specific) medical costs have grown faster than general inflation for years, both before and after this particular balanced budget amendment, and two, the tool for controlling these costs was to limit prices paid to doctors without limiting the number of services performed for Medicare beneficiaries (and three, it lumps some very disparate things from primary care visits to drug infusion therapy under the umbrella of "physician services" some of these categories of costs have grown much faster than others).

Then of course when they don't like the results of their own cost-control formula, Congress passes a fix that delays the pay cut to doctors for a year (which they've been doing for the last ten years) but doesn't abolish the formula because as long as it still exists and, under current law, "really will take effect next year" then they don't have to find money to pay for the billions it will cost to abolish the spending cap formula over the next decade. And they do the same thing the next year. And furthermore it is cumulative so what was a 10% difference in payments 5 years ago is now a 27% projected cut...next year it will be more than 30%.

Also a new report from the OECD shows that the US is still number one in health spending. We spent $7,960 per person on health care in 2009, compared to the average of $3,233. For that price...our 5-year breast cancer survival rates are the best in the world but our rates of hospital admissions for uncontrolled asthma are 2.4 times higher than the OECD average, our life expectancy at birth is lower. You do well in the US if you have cancer, less well if you have chronic disease or need primary care. More here on the KHN blog.

Gardening today

I'm afraid I don't have any pictures but I got in some nice gardening today. I spent a while talking to Mom (thank you cell phone headset) while planting garlic, spinach, and kale. I don't know what will actually grow over the winter here, but it's worth a try. It was almost 18 degrees here today (that's Celsius of course, 65 degree for you hidebound Fahrenheiters). Not that I should talk, I had to calculate the conversion myself. But we should be operating on Celsius, just like we should be using dollars coins. So I will continue my ad hoc one-woman crusades to encourage both of those activities.

After that I spent another hour listening to the radio while digging rotted straw into my second bed. I'm constructing low raised (or at least separated by boards) beds using some lumber out of a weathering stack that was sitting on the side of the lot. Clearly no one had been using it for some time so I just appropriated some pieces. As Miles says, it is often easier to beg pardon than ask permission. No one has complained about it yet so I'll just keep gardening along.

The soil needs a lot of amendment so I'm reclaiming rotted straw from the straw bales around the perimeter. I assume they were originally placed there for erosion control but now the ground is pretty well grassed in and the bales are collapsing... Thus creating a handy source of soil organics for me.

And while digging straw into my second bed I listened to this interesting segment on Interfaith Voices. It's a public radio show (of course) that's on the local station on Sunday afternoons. The first segment in today's episode was an interview with Bob Lupton about his new book, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse it). You can go to their website to listen to this week's show. This first segment was about 20 minutes long. His argument is that giving, especially one-way giving, can feel great for the giver but may be problematic for the recipient. He goes on to suggest that we need much more assessment of the effects of charities on those they serve and cites the example of mission trips. It's not enough to say that our group had an amazing experience and really coalesced around this project... What was the impact on the community they worked in after the mission group had left?

Anyway it was a provocative piece and something to think about especially in the season of charitable fundraising. That is probably one of the things that makes the Heifer Project stand out for me. Their model incorporates the recipient "giving on" and and so moves toward the meaningful exchange and away from the abject recipient model.

What are your thoughts about right, and wrong, kinds of charity? Listening to his story I agree that the church breakfast project where I'm helping to cook on Sunday mornings definitely has some of those flaws. It's not immediately obvious what could be changed given the available resources and time constraints though. I'll have to keep mulling it over.

Salad!

Yes, I do things other than cook. But somehow that is what I often think of sharing. I was tired tonight and wanted something different to eat to I got a bag of baby spinach at Safeway and made a fabulous salad.

Take a look!

It had spinach, mandarin orange pieces, dried tart cherries, chevre cheese, and chopped sugar & spice pecans with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Winter is really the time for this salad somehow, probably because the spinach and citrus tastes so good in the season of reduced fruit.

Along with the roasted sweet potatoes (that I also got on the way home, a store across the street is quite handy sometimes) it made for a very good dinner. I followed that up with a batch of granola. It's good to have around and the warm oven was nice company on this chilly night. I think we're forecast to get the first frost of the year tonight. Yep. It's November and they're talking about the first frost. This is definitely farther south than I'm used to. 

I was working on my underwriting project today at work. It's complicated in that there are a lot of moving pieces and computer systems to learn but once I figure those out I think it will be fairly straightforward. It's definitely an opportunity to learn about a large government system for providing and tracking client services, mortgage insurance contracts in this case, but similar issues would apply to many other types of services...tracking building projects, grants, highway projects...

And then I walked home and read the news online. Ezra Klein's Wonkblog with the Washington Post often has a couple of interesting pieces and can point me at other good stories too. For example here is a post about where the projected federal budget debt is actually coming from in the next nine years. Answer: the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire completely would do more to reduce the deficit than anything the supercomputer is talking about.

And here's a rant from Jonathan Gruber about the politics and the situation surrounding the Affordable Care Act. I appreciate that he flat-out calls Romney lying for trying to distinguish his Massachusetts health care reform from Obama's federal reform. They are the same approach. The major difference is that Massachusetts got the Feds to pay for their reform and so shifted the costs off of the state books. Nationwide we don't have the option of getting someone else to pay for expanding access to health care services.

And I want to quote Gruber's final lines:

"Basically, this is the last hope for a free-market solution for covering the uninsured. If this fails, then you either give up on the uninsured or you go to single-payer. Those are the only two options left. And the Republicans, if they're willing to stand up and say, 'We give up on the uninsured,' then great, let them say that and let the voters come to the polls and decide, but they won't say that."

Now my late-night amusement is the what-if of the Supreme Court striking down the individual mandate but leaving the rest of the ACA intact. That would be the insurance industry's worst nightmare because they would have to sell insurance policies to people when we become sick. If Congress remains sufficiently gridlocked they might not even take any action to change it which would be a really uncomfortable, and ironic, outcome for all concerned.

It might be the quickest way to get us to national single-payer though.

Well, enough with the wild speculation. We'll hear the Court's decision by June.

Must Have Jam

Kinda like a zombie, only it's "Jam...jam..." rather than "Brains...brains..."

But store jam is so bad and all sugar and barely tastes like fruit and mystery fruit at that even when there is a picture of a blackberry on the label. This reality led me to go pick strawberries, or rather go pick up strawberries. I need some good jam that tastes like real fruit.

So I bought frozen strawberries, let them thaw in the fridge for a couple days, and made jam tonight. Here's the evidence:

Look at my treasure:

And of course once I had jam I had to make a quick batch of biscuits to eat some jam on. For your future information, 1/2 cup of flour makes three biscuits.

Yummy!


Evaluating the price:
Safeway had a coupon for a 40 oz bag of frozen strawberries for $5, or $2 per pound. I don't know if that's a good deal or not (it's more than we paid for U-pick berries with Erin last spring, isn't it Karl?) but it was a total of $5 for the strawberries, $3.50 for the pectin, half a lemon, and some sugar. Say $10 for the whole batch. It made about 6 cups which is probably at least 6 jars of jam, and a jar of jam definitely costs more than $2 in the store so it's a pretty good deal even with commercially priced berries.

And now I have proper freezer jam that actually tastes like berries and not like sugar.

In other news I had an interesting day at work. Tanya, one of the 2010 HUD PMFs, organized a Pecha Kucha session with three current PMFs speaking about the work of their offices. The Pecha Kucha format is a presentation with 20 slides, each slide shown for only 20 seconds. It is quick and lively. I enjoyed hearing about the activities of some of my fellows. It is a good way to get a broader picture of what all is going on at HUD. Following the Pecha Kucha we got into a discussion about employee retention and making HUD a better place to work for younger employees. Apparently HUD has one of the lowest five-year retention rates for new employees in the federal government so there are plenty of opportunities for improvement. It was a real example of the kind of creative and change-motivated thinking that is supposed to be one of the contributions of us in the PMF program. I quite appreciate seeing it in action, and I will definitely get involved with the "Under Five" working group.

Well it's after 10 so I'm headed to bed. I'm trying to get to sleep earlier since I've been getting up at 5:40 in the morning. Fortunately I've got that walk to work to get my blood flowing in the morning.

Garden plot and APHA

I got a garden! I got a garden!

Ok, so it's really a 100 square foot plot of weeds, but it's got potential. Unfortunately it probably doesn't have durability since this is a temporary community garden site on a vacant lot down the street. The Lutheran church was cool enough to use part of the site for a garden when they tore down their old (and apparently poorly constructed) building. But they will be rebuilding the site as an apartment complex, mixed-use building, and new church so the community garden only lasts until they start construction. Hopefully that won't be until next fall though so I should have at least a year of gardening there.

The soil is not great, but I'm using the rotted bales of straw that are around the place as a soil amendment. That, some purchased [gasp!] manure and a good dose of miracle grow ought to accomplish relatively decent gardening next summer. I know it's not particularly organic or soil-building to use concentrated chemical fertilizers like miracle grow but this is an unusual situation. I don't have time for the long-term soil development that makes for a truly great garden so I'll take the quick response of refined chemicals instead.

Here's a picture of the site. My plot is on the end closest to where I'm standing to photograph it. I just started digging out a bed (look for the red spading fork) and stopped to take the picture.

And here's what it looked like when I finished the day's digging.

Boards and edging really help make it look like a garden. I'm attempting to solarize the weeds in the second bed with plastic bags. I'm not sure it's going to work though because the weather may be too cold and the sun too low in the sky.

The garden was last week. This week, Sunday through Wednesday I attending the APHA Annual Meeting. APHA is the American Public Health Association. It is the group for public health research, practice, and advocacy. It has a HUGE conference though. I heard there were around 12,000 registered attendees. There are so many simultaneous sessions that it is practically impossible to prioritize.

Here's a picture of the closing session of APHA. Not that it is terribly exciting since it looks like every other conference speech, but I'll prove I was there.

Oh here's a niftier picture. The replica tall ship, Pride of Baltimore II, came to visit the DC waterfront a couple of weekends ago. She is as "1812-era topsail schooner privateer." She is a modernized replica which means she looks about the same on the outside but has electronic navigation and a (small) backup diesel engine on the inside. It's hard to imagine, walking around on the deck that over 100 men would have lived on a ship like this in her privateering days. Talk about crowded! Also this ship and lots of other organizations and sites in Baltimore are planning a whole bunch of special events next year for the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. You ought to come visit me and check them out.

Here's the ship: 

I'm working on getting up earlier (I want to try to start work at 7 so I'll have a little daylight left when I get out for the day) so I'd better head to bed. I'll leave you with this link to a news piece about Oregon doctors using electronic health records though. Why? Because, one Go Oregon (also OPB helped on the reporting), and two I keep meaning to share more health policy stuff with my readers. That's part of why I'm here in DC after all.

Have a good night.

-Sarah