The problem with our government

Yesterday, we had a staff meeting during the State of the Union address.  There were technical difficulties with our powerpoint slides, so we watched the address while we waited for them to be worked out.  My boss tried to explain our current fiscal reality to our Korean coworkers.  In the meantime, in the background there's this perfect image illustrating the problem: that of John Boehner sitting behind the president with this petulant expression on his face.

AP photo from here

John Boehner and his antics have helped make the 112th Congress both one of the least productive and least popular in history.  It's not hard to see why.  He and his cohorts regularly pull a series of political stunts in an attempt to drum up displeasure for president Obama.  Political stunts, you say?  Just another certainty on Capitol Hill.  Well, yes.  What really drives me mad is that the demonized "government spending" that we need to control, so much, apparently, that Congress refuses to compromise on a budget, is not a nebulous concept to me.  It's my paycheck, and that of my staff.

Now we are trying to drum up morale in the face of furloughs and a hiring freeze, yet again.  If we are determined to live in a new fiscal reality, let's cut our budget and be done with it--preferably handing the new budget back to us at the beginning of the fiscal year (ha!).  It's disheartening that my own government is willing to pay chicken with my paycheck, and the 20% pay cut we all face if we furlough is not insignificant.  It's not just "government spending."  It's the livelihoods of myself and 750,000 people.  And yet, it's a prop for yet another ridiculous cat fight on Capitol Hill.  Thanks, Congress.

Smart Electricity

Our house is high tech.  Our dryer stops running when the laundry is dry.  Our door talks to us.  The refrigerator dings when we have held it open for too long.  Our air conditioner has a remote control, and can cool our cavernous living room from the corner.  Perhaps the houses of the well heeled do this everywhere, but we did not have such appliances until we moved to Korea.  As we recently learned, in addition to all of our smart appliances, our electrical grid has a self destruct feature.

We were not aware that there is an outlet under our kitchen sink.  We bathe Xander in there, and he loves to splash around.  Apparently one day--Lunar New Year's Day, in fact, the biggest holiday of the Korean year--the outlet decided that it had had enough, and it turned off the power to our house.  We fiddled with the circuit breakers, trying to turn it back on.  We called our landlord.  He came by and demonstrated to us that the problem was in one area, so with some masterful fiddling, we could turn on the power in the other five areas of our house.  The house had no problem with that.  It was only when we tried to return power to the cursed section that the house decided that to protect us all, it must shut the power off.

We rigged up our refrigerator with an extension cord and called it a night.  The next day, the landlord prodded us about our new appliances.  Surely we had plugged something in that did not please the house.  We insisted that we hadn't changed anything, and he called the electrician, who discovered the outlet that none of us knew about.  Which, as I mentioned, was under the sink.  The perfect place for an outlet.  Happy New Year!

Deep Thoughts with X

X plays well in his crib.  He has a plethora of stuffed animals in there, as well as a projection mobile and an activity board.  I normally wake up to the sound of him playing.  So imagine my surprise when, early this morning, I heard him babbling to himself.  A look at the video monitor confirmed that he had not turned on his mobile, nor was he playing with his activity board or one of his animals.  He was just staring at the ceiling and babbling.  He did this for an hour, then rolled over and went to sleep.  I guess he was philosophizing in the dark.

Here's some of the hours of video footage we have of our little deep thinker.

Learning to drum, then breaking his drumstick

Christmas morning, discovering his new toy

Playing with daddy.  He's wearing pajama pants because his last clean pair of pants just got dirty.