Author Archives: Netmom

That Darn Cat!

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I love animals, and am not categorized as a “cat person” or a “dog person” — I enjoy both, though I am a “big dog person” and not at all fond of the little yappers that people carry into stores in oversized purses. Still, to each her own.

My cat moved into this house before I did, as there was a significant mouse problem. The cat food went mostly untouched for a month or so, the cat gained weight and muscle, and the mice just disappeared — no poison or traps required.

Today though, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t rather have mice.

All winter it’s seemed like the house was much colder than usual, though I attributed that for a time to keeping the thermostat turned lower than I have in the past. Still, it didn’t seem like the utility bills were as much lower as I would have expected for the discomfort. Next, I thought it was probably because a lot of the insulation in the crawl space has fallen down, and that’s probably part of the problem. Especially in the kitchen (only half of the house has a crawl space; the rest is a basement).

It seemed suspicious though, when I went to the basement for firewood and realized it’s warmer down there (underground — typically the same temp year-round) than upstairs. I went around to all the vent connections in the basement and repaired one that was loose, but the problem persisted.

Yesterday, Hubby caught the youngest cat (a young adult, but still kitten-sized, as she was the runt of an unwanted litter) crawling out of one of the heating vents. This morning, Alpha saw her do it again. Exasperated with the energy loss (and fearful of the cat doing something stinky in the ductwork) I set about looking for the hole, and found it.

She — or they — had torn a hole about two feet across and nine inches wide, along the top of the main duct from the furnace.

So, as the child of an engineer, the wife, sister, sister-in-law, niece and cousin of engineers, I grabbed the duct tape. I can fix this. For the record, we’re more likely to have duct tape in the house than bread, milk or paper towels — so that isn’t a problem. The fact that I’ve used duct tape for 1,001 things except it’s intended purpose was not a deterrent.

I also happen to know that there’s a big box of duct material in the basement, from a long-forgotten project that Hubby intended to complete about 15 years ago… at this point, I don’t think he’d miss a couple of small pieces. Armed with a ladder, duct tape, duct material and my trusty pocketknife, I patched the massive hole (as the HVAC system blew dust and fiberglass all over me).duct patch

It’s not pretty, but it’s sealed.  Next, I need to cut a couple of pieces of plywood (yes, we have some of that too) to block off the route the kitties use to get from the top of the stairs to the top of the ductwork… otherwise, the little monster will just tear another hole in it.

I’m not a big fan of having cats de-clawed, but have to wonder if it might be a necessity with this one.  One of the others has a habit of kneading his paws on Hubby while he’s sleeping — sometimes with claws — so I’ve trained that one to sit still for a “manicure” so I can trim his claws to a short, painless length.

Not sure if our ductwork culprit (her name is Creamsicle, but we call her “Itty-bitty” more than anything else) will sit still for that.

Most people start off January with self-improvement; I’m taking on “home improvement.”

Talk of the Town

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Education funding is the talk of the Tennessean, with two legislator guest columnists and an editorial on the topic today.

The main editorial opines that the rural schools’ funding woes have been satisfactorily addressed, or at least so sayeth the court, but that urban systems have fallen behind with their greater proportion of expensive-to-educate (at-risk and ELL — kids who don’t speak English).  They close with the easy point:

The state should not have to see another lengthy legal battle to bring fairness to the urban schools. But it should be clear that there are flaws in the current formula. The heart of the matter is the needs of the students in those urban districts. The General Assembly should address those needs in K-12 school funding. The formula should be revisited.

Rep. Gary Odom’s piece calls for a system that is more “simple and fair.”  Notably, he points out that all school systems have high risk and ELL students… and they do.  While it may indeed be true that the urban schools have greater numbers of ELL students, it’s not necessarily true that they have greater percentages — and it’s certainly true that they see more benefits from an economy of scale.

Smaller systems with a small number of ELL students still have to provide extra teachers (and often, extra instruction) to those students, even if there are only five spread across elementary, middle, and high school.  That gets expensive in a hurry.

Rep. Jason Mumpower points out some of the flaws in the current system, but also the glaring flaws of what he terms the “lead replacement plan” — the system-level model put forth by TACIR, which I have written critically of so many times in the past.  However, he also questions whether Tennesseans are seeing value for the additional dollars poured into education over the past decade, and calls for a system that goes beyond funding alone to ensure measurable results.

Everybody wants a system that is “fair,” but only Mumpower points out the gross unfairness of the direction to date:

However, the front-running replacement plan actually double-counts the tax bases of cities and counties, according to the BEP Review Committee, and creates huge winners and losers in terms of funding distribution.

The principle behind the BEP was that local governments with large tax bases should bear a greater share of the burden for their school systems, while those with meager revenue sources need additional help from the state.  It was a Robin Hood plan from the beginning, but any system that provides substantially equal opportunity would have to be thus.

Taxation is, quite simply, a pooling of resources.

What none of today’s writers dared say is that to provide an increase in education funding for anyone, and to do so fairly, will require a net increase in education funding overall.

While there will always be differences in the relative wealth of local governments across the state, what I would like to see examined is a system that shows the following:

  1. If every local government had the same property and sales tax rates, and
  2. If every local government allocated the same percentage of tax collections to education,
  3. The amount of augmented funding needed based upon the true ability of the local government to fund schools, not their willingness.

I suspect that for some of the urban schools, part of the problem is simply allocation of resources to projects other than education.

The Fresh Page

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Like a fresh white sheet of paper beckoning, the new year arrived amidst a lively gathering of friends and family, pens and pixels poised.

Many or most of us who gathered share the usual goal of eat healthier/lose weight, with the New Year’s Eve celebration as a last excuse for bringing out the heart-attack-on-a-toothpick delicacies… oooh, it was good.

There was an impromptu concert, singing, and a few rowdies holding up lighters and chanting “free bird…”

This morning is a beautiful, mild winter day.  Tomorrow, real life starts back.

Y-12 Rules

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The past few years have seen an increasing number of dress code restrictions for Y-12 employees, mostly in the name of safety.  Sandals and clogs have been banned (much to the chagrin of female employees); now, the fellas have been relegated to boxers.

Atomic Wedgie

Farewell, 2006

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It’s been a mixed year in the balance of triumph and adversity, both personal and otherwise.

A few of the highlights for me were:

  • Presenting Alpha with her high school diploma (brag moment: she brought home a 3.75 GPA in her first semester in UT’s College of Engineering);
  • Several quality+quantity “family time” weeks;
  • Watching Betsy Coleman start her own real estate company;
  • Making several new friends, whose company I enjoy and opinions I value;
  • Holding off harmful changes to the BEP during the legislative session (though the battle continues);
  • Seeing this community pull together to show support for education, from the ground up;
  • Starting this blog, moving to WordPress, and mostly keeping up with it.

Of course, the biggest joy (as it is every year) are the daily reminders that I married the right man. I don’t know why, but I would never have thought that we could be more in love after 19 years of marriage than we were when we went to the altar.

* * *

There were, of course, a few disappointments along the way, but there’s no need to list them. :p

Useless Trivia

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Not sure how accurate this thing is… there were several questions I could have answered either way, or where there was no good answer for me.

Your Brain is 33% Female, 67% Male
You have a total boy brain
Logical and detailed, you tend to look at the facts
And while your emotions do sway you sometimes…
You never like to get feelings too involved

FY08 Budget Preview

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An early preview of the Oak Ridge Schools FY ’08 budget (scheduled for adoption April 12) will be a topic of discussion at the School Board meeting on Wednesday, January 3.

The “budget concepts” document (be patient, it’s a large file because it was scanned) provided to the Board is very preliminary, but does illustrate some of the relevant challenges.  Among them are the fact that we still have not implemented the Compensation Study, which means that some of our employees are paid significantly less than market value.  In addition are changes to the Alternative School to address No Child Left Behind issues… probably graduation and attendance rates, as much as anything.

I think most of us have asked ourselves, what if “alternative school” really was an alternative (for kids who just don’t fit in, for whatever reason, to the standard school model) rather than it’s present form, which is more like what most of us called “reform school” a few decades ago.

The part that concerns me most is that we are projected to continue “spending down” our undesignated fund balance, leaving us almost no cushion against unexpected expenses (i.e., food service equipment or HVAC systems that fail sooner than planned).

If you’re interested in the school budget, you may want to read through this before (or during) Wednesday’s meeting.

Saddam Watch

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Waiting for the pressure cooker to cool enough to open (to hubby: stop touching that!  It will BURN you!), Delta and I heard on Fox News (chill, Joel, CNN has the same story) that Saddam is due to be executed in the next couple of hours.

Delta: Will they show it on TV?

Me: No, honey.  That’s gross.

Delta: We should cheer!

Me: Well, we really shouldn’t cheer when somebody dies.  Even if it will be a relief when he’s gone.  He’s a very bad man.

Delta:  Yeah… didn’t he cause the Holocaust?

Something like that… 

Telecom Changes

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Uh oh.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the FCC has approved the merger of Bellsouth and AT&T:

The Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T Inc.’s $85 billion takeover of BellSouth Corp. Friday, after the telecom giant offered a series of major concessions to consumer groups and regulators.

The agency approved the deal, the largest ever in U.S. telecommunications history, by a unanimous 4-0 vote. The merger creates a behemoth that will have a market capitalization of over $220 billion — more than double that of nearest rival Verizon Communications Inc. — and will serve 67.5 million local phone customers in 22 states, as well as 11.5 million broadband users.

The FCC released a statement saying that “significant public interest benefits are likely to result from this transaction.”

Approval of the deal was never in serious doubt, but it was held up for months because of objections from consumer groups and Democrats.

AT&T broke the logjam by proposing a series of conditions this week that won over the Democrats, including a pledge not to prioritize any Internet content provider’s traffic over another’s, a principle known as “net neutrality.” Lawmakers, consumer activists and some Internet companies said that without such regulation, AT&T would be able to strike deals guaranteeing Internet companies like Google Inc. higher quality or faster transmissions than other providers. (Read AT&T’s filing.)

The net neutrality condition applies to the portion of AT&T’s network that connects consumers’ homes to the Internet backbone. Special data and voice networks used by corporate customers would not be subject to the rules and AT&T’s own nascent video offerings would also be exempted.

AT&T also agreed to lower rates for some high-volume voice and data lines that serve corporate customers and are leased on a wholesale basis to smaller telecom carriers. And it pledged to offer stand-alone high-speed Internet access for up to $20 a month. Companies that offer Internet phone service, like Vonage Holdings Corp., would stand to gain if consumers don’t have to buy their phone service and Internet service in a packaged bundle.

Hmmm.  We’ve been considering switching over to an IP phone service for some time now, but haven’t done so because we 1) don’t like Comcast internet service, and 2) anything else without phone service bundled costs more than phone+DSL.

The next question is, does AT&T offer wireless phone service that’s worth a flip, and if bundled with high-speed internet, do they offer it at a decent rate?

I’m still not very happy with US Cellular, but am waiting out the contract for another couple of months.  However, I’ve yet to find anyone who thinks their cell company provides good customer service.

Musical Etc.

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Listening to: Genesis. Via Pandora, where you can plug in an artist or song name, and create a channel containing not only your selection, but other similar works. If a song comes on that you feel strongly about (good or bad), you can click “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to include more of / exclude other similar pieces. They call it the “Music Genome Project.”

In the background, I see that Saddam is set to swing sometime in the next 24 hours. There’s something oddly right about looking at Saddam’s face while listening to Bobak, Jons, Malone and Jethro Tull.

Even with noise-canceling headphones, it’s a challenge to relax and enjoy the music with the kids interrupting every few minutes.