Can you help Ruthie, or do you know someone who can?

I’m a very firm believer that G-d doesn’t put anything on your plate you can’t handle.  Some people have bigger plates than others.

Kim Clements, a friend of a friend of mine, has a turkey platter.

In addition to having two boys with Asperger’s Syndrome, Kim’s daughter Ruthie has been diagnosed with hypogammaglobinemia, an immune deficiency disorder.  The rare disease is responsible for her asthma, eczema, and severe allergies, and means she hardly ever gets to leave home – and never without a boatload of medications.

“If my other children come home with a cold from school, she goes straight to pneumonia, a simple cut, she ends up with a staph infection, and she had MRSA last year,” said Kim in an interview.

Poor kid.  My son, having  asthma, gets sicker than most from a simple cold.  I know what it’s like to deal with that.  I cannot imagine what it’s like for Kim to deal with, and take care of her two sons, too…

Ruthie has an appointment with a team of doctors in Denver later this month, but getting there is a problem.  Flying commercially puts Ruthie at great risk for illness, and she likely needs to be fairly healthy for her Denver evaluation.

So my friend e-mailed me and asked me if I’d help get the word out.  You never know who knows someone who knows someone who can make something happen.  And since Ruthie’s story has been picked up by the local news I think there’s a good chance that the right someone will see the story and want to help.  Still, they may not be TV watchers, so I’m putting it out to the blogosphere.

So, I’m asking bloggers to you please write your own story, or link back to this one or the TV spot. And I’m asking everyone to pass the word.

Pretty please?

If you would like to help Ruthie get to her September 24th doctor’s appointment, you can e-mail Kim Clements at ksclements@yahoo.com.

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The Most Financially Irresponsible Question Ever?

I was doing a search for a clarification on a homeowners insurance policy coverage issue and came across this question posted at Yahoo Answers:

Is there a homeowners insurance policy that covers every conceivable method of loss to everything?

Im looking for a homeowners insurance policy that will cover everything and with no deductable. We just bought a house, and im looking for a better policy. I live paycheck to paycheck and dont save a dime of money, it all goes to bills or payments. I would never be able to afford a deductable. Im looking for a policy that will cover every method of loss from flood to alien invasion to tornadoes to fire to war. If a storm hits and frys my $50 toaster, i want it completely covered with no out of pocket loss. If a tree hits our roof I want it completely covered with no deductable and no questions about how it happened. I am very tightly stretched with money and my entire lifestyle and state of life is riding on no unexpected emergency events that leave us with a loss. So now that you know what im looking for does anyone have any reccomendations?

Seriously?

Seriously?

I’m thinking someone posted this as a joke. I hope it’s a joke. I hope there isn’t someone out there who has literally no money for emergency expenses, who is stretched so thin yet still thought it a great idea to buy a house, and that couldn’t even replace their $50 toaster if broken.

Then again, with all of the stories going around lately I’m sure there are many people in the same circumstances as this person. A sinking ship indeed.

They want recommendations. I have plenty, but none of the important ones are about insurance.

I recommend you take a good, hard look at your lifestyle and cut it back.

I recommend you take the highest deductible possible on your insurance so you can have some money to build an emergency fund. No policy covers everything, and even if one were available buying it would be another bad financial decision.

I recommend that if your toaster breaks you replace it with a $10 K-Mart special.

I recommend that you declutter your life and make some money selling that clutter.

I recommend that you get a financial advisor that isn’t reading Yahoo Answers.

I recommend that you get a second job.

I recommend that you wake up and start acting fiscally responsible before you wind up either homeless or dead from the stress.

And I didn’t even mention the spelling and grammar. No use piling on…

Oy. Someone please tell me it was a joke.

Being Computer Illiterate has its Drawbacks

I’m a fairly smart cookie, in general. I read pretty well for a college graduate. I can do basic math in my head, so I’d know how to make change for customers without looking for the cash register to tell me. I know that the general rule of thumb in New York fashion is “always wear black.”

Computers in general are a mystery to me. I grew up in the “only really, really, really, REALLY geeky people own computers” age, and since I was utterly cool (a big fat lie, but at least I wasn’t a computer geek) I was late to the party. I can e-mail and blog and sell on Ebay and post listings on Craigslist. I can even convert a PDF to a JPEG using my Photoshop (which is really wasted on me, much to my husband’s chagrin).

I know just enough to get myself in big trouble. I don’t really get what RAM is, I don’t understand why I can’t just press a button to resize my photos, and I know nothing, NOTHING about programming. That’s why my husband called Apple when he had a problem.

That’s also why I have no idea what’s wrong with my Feedburner feed for this blog. I noticed that it was telling me I had no views, which thanks to you and my WordPress dashboard stats page I know is not even a little bit true. So I fumbled around their site a bit until I saw something about checking to see if my feed is valid. So check I did, and this is what it’s telling me:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

• line 525, column 1401: Invalid character in a URI: ' ' [help]
  

  ... =justshootmenow&ref=&feed=1" /></div>]]></content:encoded>
                                               ^

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

line 2, column 0: The prefix “media” generally is associated with the namespace “http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/” [help]

<rss version="2.0"

Huh?

I’m literate enough to understand that there’s an invalid character on line 525.  And there’s something I could do in line 2 that would help my feed work better.  Got it.  But what to do about it?

So I click on the help links which are, apparently, written in Greek. I have no idea what’s wrong, let alone how to fix it. So if you’d like to get my feed, I recommend you just get it some other way. Which I really can’t explain to you, except that it may have something to do with the little orange thingy in the web address space…but that could be the Feedburner way…

See what I mean?

I’m so glad I have my Google reader.

Tips on Pumping Gas

This info was sent to me in an e-mail, and I thought them worth passing on…

Here are some tricks to get more of your money’s worth for every gallon.

• Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning, when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening….your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role. A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps, so you get less gas than you pay for.

• When you’re filling up, squeeze the trigger of the nozzle only to the “low” mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some of the liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you’re getting less gas for your money.

• Fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL (or HALF EMPTY). The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation.

• If there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up. Most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

I hope these tips help you get more for your money!

 

 

See the Stretch Your Dollar Page for other money-saving ideas.