For the sake of moving this along... The weeks between December 17rd and February 7st was one of the most trying periods of my life and involved not one but THREE visits to the hospital, once through the ER. The months since have been a minefield of minding how I live and follow-up visits. If you know, you know... If you don't, well you get it. The way my off time goes at my full time job, I am allotted 248 hours a year of off time in one bank for use for both vacation and sick time. I am allowed to roll over up to 40 hours at the end of the year, and that is a wise thing to have banked on some just-in-case shit. 18 years with the company, I've always had at least 25-30 hours to roll as a cushion until my allotment begins to build back up. This time, however, that late-year hospital stay set fire to nearly ALL of my leave time and I approached January with only like two hours. Because of this, I've spent the first half of this year S...
Look, Haiti needs some help. We know this. In the month of January, I was not eating meat, and I had plenty of soups, tuna and other non-perishables in my cabinets that I would not have eaten for AT LEAST 3 weeks at the time. A lot of it was soup that we got when The Katie had a tooth pulled, then again when we both had Swine Flu were a little under the weather after our vacation. The thing I have here is that Haiti has needed help all along. Here is what we know: Haiti was forced to pay France for its freedom from slavery. Let us not forget that they didn't enter this slavery voluntarily, no one does... When they couldn’t afford the ransom, France (and other countries, including the United States) helpfully offered high-interest loans. By 1900, 80% of Haiti’s annual budget went to paying off its “reparation” debt. They didn’t make the last payment until 1947. Just 10 years later, dictator François Duvalier took over the country and promptly bankrupted it, taking out more h...
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