No More Tiers

So this is our grand-daughter, Logan.  It's our first time watching her for more than a few minutes for a run to the store.  She's a good baby, so I taught her to stick out her tongue.  She's not quite 4 weeks old.

Mommy's out doing foxy boxing tonight and it looks like Logan is, too.  Dynamite comes in small packages!

That's my size 10+ foot next to the biggest mushrooms I have ever seen.  Wish I was better educated in whether they are edible.  Too risky.

I spent a lot of time on the phone yesterday with different branches of Ohio Job & Family Services.  The first call I made was to unemployment.  Actually I had tried them on Monday and their outgoing message said that people with names that start with "P" should only call on Wednesday,  so being obedient and orderly and a former call-center drone, I called on Wednesday.  Sometimes the outgoing message says that call volume is too high, please call back at another time, this call is now ended, but I managed to get through.  The menu choices didn't fit what I wanted so I punched # and 0 until I got that sickeningly peppy light jazz hold music and I waited a very long time.

Finally a human answered the phone and I was able to ask my question.  I said that I had not received a benefit payment for several weeks and could not even file a weekly claim online so I assumed that I was one of that new class of people in today's economy called a 99er.  I had even logged in to the unemployment website and counted payments and it looked like I had used up my legally allotted 99 benefit weeks.  The reason for my call was that I had just received a direct-deposit payment after that gap of several weeks, and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate before I spent it, because I would not be able to repay it if it was a mistake.  The call center agent told me that it was indeed legit, that it was my 99th payment which just happened to get held up by that tug-of-war that had been going on in Congress.  So unless Congress passes a Tier V, it's the end of the line for my unemployment benefits.  I'm still applying for jobs though, so any phony statistic from the government or media that says that I have given up is just baloney.  There is a growing number of people like me who can now be left out of the official unemployment numbers and ignored, like a shadow army growing increasingly frustrated and desperate.

That bottle in the picture is a little experiment we're trying for the first time.  It's homemade blackberry wine!  And it turns out that blackberry wine is kind of a family tradition from back before my Mom was born, and it created repercussions with the Patriot Act, but that's a story for another post.