Hard up for money I guess

You have to love living in a city so hard up for money that people call in other people for 'wheel tax fraud'. Lincoln, NE has a wheel tax of 11.00 and some change per wheel, but students are exempt because they are not residents. Recently the State of NE went after people registering their vehicles in other states and the local municipalities followed suit. NE auto taxes are insane-my 1986 cavalier still costs me 150.00 to put plates on and its only Blue Booked at around 300 if im lucky. Good to see this kid obviously stood their ground.

A8-099587 5500 BLOCK OF SHADY CREEK CT POSS WHEEL TAX FRAUD/PRTY FND TO BE STUDNT TRAVELING BACK/FORTH 10/4/2008

Im pissed off today....

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/smartspending/archive/2008/10/06/they-tried-eating-on-25-a-week.aspx

http://25challenge.blogspot.com/

http://feedingillinois.org/news/hunger-action-month/

The Illinois food stamp program runs at around 25.00/week per person max. There recently was an awareness campaign where some people signed up to eat on that, some single, some family. The blog posts and comments to the story itself are pretty illuminating.

I grew up with two working parents, free lunch, and gov. cheese, so I can definitely relate to a lot of this. There is some good stuff to take away from it-they posted a shopping list (sample) of what you could buy that would fit into the guidelines and it give you some ideas, but KIM that there are people that can’t jazz it up and don’t have the luxury of modifying a menu/shopping list like this. It’s not great, and it certainly sheds some light on the idea that poor people shouldn’t be overweight because ‘they don’t eat much’. They may not eat much, but they do eat badly, and cheap food is generally over processed and full of carbs and lean on anything else useful-so you get to eat a lot, cheap, and it does little for you, and they you end up hungry again.

With the economy being what it is, jobs being harder to find and keep, we’ll only see more of this. I just thought that those of us with families on a budget (and single, returning to college students-Sarah!) might find this useful in some way.

Here, however, is what ticked me off-the Digg.com comments associated with the article

You college kids and your idealistic self righteous view of your self induced poverty really piss me off. The main point of this article is not how thrifty you think you can be-its about feeding families in the long term. You may get away with eating ramen three times a day but subjecting your kids to it should be a crime. They don't have the luxury of your self imposed hippie poverty-they face serious health issues from eating like most of you say you do. And spare me the 'then don't have kids....' argument. This kids that are such a burden to you now will be paying for most of your retirements. Many people work-hard-and don't have the option of 'just moving' or 'stop driving' and shouldn't have to not have kids when they are working full time.

Your admissions counselor lied to you-you don't get the keys to the executive washroom or work for Google just because you have a piece of paper. The reality of the world is more like this article than some of you seem to grasp. For the rest of you that cut coupons and make this work, I salute you along with my mother, who made this work most every day while I was growing up. Both my parents worked, too, 40-50 hours a week.

Ask and thou shalt receive

And....here is a wolf spider, courtesy of our client services dept. (mine) about 10 feet from my desk. I put him/her outside, but it was much to the consternation of my supervisor and some others that hate spiders. Our release director told me to step on it, or she would-I told her to go sit back down and get a grip. Im sure ill pay for that one over the next several weeks with being more ignored than usual. I don't care though, she's not my boss and is somewhat parallel to me, and has enough of her own work issues to worry about. 

Bug Menagerie

We have lots of bugs at work-I mean LOTS. Here are some pics I took this morning in and around our parking log. We have a field on one side, so that probably explains it, but this was a bumper crop even for us. Maybe I can get a pic of a spider one of these days-we have them, too, but based on the number of mantis's im not surprised that I don't see more of them.