In Other News Of The World ...

Shelby, who lately has been far more into the whole blogging game, has already covered recent events like our trip to the Orange County Fair (compares favorably to the Hamburger DOM!) and our trip to the Hollywood Bowl (fun, but difficult enough to get to that I don't see doing it more than once a year). Here are all of the other loose ends that I've been saving up:

• The A/C: I finally broke; it got hot enough that we turned on the air conditioning at the beginning of last week. It's nice, I have to admit.


• The Hospital Saga: It looks like all of the bills have come in from Shelby's hospital adventure last month. Final tally:
  • Total amount billed by the hospital: $27.179.00
  • "Negotiated amount" actually paid by insurance: $9,808.38
  • Amount that we have to pay: $142.91
  
  I'm convinced that the hospital starts the game by pulling a random number out of thin air, the insurance company counters with a random number of their own, and whoever doesn't blink is the winner. But still, $142 sure beats $27,000 -- hooray for health insurance!


• Boom!: Last week's big local news was the discovery of multiple tons of decaying fireworks stored in three tractor-trailers just a few blocks from our house. Local fire departments, the FBI, and the ATF converged to remove and detonate the more unstable explosives at a park down the street from the storage site; the process took several days, producing unsettling BANGs and BOOMs at all hours (not to mention that the entire perimeter of 21-acre La Palma Park was wrapped in police tape for the duration). Here's an article from the Orange County Register about the first fireworks cache -- and, proving that compulsive hoarders are all the same, whether it's old newspapers, cats, or potentially deadly quantities of explosives, the police found another similarly-sized hoard, kept by the same man, just a few days after they were tipped off to the existence of the first. (As always, I recommend bugmenot.com for those troublesome password-protected newspaper articles.) When I first heard about the fireworks, my fear was that our neighborhood would turn into another Enschede, but fortunately this much-smaller-scale potential peril was averted, with the idiot behind it all proclaiming that he's "one of the good guys".


• The Reedy Creek Improvement District: Friend Marc (of Marc's graduation fame) sent me a link to this post on BoingBoing about the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney's end-run around state and local governance over Walt Disney World by establishing and controlling its own governmental entity that makes the rules for the land that WDW occupies. For all of the locals who think that Disney calls the shots in Anaheim city politics, Disney only wishes they could do here what they've done in Florida. (And I'm sure that Wal-Mart and such look on drooling, wishing that they could get away with doing the same thing.) The RCID has its own website -- among other things, don't miss the job listings (seeking out a chief inspector with " ... [t]horough knowledge of the EPCOT Building Code ..., the EPCOT Plumbing Code and the EPCOT Mechanical Code ...").

Posted by Kevin at August 1, 2005 07:01 PM