Things I'm Thinking About- December 31

Return of the Locksmith- Last week, I wrote about the curious incident in the Price Cutter parking lot when I stopped the man from getting into my car. Of course, the man turned out to be a locksmith, something I kept from the reader until the end. Today, the locksmith was getting into my car at my invitation. For the first time since I bought my car in 2007, I locked my keys in the car while I was leaving copies of Let Teachers Teach at Always Buying Books.

My First Pension Check- I don't know whether this is the step that actually signals my retirement, but my first pension check was direct-deposited today. I can think of a few other people associated with Joplin education who should have been forced into early retirement, but then I have been writing about that for the last several months.

Former Joplin Globe Reporter at Denver Post- As I was reading an article on yesterday's Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department news conference on the recent school shooting, I noticed the byline belonged to Sadie Gurman, who if memory serves correctly, worked for the Joplin Globe covering statehouse news while she was a student and then worked for the newspaper for a short whlie after that. A link to her reporting can be found on the Room 210 Education site.

Working On Solving Pop-Up Ad Problem- I wasn't aware until this afternoon that some readers, especially ones who are visiting my blogs on their IPads, have been getting popup ads. I made some adjustments and hopefully, that problem is solved. The advertising is needed to help make the websites pay (I am not naive enough to think that there are going to be a large number of people paying for the voluntary subscriptions I have available), but it is the growing traffic to the websites that makes them pay and if these pop-up ads, which I did not know about it until today, are running away readers, then they are not going to be on the site. Please let me know if you have any problems accessing the Turner Report, Inside Joplin, or any other other sites.

 Obamacare Coverage Starts Tomorrow- In less than four hours, I switch from having to pay $407 a month to the Joplin School District to be retained on its health insurance plan to being covered under the Affordable Care Act. While I am confident my insurance is going to work well for me, anything has to be better than what I was getting. I refilled two prescriptions at the 15th Street Wal-Mart yesterday and discovered that my $407, which was supposed to be providing me with the same coverage I had as a teacher, did not pay a cent because of some kind of problem. It wasn't  a great amount, so I simply covered it, and just filed it away as another bad experience caused by Joplin R-8 Administration.