G’s Place

Kenny’s prom is tonight. They all met up at one house, and went on a party bus! That had a dance floor in the bus!

The flickr set is here 

Here he is….

Here he is with his girlfriend and date:

Well, I got past the GRE. Just need to send all the materials in, and hopefully I will start grad school in the fall. The program of study really is interesting, there are things I could use in my job RIGHT NOW. Like Managing Instructional Development. Of course, hopefully I will be able to take some courses how adults on the autism spectrum learn, since ultimately that is what I want to focus on.

We did the 5K today for HMEA. We got drenched….I hope it stops raining soon.

And I am teaching tomorrow. I am very nervous about it. Looking forward to June, I have to say.

560 verbal, 510 Quantitative. I needed a 1000 combined.

So, now I have all the minimum academic requirements. Everyone hold your breath for me….

I am so swamped and overwhelmed that I feel sick, but I still wanted to talk about this.

If you haven’t heard, some Congressmen (one from Mass) are trying to live on $21 worth of food a week…the weekly food stamp allowance given to adult men.

I used to be poor. Not poor enough to qualify for food stamps, but poor enough that I had $60 - $80 a month to spend on food. I look at that dollar amount now and am amazed. I have been trying to remember how I did it.

• Lots and lots of Hunt’s canned spaghetti sauce. They would be on sale for 89 cents a can, and spaghetti noodles were 3 for a dollar. It makes me ill to even THINK about that stuff now, but my son will still ask me to cook it.

• No fruit, unless I got the marked down stuff. You know, the stuff that is almost too bad to sell because it’s starting to go bad. Bring that stuff home, cut off all the bad spots.
• Buy meat if it was marked down. It would keep if you cooked it right away or froze it. Once a SuperWalmart came to town, I knew the days they would mark meat down, and that is when I would shop.
• No juice. Koolaid is way, way cheaper. So is soda.
• 
• NO WASTING FOOD. I think this is why I can cook anything…I learned how to slap leftovers together to make something new. Didn’t always work, but that is why Tony Chachere’s seasoning was made. It can make anything edible.
• Go on dates. Hey, ya gotta do what ya gotta do when you are hungry. I would get alfredo and take a couple of bites and then take the rest home for the kids. Sad, I know.

Now that I can afford food, I am weird about it. I freak out when we start running low. And we are honestly no where near low…I can remember having nothing in our pantries. Going to food banks. etc.etc.

I think it is good that the Congressmen are experiencing what it’s like to not have enough food. But is adding more money to the food stamp budget the answer? In the short term, yes it may be. But let’s SOLVE the issue, let’s make jobs. Don’t let big factories in the US use illegal labor. Don’t reward big companies for sending jobs overseas to access even cheaper labor.

I can tell you from experience, folks are living on less than $21 a week because they don’t qualify for food stamps, or because they are too proud to get through the humiliating application process. People want to work, they don’t want handouts. Do something about the lack of jobs, that is what will solve the issue about hunger.

Watch Iraq for Sale

via metafilter

BE CAREFUL MY BROTHER!!

We are walking in a 5K in on May 20 for HMEA.  They are a local organization that supoprts people with developmental disabilities, including people on the autism spectrum.

We have a page set up so people can help us raise money. Our company will match, $250 a person (that means $500 for both of us). So every $5 dollar donation will get doubled!

Go donate here.