OT: Health insurance premiums (self-employed)

Not that I've noticed. We underuse heat. Since we live in Oregon, if we need anything at all it will be mostly heating.

A few days ago, the "oil man" came out for the first time since early last spring to fill up our oil tank. They keep track of the last fill and the "cold day" accumulations and compute a delivery time from that. When he got done he was quite surprised at how little oil we'd used. We were way under their estimates and had used so little that they wouldn't have wanted to come out, at all, had they known. We use quite a bit less than most folks around the area.

Love the floors.

Jon

P.S. Our family is of Swedish descent. So perhaps that's part of it.

Our dogs and cat have always preferred the beds (and couches, overstuffed chairs, etc.). :-)

Cats in particular seem quite well constructed for sleeping, being able to use their hind legs as a pillow for their chins when they curl themselves up into a ball.

purr....

Ours find such things, too!

Yes. Which reminds me about the behavior of one here...

One cat we have here, Moogie, is from a litter of the one female we let have kittens before fixing her. The litter was four, two dead on arrival and one of the other two very unusually injured on its paws. It looked almost as though a shelf door was closed on them, pinching off the toes nearly, but there was no possibility of that. So I remain bewildered about it. We were around constantly and this was observed within a short time. That one died after one day. That left just one kitten. The mother would drag her everywhere to sit with us. We would see Moogie in her mouth all the time, going here, then there, where ever we were at. I took over and raised her with me. Since I sleep on the floor, that was easy.

Now, she sleeps in my arms, resting in my arm and laying her head just where my wife would otherwise be. I wake up like that, not infrequently. Sometimes, she wakes me up so that I re-arrange myself for her.

I've owned cats for quite some time. Our oldest right now is 18 years old and going strong. No idea when he'll die, but it won't be soon. But none that would even seem to want to get into such a risky position with a human, sleeping. A short distance away, yes. But not this kind of thing.

But Moogie is very human-socialized, it seems. I suppose in part because I was so distraught at the loss of all the other kittens and gave her a lot of early attention.

Jon

I find that interesting, too -- we each started from the definition of 'bed' as being 'the whole dang thing' then made different assumptions from there.

In spite of being _way_ younger than Jim Thompson I'm old and creaky enough that I need some padding between me and whatever hard thing I'm sleeping on. This can be as little as an air mattress, but if I do manage to get to sleep on the floor I'll be pretty darn stiff the next day.

Perhaps if I had stayed in practice, though...

I can sleep just about anywhere, in just about any orientation.

Drives my wife nuts... I go to sleep before the plane takes off ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Once I was lucky and got an upgrade from biz class to 1st. On international flights that is a real treat. After landing in Duesseldorf (when AA still flew there) the stewardess had to wake me up and said that all the other passengers had already left. She said she couldn't believe how I could have slept through that landing in a gusty crosswind.

Mumble years ago my wife and daughters thought a trip to the new local horse races on video parlor was the cats meow. I went along with it as far as going there. Then I found a comfortable seat and went to sleep until they were ready to go. Drove them all nuts.

You would have woke up on the landing last time I was in Japan. The kid swears he saw a shower of sparks coming off the left wingtip when we hit (and I do mean hit, hard and at an agle) the runway. No blown tires though, so I suppose others have had it a lot worse and still been able to use the plane again.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany