No Canadian I've ever met would get within a mile of the US system.

Everytime you guys talk about health insurance, I mentally hug our healthcare system a little bit tighter. Not that there aren't problems.

It also helps that I have supplemental insurance & a good doctor who I have had a long relationship with.

My coworker is trying to talk me into reinventing myself as a horseshoe crab rancher. Pretty successfully, I am intrigued. I'll have to check the municipal code, but I don't think that's expressly forbidden in my city.

Horseshoe crabs are tremendously cool.

Who was it that wrote politician slash, PMM? [link]

I got to pet one on Monday! Also, jellyfish. Which feel so much more substantial than they look (I'd never knowingly touched one before; they look like they should feel and give like silk in water. But no, solid like...I dunno. Nearest comparison I have is a blob of dried silicon glue.)

Only you guys will get this: as I was putting away dishes tonight, I said "Damn, my parents used all my spoons!" And had to add, "Not figuratively!" (But seriously, ALL of them.Normally my drainer is filled with just forks and one spoon.)

Is there a big trade in horseshoe crabs, -t? That seems surprising, but I don't know anything about them!

Seeing a woman POTUS is going to be huge for girls across the country, as Steph said. Hell, it's going to be big for me.

Also, what Calli said about the rats. It's not like I didn't know shitty, small-minded people existed, but the number of people who agree enthusiastically with Trump's hatespeech is really disheartening.

Zen...I wish you safely through the layoffs. It sucks.

My company is going through a major reorganization right now. The CEO had said that 800 jobs will likely get cut. The original implecation was that it would be upper, upper management types. But every Thursday for the past 3 weeks, so far, they have laid off a chunk of folks. And it appears completely random. Some folks who have great reputations and who are fully billable (not on overhead). Others who are low level and aren't going to cut much cost. Today I showed three different people how to query our company directory to see who was terminated in the last week. The results include people who quit too, but it is sad that pulling that list is now part of my Monday routine.

As for my job...I think I will make it through but who the heck knows. I'm trying to take comfort in the thought that severence plus my banked time off would cover about a half a year's salary. The weekly layoffs are supposed to be done by the end of November...so another month of sitting on the bubble.

Edited to fix the word salad courtesy of autocorrect.

Their blood is used for medical testing. Vital in vaccine testing, I think. Ideally, they are only blood donors, not killed (but it does have an impact on the wild population, IIRC from whatever it was I watched.)

Timelies all!

Yay, Gary's getting home tonight rather than tomorrow. He's been away since Saturday on business. I've been wrangling destructo-toddler by myself, which is exhausting when I'm 100%, let alone with my foot in a brace.

Thanks, Suzi. You too! I hate this uncertainty.

Horseshoe crabs aren't really crabs, they're more like Jillifonts, and they're really ancient, like cockroaches, unchanged for millions of years, and they have blue blood which is used in some medical testing procedure I forgot, and so they're harvested and probed and their blood is stolen and then they're released back into the sea with a fantastic story of alien abduction, but they're being overharvested because they can only take so much of that Close Encounters shit, so farming them is a good idea and also probably profitable. And that's all I know about horseshoe crabs. Over to you, billytea.