10:37 – CBC posted four short video clips yesterday of Heartland star Amber Marshall’s wedding. Within a few minutes they were also up on YouTube. My impression of Amber’s new husband, Shawn Turner, is that he’s a solid guy. When he’s on camera, I can tell what he’s thinking, “I can’t believe she’s going to/has married me!”
Amber is her usual down-to-earth self. The wedding was held at her/their ranch. On the morning of her wedding, Amber wakes up and mucks out her chicken coop. She then drives into town to buy the flowers for her own wedding. Whatever the opposite of Bridezilla is, Amber’s it. As of a week before the wedding she hadn’t actually planned anything, although she said she “had some ideas.” On the laid-back to stressed-out continuum of brides, Amber definitely anchors the laid-back end. On the morning after her wedding, she’s cleaning out her barn, disposing of the refuse from the wedding and reception. I predict a long and happy marriage for those two. And, yes, she literally did ride in on a horse instead of walking down the aisle.
Work on science kits continues. At this point, things have slowed down, but we’re still shipping 15 or 20 kits a week. That means we have to keep building kits constantly to keep up. I’m not sure what happened in June and July. Ordinarily, those would be heavy months, but this June and July we barely beat the results for June and July of last year. I suspect it had something to do with the expiration of tax cuts and the sequester because we’re by no means the only business that saw volume tail off during those months. The other months have been good, with sales of 1.5 to 10 times as much as the same month in 2012.
All in all, it looks like 2013 will be pretty decent year for us, and 2014 should be considerably better. Which is good, because the morning paper listed the ObamaCare rates for us and the surrounding counties. It looks like a “platinum” policy will cost Barbara and me somewhere around $1,500 per month before the tax rebate. Of course, we won’t get any subsidy because we make too much money. Bastards.
I think it’s interesting how political correctness impacts rates. The single factor that trumps everything in true health insurance is pre-existing conditions, but ObamaCare policies won’t take that into account. A terminally-ill 27-year-old pays the same rate as a healthy person of the same age, which of course means that all the healthy young men are being forced to pay much more than they should to subsidize the ill men. Another major factor in real health insurance premiums is sex. Women cost much, much more to insure, particularly those of child-bearing age. A 27-year-old woman should pay at least two or three times as much as a man of the same age, but that would not be politically-correct, so under ObamaCare she pays the same premium as a man. Then there’s smoking. Cigarette smokers do and should pay much more for life insurance, because they don’t live as long as non-smokers (or, come to that, cigar and pipe smokers). But cigarette smokers should pay lower health insurance premiums than non-smokers, because smokers tend to die younger and of diseases that kill quickly. Non-smokers are the ones that cost the insurance company money, because they live longer and tend to suffer chronic diseases that are very expensive to treat. Of course, smoking is totally non-PC, so smokers get hammered under ObamaCare. The one thing that surprises me is that ObamaCare doesn’t penalize people for being overweight, which is about as non-PC as smoking.