Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts by Kevin Knauss not related to health insurance or other categories, usually editorials, travel essays, food, pictures and maps.
At a recent San Juan Water District (SJWD) Board meeting one of the Board members declared that the district would defend, with a lawsuit if necessary, their pre-1914 water rights to American River water during a period of drought. This board member’s passion that this government agency “owned” water because of a man made dam built during California’s gold rush struck me as pure folly. Water rights are a myth. No one owns the water flowing in a river.
In its very essence, the Freeport Regional Water Project is a peripheral water conveyance system designed to have Bureau of Reclamation water purchased by EBMUD not pass through the Delta. Even though this water is being used to service East Bay communities, there is no reason that some simple modifications to the EBMUD aqueducts would allow the water to be sent south to Southern California. Perhaps the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California should fund the construction of the necessary modifications to allow the discharge of water from the EBMUD aqueducts in the event of an emergency situation where Sacramento River water can’t be conveyed through the Delta.
All new ACA health plans include acupuncture as a covered health care service in California. So what is it like to receive acupuncture and can it potentially help relieve medical challenges that some of us face? I decided to try out this traditional Chinese medicine to see if it would alleviate the pain in my neck.
How much is water worth? For Starbucks, they are able to take $0.66 worth of Folsom Lake water and convert it into $11,668.80 dollars. The San Juan Water District, who treats and delivers drought depleted Folsom Lake water to residential and commercial customers, is asking homeowners to use less water and pay more for it while company’s like Starbucks generate handsome revenues from residential conservation. The current and proposed Stage 3 Water Warning rate structure continues to have residential customers pay more per unit than Starbucks and other commercial uses who use the water to create revenue and profits.
For years the UC Davis Picnic Day parade name has belied the truth of the event. Far from a mid-western farm festival, the Picnic Day parade has consistently had the most diverse participants of any celebration I’ve attended. The parade is a spectrometer of the local area showing the variety of community and religious groups, liberal protests, conservative causes, campus groups and parade music from different bands. All of these folks from different races, cultures, religions and political philosophies walking together down the parade route. This is America. This why I keep coming back to Picnic Day. This renews my faith and hope for the future of humanity.
To be honest, I was fully prepared to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the Blue Shield of California corporate offices in El Dorado Hills. Numerous phone calls and emails on behalf of a client who had made his monthly premiums like clockwork, only to have his health insurance cancel, resulted in hollow promises and no action by Blue Shield to resolve the billing and cancellation nightmare. My last hope to help restore the health insurance for my long distance truck driving client was to rattle the corporate cage of the carrier.
I’ll admit that I’m addicted to flavored water. For years I have been buying Aquafina Flavor Splash and recently started purchasing Mio Orange Tangerine Liquid Enhancer concentrate. When I looked at the ingredients of these two products I realized that I could make a similar concentrated to flavor water at home. While my home brew chemical mixture isn’t quite as perfect as the store bought products, it tastes good and it’s fun to tinker with the ingredients.
I was visited by everyone’s worst nightmare; a computer that crashes in the middle of a vital project. As I browsed the local computer store, I decided to lean on the old adage of “you get what you pay for” and decided to pay the extra money for a Sony Vaio Fit 15E. Much to my surprise, I got less than what I paid for as this Sony notebook computer fails at the critical task of maintaining a wireless or wi-fi connection for more than a couple of minutes.
Several years ago I discovered that roasting vegetables was relatively easy and quite flavorful. While I roast roots as part of a vegetarian main dish, they can easily be a side accompaniment with a meat selection. Roasting root and stalk vegetables really concentrates the flavors and the fiber provides for a filling meal. Best of all for this old man, the hardest part is just cutting up all the roots.
People turn to the Internet for two things: entertainment and information. If you’re not producing content focused on one of those two areas, you may not be getting that much traffic to your website. If you want to get visitors to your blog or website you need to create content that is either entertainment or information oriented.
