Hugh's Worthless Blog

  Why not celebrate St. Patrick's Day in February? Our annual Habitat for Humanity corned beef dinner is scheduled on Saturday, February 28, 2026 from 4:00 to 7:00 pm. See the full post here .

2026 Update: The dinner is even earlier this year, on February 28, 2026! See the latest post here 2025 Post: It's time for my 2025 Habitat for Humanity Dinner and Auction post! Our early St. Patrick's Day Corned Beef dinner this year will be held Saturday. March 8, 2025 from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm at Samuel United Church of Christ in Clayton, Missouri. We should have plenty of food (including desserts) and we are hoping the warmer weather holds up after a couple miserably cold and snowy weeks in February. The auction is on the new updated BiddingOwl site, and I am happy to say I am not the technical support for the auction site this year. The auction just opened and runs until the day after our dinner, on Sunday, March 9, 2025. All proceeds from both the dinner and the auction go to support the St. Louis Habitat for Humanity location which our church has been supporting for about 20 years.  I had to post this so my 2023 post from the old auction was not the first post on my blog!...

  Our St. Patrick's Dinner  was very successful and we raised over $10,000 for the Saint Louis chapter of Habitat for Humanity . Now we are hosting an online auction in partnership with other area United Church of Christ congregations to help raise more money for Habitat to provide affordable housing in the area.  One of the items up for auction is a hand crocheted cat Afghan (30" x 64") made by my wife, Penny. She put a lot of hours into making it, so we are hoping it helps raise some much needed funds for Habitat. There are more than 60 other items up for auction, with a wide variety of different options. Currently one of the items receiving a lot of interest is a set of  St. Louis Blues hockey tickets . We will be curious to see how much we can raise. BiddingOwl is a very easy platform to use, and if anybody wants any pointers feel free to ask me about it since I was the person to set ours up and posted all our items.  UPDATE: We ended up making over $5,0...

After a three year absence, we are happy to announce the Samuel United Church of Christ St. Patrick's corned beef dinner is back for 2023. We will be having our dinner this year on Saturday, March 4 , from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm . The menu will consist of premium corned beef from Kern Meat Company, along with assorted side dishes (typically in the past it has been cabbage, potatoes, carrots and Irish soda bread.) The meal also includes beverages and our homemade dessert bar of treats created by friend and members of Samuel UCC .  Neither Samuel UCC or Kern Meat will keep any of the donations, 100% will go to the local St. Louis chapter of Habitat for Humanity to provide affordable homes for local families. Samuel is donating the space, beverages, desserts and labor and Kern Meat is providing the food for the meal and their guidance in preparing the meal to their restaurant level standards. Here is an interesting article from St. Louis Magazine in 2019 about corned beef in St. Louis ...

Orange= Fall 2020, Blue - Fall 2021 Today was the final day of class, so we have successfully completed another semester during the pandemic here at Washington University in St. Louis . Since the campus COVID-19 dashboard was updated today with final numbers for the semester, I have decided to create a graph that compares the student positive count from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. The orange line shows last semester, and the blue line shows this semester. For Fall 2020 we ended a slightly abbreviated semester with 273 total student cases over the 95 days from the beginning to the end of classes. For Fall 2021 we only had 175 total positive cases, so we had a reduction of about 36% over 102 days. The total number of positive faculty and staff cases also dropped significantly, from 120 last fall to only 78 this fall (a very similar 35% decrease.) Last Fall the university did require masking when in any public indoor spaces, and that continued again this year when a lot more people were pres...

  Commencement was yesterday on-campus at Washington University in St. Louis so the semester and school year are officially finished. On our COVID-19 dashboard the final date was May 12, and at that point we had 602 positive student cases (504 undergraduate and 98 graduate students) and 208 positive faculty and staff cases for the full academic year (since September.) My graph above shows the positives with the students combined as the orange line on top and the faculty and staff on the bottom in blue.  Since we have 7100 full-time undergraduate students and 6600 full-time graduate students for the academic year, that comes out to about 7.1% of our undergraduates and about 1.5% of our graduate students being positive at some point during the year. The large difference is probably due to our undergraduate population primarily living on campus and congregating together whereas the graduate population lives on their own and most likely interacts with much smaller groups of frie...

  Happy New Year! The year 2020 is thankfully over and we can all look forward to a brighter 2021 when we can all get vaccinated and things will start going back to some form of "normal". The Fall semester at Washington University has ended and Spring semester does not start again until the last week of January.  During the fall, I was tracking the total reported positive cases off of the university's dashboard and was happy to see how well we were keeping the spread at bay at first. Within our population of over 7,000 on campus undergraduate students and nearly as many graduate students, we stayed under 100 total positive student cases through all of September and October (our classes started September 14.) In my graph the total student positive cases is in orange and the total faculty and staff numbers are in blue.  In the middle of November, as the temperatures turned colder and students spent more time inside, our positive numbers spiked, doubling from 95 on Novembe...

This weekend when I booted up my aging Dell Latitude E7440 it was installing yet another Windows 10 update so I let it do its thing until it was ready to let me log in. Unfortunately, once I was able to log in, the system was running at a snail's pace and simple tasks were taking several seconds instead of instantaneously as they had just a day beforehand. So I thought I would try using System Restore to take it back to a restore point in late November when I know the system was running in its old perky self. Unfortunately, the system started into a painful loop where it would keep rebooting and trying to repair itself until it came to a point where it said it could not repair. I tried booting it in Safe Mode and it would not even boot in Safe Mode. I was resigned to reinstalling Windows 10 on the system when I noticed I had an Ubuntu 18.04 boot flash drive here at home so I thought I could at least boot it up with it and copy over a few files on the local SSD I had not copied ove...

  During the pandemic I have been doing a number of jigsaw puzzles in my spare time, so my thoughtful wife, Penny, has been finding a number of them for me to put together. Unfortunately, one of her purchases did not turn out so well as they shipped the wrong puzzle, in fact they shipped two identical National Park puzzles that we did not want. After a lengthy dispute, she was able to get her money back, but the company said we could keep both of the undesirable puzzles. Therefore I decided to put one of them together and try it out. One of our faculty members in my department at Washington University teaches a very popular National Parks course so I thought I could at least learn the names of some of the parks. First off this puzzle is made from a very flimsy card stock which is not much thicker than a playing card. The backing of the puzzle is stamped with the letters A through H which allow you to figure out which section of the puzzle it is which can be helpful since almost a...

  We have successfully completed two weeks of classes now at Washington University , but the fall semester is definitely quite different than it was last year. Even strolling across campus, the large groups of walking students have now disappeared even between classes when you just see a few students walking around and never in groups larger than two or three. Everyone is properly wearing their masks and after two weeks, the university is showing very low numbers on our COVID-19 dashboard , even though they are making it very hard to even find. Since August 31 they have run 7,477 tests on students and only have found 12 positive cases. I had thought SLU (Saint Louis University) had been doing pretty well themselves with their much more informative dashboard , with only 136 positive cases since August 31, and only 12 positives in the past 10 days out of 642 tests (Sept 14-23). One thing that really looks odd when you walk around campus is seeing all the random lone chairs placed all...

  At the beginning of this month Google decided that our old Google site dedicated to our free church play scripts had to be updated so we decided it was time to do as Google asked and update it. The options there were pretty limiting but I was able to migrate all the content and the 13 script pages we had there into a new format Google site. One thing we noticed, however, is that it would not allow me to put any Google Adsense ads back on it, and once I read around I realized nobody could add Adsense ads to Google sites since 2013, and we were only allowed to keep our ads intact because our site was opened up before 2013 (it was created back in 2009) and we were grandfathered.  So today I decided to migrate the whole thing to WordPress which is easier to use anyway and allow Google to place ads back in it. I am hosting it on my same HostGator site that hosts my calculator site where I can actually run a number of WordPress sites. My " Dead Reckoning " estate planning site ...

Since I receive e-mail from just about every place imaginable, I actually somehow signed up to receive messages from both the Democratic and Republican campaigns for just about every upcoming election. One thing that is consistent is that they all want my contributions, but in some cases they will give you special swag. I found it interesting that for the exact same $35 donation you can receive a very different special gift from either campaign.  If you donate $35 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) you will receive two reusable cloth face masks that not only help reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, but help promote that everybody go out and vote during the election. You can definitely purchase face masks for less, (like from one of my co-workers who sells custom made, decorative masks for just  $7 to $9 on Etsy ), but you are also paying more to help the Democratic Party promote their candidates. If you donate $35 to the Trump re-election campaig...

My mother-in-law had been experiencing dementia since her early 80's and was living in a nearby assisted living facility when she fell and broke her hip in early January this year (2020). That was the beginning of the end for her, but we did not realize she would end up passing away in April during the COVID-19 pandemic when the St. Louis area and much of the country was under a "stay at home" order. This has made taking care of all of her affairs much slower and more challenging, but luckily we had planned a lot in advance to make the whole procedure less aggravating. My wife, Penny, decided to write up her ordeal and I have posted it on my site as " Dead Reckoning " our guide to setting up and executing an estate plan for a parent. Enjoy!

Last week the new east end garage opened on Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis which was great for all the people who want to park there. But for those of us who take the Metrolink to and from campus, there is now a wonderful almost fully precipitation free path to get from the Skinker Metrolink Station to Brookings Hall (or Scott Rudolph Hall.) The map above shows the path, but it is not all on the same level so it needs some explanation. Green Hall Doorway - WashU ID required The first part is easy, getting from the Metrolink station to the archway of Green Hall. Then you enter the double doors there, but realize you need a WashU ID to enter those doors. Withou a valid ID, you must walk around to Brauer Hall where the center double entry doors are always unlocked. Luckily part of that outdoor path around Brauer Hall is even covered so you would hardly get wet if it were raining. Green Hall hallway towards Brauer You then keep walking through Green ...

WUSTL Family HMO Premiums 2004-2019 It is open enrollment time at good old Washington University , and for the first time I have switched from the HMO/EPO choice we have been using forever to the HDHP (high deductible health plan) that the university is offering and obviously pushing. The university is even contributing $800 each year to our HSA for the family plan ($400 for single plans), and with the EPO premiums now about 3.5 times the HDHP premiums ($475.79 vs $136.89) we decided it was time to switch.  Since I have been with the university over 15 years and they now store all our old paystubs on line, it was easy for me to extract the data to see how the family HMO premiums have increased over time. Back in 2004, the HMO premiums were only $189.75 per month which was less than 5% of my gross salary. For 2019 the $475.79 represents a 150% increase whereas my university salary has only increased about 70% over those 15 years. This now represents  almost 7% of my sa...

A new semester started this Monday on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis , but along with the new faces within our building there was also new construction outside our building. A brand new sidewalk now connects the sidewalk between our building (Scott Rudolph Hall) and Physics (Crow/Compton) and the northern door of Brookings Hall. There is also now a large mulched area just west of the sidewalk, just east of Cupples I (Math), which I am hoping will eventually be filled with some lovely plants of some sort and maybe even some benches or statues (who knows?) This is the first time the northern door to North Brookings has been open since the week after commencement, as well as the stairway into the northeast corner of the quadrangle. Now I am just waiting for them to open the southern door near my office in Rudolph Hall. Since the undergraduates have returned I have now seen multiple students staring at their cell phones walk straight through the first set...

No Exit! Just try leaving our building! We are lucky that most of the students, faculty and staff at Washington University in St. Louis are very bright, motivated individuals. Otherwise they would never be able to navigate around the east end of campus this summer to get where they need to go. This summer the east end is truly a mess with both ends of Brookings Hall being closed off, as well as the area just north of the Brown School of Social Work as well of the area south of our building, Scott Rudolph Hall , which just a few weeks ago was still a lovely landscaped area. Just last week I heard a terrible noise outside my window and saw an earth moving construction vehicle ripping up the concrete sidewalks next to our building. Scene from Rudolph Hall, May 25, 2018 - One Week after Commencement So now we only have one fully available entrance/exit to our building, the door to the west leading to Compton and Crow ( Physics ) so we must plan our trips across campus carefu...

Next month our church, Samuel United Church of Christ in Clayton, is doing something incredible. We are converting a large quantity of corned beef, lamb stew, sides and desserts into a portion of an affordable home for a low income family in St. Louis. That is right, we are hosting our annual St. Patrick's Day lunch and dinner at our church to help fund a home through Habitat for Humanity here in St. Louis. All the meat and sides are being donated by the Kern Meat Company who is also preparing the delicious feast. Beverages and scrumptious homemade desserts are being provided by the members and friends of Samuel UCC, as well as the labor to serve everybody. That means 100% of the proceeds are going to Habitat to provide funding for the future home of a needy St. Louis family. Our church is not earning a dime, and neither is Kern Meat Company. Better yet, any tickets purchased in advance before March 1 will be matched 100% by a donor to increase the funding to Habitat eve...

Well, they did it and we have a new tax bill signed and ready to go for our 2018 taxes. They had promised to try to simplify things, but as things often happen, the final result is not very simple at all. I have modified my online income tax deduction calculator to try to figure out the differences between the current 2017 tax structure and how it changes for 2018. The bottom line is even less households will be itemizing and most households (and corporations) will see a federal tax decrease in 2018. How the federal government will survive with such an increased deficit is another story, but most people are more concerned on how it will effect their own taxes. With the new expanded standard deduction, one thing I have noticed is that donor advised funds can be used very effectively to take advantage of the new rules. We have an account with the Schwab Charitable Fund , and we realized our best practice was to contribute a large chunk of highly appreciated equities this year to use...

Yesterday I received a phone call from a fellow Washington University employee who worked at West Campus asking what was the best way to watch next Monday's eclipse since he was coming in to work that day. The university is actually sponsoring an Eclipse watch event on our campus (with ice cream), but unfortunately none of our campus is within the range for totality so it would only be a partial eclipse party. Our campus further west is extremely close to the edge of totality so the West Campus employee was asking if he could just walk across the street and down the block to see the full total eclipse. I told him he could, but he would likely only experience a few fleeting instances of totality and it would be better for him if he could get further south and possibly further west for a better experience. However, since West Campus is located very close to the Forsyth Metrolink station and all employees can receive a free Metro U-Pass, I realized the easy solution. Hop on th...