Now, being fairly fluent in Spanish I have found that classes are usually below my mastery level. Movies and novels are OK, but are not as personal and memorable. They are also easy to forget as they are sort of optional. What has worked well for me recently are online classes in which I can chat to someone to improve my conversational skills. I have been happy with http://personalspanish.net/ which offers classes from a variety of teachers that fit my schedule. I work long hours.

Do you know of anyone with a similar problem and how have they managed?

Have fun!

http://kaiserquotes.com/california-health-insurance/individual.php

Plans vary, but the ones I clicked listed maximum yearly out of pocket expenses to be $2500-$7500 depending on your selection of copayment and deductible.

http://www.healthinsurance.org/ for my current area code (55414) shows insurance options averaging $100 per month. Granted, I’m a young healthy male with no current conditions, but even if you quadruple the premiums, it still doesn’t exceed $5000.

So, it turns out that individual health insurance is even cheaper than I had originally thought.

The article is quite sad, but not unexpected. The sheer weight of WoW is such that other games have a hard time squeezing any money and time from gamers. EA is also a terrible game company to work for =/.

From Wheelan’s article:
“As far as I can tell, sports have three purposes: To get exercise, to have fun or to get your kid into college, earn a scholarship, turn professional and become rich and famous.”

What Wheelan fails to consider in his article is that there are more than his three reasons for playing a sport. Sports, and by extension, competition, emphasize sportsmanship, sacrifice, and teamwork. These are life lessons. Wheelan instead implies that an aspiring high school or college athlete will have gained nothing from their competitive experience if they don’t garner a scholarship or a lucrative professional contract from all of their hard work, since that is his third reason for why one would participate in a competitive sport.

He is right about one thing, of course: such competition need not be instilled in kids at eight years old. Let children play little league ball for the first two reasons: to have fun and stay fit.

However, it is not right for him to ignore the intrinsic value of competition and claim that sports are a zero-sum game because of, for example, the limited number of annual sports scholarships awarded. Sometimes the journey of competition is just as important and profound as the physical or monetary rewards that may (or may not) be manifested as a result of that journey.

From the OP:
“every parent is pushing his/her kid to succeed in all areas”

This is a sweeping generalization. Not “every” parent approaches the lives of their children in this manner and it is not productive to your argument to make this claim, as it is false.

Athletic competition, even at a young age, is widely considered a positive stressor and a healthy part of a child’s social development. Some people take this competition to unreasonable and unsafe extremes. This does not make competition “insidious.”

Perhaps instead a case should be made against parents that have insidious ambitions of their own that lie beyond the values of competition and sport in our society.

Anyway, this article might be of interest to you: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_213/6341-Casualty-of-Warhammer