Seven Things Make a Post
It's been a mostly-annoying day, though I did get some writing done, and a whole raft of errands, including unscheduled ones.
The Bad Filk Muse visited me, and I tweeted: My googles are feeding me info, My googles are feeding me lies, my googles are feeding me spambots, oh what a dreadful surprise!
I love Private Health Insurance-NOT! One of the bigger healthcare providers in my part of the country is called Aurora. As of December, I had a pharmacy I liked, a primary doctor’s office, and a provider of CPAP supplies (everything except my allergist) all of whom were, one way or another, part of Aurora. Well, my employer’s insurance, which I remain on courtesy of COBRA, stopped covering all things Aurora. (You can use them as a non-preferred provider, but then you have a higher copay AND there’s a separate deductible for non-preferred providers. That’s right, it’s not bad enough that I have a $1250 deductible before the larger part (but never all) of the cost of my medical care and prescriptions is covered by insurance, but if I need a non-preferred provider, I have another $1250 to pay before the insurance company will pay anything at all to them.)
So I spent way too much time in the last several days, calling Aurora and the new company, working to get to a point where Aurora forwarded my records to the competition AND the competition could find the records, to get a new CPAP mask. That was accomplished just before 4 p.m., leaving me just enough time to drive all the way across town during rush hour on a holiday weekend to pick up the replacement. (In the meantime, the old mask was being held together with waterproof bandaids, which weren’t sticking as well as one could wish. Consequently, I started out the day tired, after waking in the middle of the night to wash off the glue that wasn't sticking and apply a new bandaid.)
I love Private Health Insurance-NOT! Part Two My brother has been running his own little one-man company, which limits the kind of health insurance one can buy. And HIPAA, which protects employees of big companies from pre-existing condition clauses (so long as they don't let their insurance lapse), does nott apply to individual policies. He ended up in the hospital on the last day of his then-current policy. And although he had filled out the paperwork to “renew” the policy well ahead of time, before he got sick, technically it’s not a renewal, technically it’s a “new policy” and has to be underwritten. So now the same company can exclude (and is excluding) the condition that got him in the hospital. So most of his hospital stay and all of the follow-up care aren’t covered.
I love ALL my neighbors-NOT! After too many phone calls, running to two different pharmacies for medications (mine and for My Angel) and visiting yet another different medical provider to replace the CPAP mask and hose, I got to the thrift store to donate the stuff cluttering up my trunk so I can put other stuff in it. By this time I was anticipating being done with errands and silly bureaucracy. However, instead I got to the trunk to open it and found that my rear license plate had been stolen. Since I know no one would have been allowed to do that unmolested in the pharmacy parking lots, that means it happened at home.
Then I got to drive to the district police station, wait around while two women argued about how each other should fill out a small claims lawsuit form (silly women, if they could agree about the issue, they wouldn’t be filing suit). The officer finally told them that each of them can put whatever they want in their own paperwork, and the guy in the black robe would sort it out. Only then could I make my excessively boring report. So now if I drive into Chicago for part of the long weekend, I do it with a little “report of stolen plate” piece of paper in the car, so if some nice officer pulls me over for no plate I have something to show them.
Wild Kittens Three We’ve had a mother cat and her kittens in and out of the yard for some weeks; the kittens recently got bold enough to watch me from a distance in the yard. So I went out with kibble and started tossing it to them, closer and closer. The mother must have been abandoned by people, it didn’t take long for her to put up with me petting her while she ate, and today she was walking right up to the container of kibble and sticking her head in it if I didn’t have my hand over it. The first day I didn’t quite manage to pet the kittens, but today I was petting them enough that I briefly picked each one up. There was an immediate recurrence of skittishness, of course, but not to the point where they didn’t come back within reach for food, and they stayed around for a while, taking their kitty baths, after they had enough. So I can tame them; the question is what to do with them then? I don’t approve of leaving cats wild to breed madly, but can’t simply adopt them.
The photos are of said felines, and of a light outside the police station. It's a pity I never took any pictures of old, creepy-looking books to go with the following:
The bad elder god muse visited me earlier this week, and I tweeted then too:
A forgotten book ~ yellowed pages in leather ~ why is it lock-bound?
If you find the book ~ Will you dare to break the lock? ~ No one has a key!
If you break the lock ~ will it tell of elder gods? ~ steal your sanity?
Or is it mundane? ~ Just some teen girl's diary ~ Drivel about boys?
The lock's really big ~ Perhaps you should play it safe ~ burn it while you can!
Fireborn: I started to write this a while ago, read a comment by
red_trillium , and detoured into doing a rough draft of an upcoming chapter of Fireborn.
The Bad Filk Muse visited me, and I tweeted: My googles are feeding me info, My googles are feeding me lies, my googles are feeding me spambots, oh what a dreadful surprise!
I love Private Health Insurance-NOT! One of the bigger healthcare providers in my part of the country is called Aurora. As of December, I had a pharmacy I liked, a primary doctor’s office, and a provider of CPAP supplies (everything except my allergist) all of whom were, one way or another, part of Aurora. Well, my employer’s insurance, which I remain on courtesy of COBRA, stopped covering all things Aurora. (You can use them as a non-preferred provider, but then you have a higher copay AND there’s a separate deductible for non-preferred providers. That’s right, it’s not bad enough that I have a $1250 deductible before the larger part (but never all) of the cost of my medical care and prescriptions is covered by insurance, but if I need a non-preferred provider, I have another $1250 to pay before the insurance company will pay anything at all to them.)
So I spent way too much time in the last several days, calling Aurora and the new company, working to get to a point where Aurora forwarded my records to the competition AND the competition could find the records, to get a new CPAP mask. That was accomplished just before 4 p.m., leaving me just enough time to drive all the way across town during rush hour on a holiday weekend to pick up the replacement. (In the meantime, the old mask was being held together with waterproof bandaids, which weren’t sticking as well as one could wish. Consequently, I started out the day tired, after waking in the middle of the night to wash off the glue that wasn't sticking and apply a new bandaid.)
I love Private Health Insurance-NOT! Part Two My brother has been running his own little one-man company, which limits the kind of health insurance one can buy. And HIPAA, which protects employees of big companies from pre-existing condition clauses (so long as they don't let their insurance lapse), does nott apply to individual policies. He ended up in the hospital on the last day of his then-current policy. And although he had filled out the paperwork to “renew” the policy well ahead of time, before he got sick, technically it’s not a renewal, technically it’s a “new policy” and has to be underwritten. So now the same company can exclude (and is excluding) the condition that got him in the hospital. So most of his hospital stay and all of the follow-up care aren’t covered.
I love ALL my neighbors-NOT! After too many phone calls, running to two different pharmacies for medications (mine and for My Angel) and visiting yet another different medical provider to replace the CPAP mask and hose, I got to the thrift store to donate the stuff cluttering up my trunk so I can put other stuff in it. By this time I was anticipating being done with errands and silly bureaucracy. However, instead I got to the trunk to open it and found that my rear license plate had been stolen. Since I know no one would have been allowed to do that unmolested in the pharmacy parking lots, that means it happened at home.
Then I got to drive to the district police station, wait around while two women argued about how each other should fill out a small claims lawsuit form (silly women, if they could agree about the issue, they wouldn’t be filing suit). The officer finally told them that each of them can put whatever they want in their own paperwork, and the guy in the black robe would sort it out. Only then could I make my excessively boring report. So now if I drive into Chicago for part of the long weekend, I do it with a little “report of stolen plate” piece of paper in the car, so if some nice officer pulls me over for no plate I have something to show them.
Wild Kittens Three We’ve had a mother cat and her kittens in and out of the yard for some weeks; the kittens recently got bold enough to watch me from a distance in the yard. So I went out with kibble and started tossing it to them, closer and closer. The mother must have been abandoned by people, it didn’t take long for her to put up with me petting her while she ate, and today she was walking right up to the container of kibble and sticking her head in it if I didn’t have my hand over it. The first day I didn’t quite manage to pet the kittens, but today I was petting them enough that I briefly picked each one up. There was an immediate recurrence of skittishness, of course, but not to the point where they didn’t come back within reach for food, and they stayed around for a while, taking their kitty baths, after they had enough. So I can tame them; the question is what to do with them then? I don’t approve of leaving cats wild to breed madly, but can’t simply adopt them.
The photos are of said felines, and of a light outside the police station. It's a pity I never took any pictures of old, creepy-looking books to go with the following:
The bad elder god muse visited me earlier this week, and I tweeted then too:
A forgotten book ~ yellowed pages in leather ~ why is it lock-bound?
If you find the book ~ Will you dare to break the lock? ~ No one has a key!
If you break the lock ~ will it tell of elder gods? ~ steal your sanity?
Or is it mundane? ~ Just some teen girl's diary ~ Drivel about boys?
The lock's really big ~ Perhaps you should play it safe ~ burn it while you can!
Fireborn: I started to write this a while ago, read a comment by
red_trillium , and detoured into doing a rough draft of an upcoming chapter of Fireborn.