June 18, 2008

Prescriptions by mail

After making sure that I’d asked for refills on everything I needed, and asked for a new note for my fibro treatments on Monday, I thought I was set for at least two or three months.

Turns out I forgot one. Dangit! I like the pharmacy that’s attached to my medical building, but it’s a good 20 miles away and I really don’t want to make another drive out there solely to pick up one medication.

Experimentally, I logged onto the Kaiser website to test their pharmacy order option and found that they have a mail delivery option. Huzzah! I don’t like that they won’t show me the price before I order because there’s no mention of shipping charges, but I can cancel the order if I decide that the emailed price is too high for shipping costs. Likely, they just won’t show a price because they have to check for the copay when they fill the RX.

Note: I wrote this last Friday before all the hullaballoo. A week later, I have only been charged my copay, and I have a three month supply of medication without having to spend another $5-7 on gas. This is wonderful!

A greater woman than I

is Sense to Dollars who says she can put up with anything for 4 months. I sure thought I could, but it seems that other people have other plans for me. Like driving me HALF MAD.

Frustrating person: “So that big stack (of about 200-300 pages worth of work) that you took with you, you’re not done with it all?”

Me: “Uh, no, did you expect me to be? That’s a LOT of work.”

FP: “Well, no, but you took it all over there.”

Me: “Yes, but I always take all my work so that if I’m working faster than usual, I’ll have all my work there and ready.”

FP: “Well, so you’re saying you’re not done with all of it?”

Me: “No, that’s a LOT of work. I just put in 3 hard hours on the two hardest chunks of work (100 pages).”

FP: “Well, you said that you had to do all of it.”

*sizzle*

How in the Good Lord’s name am I going to manage to get through months of this? Or days of this?

I don’t think it’s healthy to have your blood pressure skyrocket at least two times a day.

June 17, 2008

Prom fever sweeps Britain

Oh, my goodness. I never thought that our sometimes grossly extravagant tradition of prom would take on such a life of its own in England. This Wall Street Journal article talks about proms becoming popular thanks to “movies like “American Pie” and television shows such as “The O.C.,” and they want the chance to dress up and rent limousines themselves.”

P’raps I’m just an old fuddy duddy now, or our prom just wasn’t that fun, but I can’t recall prom feeling like it was worth more than a couple hundred, all told, much less willingly spending the kind of money these parents are spending on their high school children for a single night:

Sue Clarke and her husband at first balked when their 16-year-old son, Michael, begged them to rent him a bright yellow Lamborghini plus driver for prom night. But they gave in after their son promised to study harder in return.

“We didn’t have proms or things like that when we were younger,” says the 39-year-old Ms. Clarke, who, all told, spent $1,180 on Michael’s prom. She says it was worth every bit of it to see her son so happy.


June 15, 2008

Temporary Injunction

Due to a possible compromise/penetration of my cover by an untrustworthy soul, I’ve had to block public access to the blog.

I’m undergoing an identity cleanse and hope to be back up and running within 24 hours. I can still be reached at this name @ yahoo.com for now, but I’m going to have to make as clean a break as possible with regards to pseudonym and address. Thanks for helping me preserve my anonymity, I would hate to have to delete this blog or stop blogging entirely because of this.

I’m still trying to figure out how to reach regular readers, or irregular readers, whose email addresses I don’t have, without publicly stating that Ms.M has become such and such a blogger, and making it easy for my privacy-invader to trace me to the new blog.

Edit: I’m specifically thinking of Chocoholic, Karen, Beautiful, and a few others who comment every so often but don’t have profiles, comments enabled on their blogs, or blogs at all so that I can contact them.

June 13, 2008

United: no warning, whatsoever

*sigh* So after my rant about American’s decision, United has decided to follow suit and charge for the first piece of luggage as well.


Kacie has a good point: Southwest just plans to fly a little bit slower and save money that way; I wonder if these other airlines can’t or won’t follow suit because they’re so frequently late anyway that they can’t afford to spend time instead of gas?

And perhaps it’s simply easier and quicker to charge the customer extra than it is to implement gas efficient solutions? It seems to me that it’s smarter to reduce the requirements for gas, since the price-related scarcity is the root of the problem, than it is to simply wring another fifteen to forty bucks out of customers who may be able to choose to fly less frequently as a result of the increased costs. Yes, I sure do have a stake in saying that, but I also like to have more than one solution to a problem, especially such a major one. Sure they’ll have to raise prices to compensate as well, but let’s look at the overall picture, not just the most obvious, glaring issue.

Personally, I’m looking at alternatives to traveling with either of these airlines when I have a choice, though I don’t have a say when it comes to business travel. Since all expenses are paid for business trips, I suppose I don’t have to take it as personally, and continue to be a super-condensed packer.

My goodness, introducing the SLDR!

Hat tip to Wanda for the link to this article about the SUPER Long Distance Relationship: intercontinental relationships! I can’t really get my mind around that.

I have it relatively easy in that we’re on the same coast, and within an hour’s flight of each other. But it’s still a major pain in the patoot to have to schedule every single possible meeting, days and weeks ahead of time. With gas prices being what they are, and a promise BD extracted from me two+ years ago never to drive up alone, there’s simply zero spontaneity in the daily part of our relationship. It’s not exactly heartbreaking, since I’m the consummate, OCD, organize everything to a fare-thee-well personality, but still. Definitely no surprise bowls of soup when we’re sick, no surprise flowers when we’re having a good day. Heck, sometimes we’re so busy or tired, we don’t even know the other person is sick or happy.

[….. That makes our relationship sound terrible. It’s not. It’s just the reality of the LDR that certain things people take for granted do fall by the wayside. And it’s not like we don’t eventually figure it out, it’s just that it’s not obvious the way it is when you’re face to face.]

But getting back to my point: the SLDR? How long can people tolerate and function in that sort of distance? And does becoming accustomed to it create a dynamic in which you have to relearn how to get along in closer quarters?

When you’re starting out in an LDR of any sort, you’re thinking of the practicality: the career moves, the growth, the freedom to build a life apart from the relationship so you’re not one of those attached-at-the-hip-elbow-jaw couples. They, frankly, annoy me. After some time, though, it gets hard. Exponentially harder. I’d guess that’s when people start breaking down and either splitting up or making plans to be in the same city at the same time, forever.

I wonder if the breakdown happens at a more accelerated pace for the SLDR?

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