Both my parents smoked and my mother had handed me her cigarette to go outside and hold while she paid for her purchases. I took a puff and couldnt breathe. I didnt get addicted from one puff and if was 50 plus years ago, before they told us just how bad tobacco was for you. Others have told me that starting smoking was hard so I wanted to know why would anyone continue after the first.
On A related note, cancer sucks and chemotherapy also sucks. Specifically the side effects. Every day is a new adventure in my body hating me. I told my oncologist it’s like puberty written by Clive Barker.
I got up this morning feeling fine, signed into work, and now I’m running a fever. I left early yesterday due to what my mom called “severe gastrointestinal distress” and I only worked 11 hours last week due to othe side effects. I have FMLA and my bosses are cool with me using it but my Victorian work ethic is making me feel useless. Also I need the money. I wish I were independently wealthy so I could just take the next four months off.
I’m going to try to stick it out today because my new work computer is coming today and I want to be paid for the aggravation of setting it up.
Also I just made a smoothie with a mango popsicle as an ingredient and I accidentally threw one of the pieces with the stick still inside in the blender. Mmmm, extra fiber.
I have read a lot of Clive Barker so I know exactly what you’re saying; it’s poetry.
Also, eek, I can’t imagine how awful. 
Well, it’s done. Who showed up showed up… who didn’t didn’t. The F.H. knows what to do with the flowers, he’s in the ground… next to his brother… next to each other… and they can argue about The Yankees til Doomsday.
It’s a good weather day… for a shitty day. My wife wants to try to capture more of his cats to get them fixed and out of the house. The apartment in that 4-family house is wrecked & reeks of cat pee & kittens (too damn many feral kittens).
I come home… pop to Youtube to listen to some music… and WTF? Why the Hell is “Once Around” on? Its bad enough he looked like that bastard Dreyfus… I’ve gotta hear “Fly Me To The Moon?”
F.U. Youtube…
Now I feel both relieved and stupid.
The more I thought about this, the more suspicious that email seemed. The ridiculously short timeframe to “migrate”, the dire consequences for failing to do so, spelling mistakes in the email, the request to “click here” to immediately solve all my problems, eventually prompted me to call my ISP’s support line. Who casually informed me that, oh yes, that email is not from us, it’s a phishing attempt to get your passwords!
JFC, you’d think if they were aware of this they’d have sent out warning emails to everybody!
That assumes basic competence.
As everybody should know by now, I am a diagnosed hoarder trying to get rid of a lot of stuff. I was worried about miantenance coming into my apartment and decideing to evict me for the many stacks of boxes.
I am no longer worried about that. Last week, there was a knock on my door. I asked who it was. It was maintenance needing to do an annual inspection. He said that they had notified me. I said I had not seen a posted sign, received a letter, e-mail, phone call or text. He said that I had been sent a message on the building’s website. I let him in. He explained the other guy was with the insurance company and would need to take a few photos. They left after a few minutes.
I checked the building’s website. There was no message or other announcement. I very nervously waited for a message from management. I figure it would either be ‘You are evicted because of all the boxes’ or ‘Get your apartment in shape by this deadline or you will be evicted’. No message ever came.
I briefly considered if these men had somehow gotten into the building and then claimed to be maintenance for some nefarious purpose. Then, I remembered the long list of repairs I had given them repeatedly since before I moved in. They still have not done a single repair.
It is more likely that he really was a maintenance worker. Management failed to notify anybody. He just didn’t care how cluttered my apartment was as long as there were no fire hazards or such. To care would take energy. As would filing a report with management. So, he will do neither.
Likely to cause more trouble than it’s worth, especially to them. Cue lots of phone calls and other queries from people wondering which email is real. Plus, all the non-phished folks wondering what the hell is going on.
My employer routinely sends out such e-mails. This is partly to decrease the number of e-mails and calls asking if the phishing e-mail is real. The e-mails from management also give instructions on what exactly to do if you get the phishing e-mail, so people stop calling and e-mailing about that.
I got a notification from Blue Cross/Blue Shield that there was a new message for me, so I decided to look it up. (Usually I don’t bother because they just say “You had a Doctor’s appointment last week and this is what we paid.”) This time, it was about a prescription I just picked up yesterday.
As background, I had a seizure last May - no one can figure out why - but my neurologist has put me on a twice-daily med that I’ll be taking for at least another year. Which leads to a thing disgusting about the health industry in the US.
The provider cost (I guess that’s the MSRP for the drug) was $1070. BC/BS paid $125. My copay was $7.50. Does that mean if I didn’t have decent health insurance, I’d have to come up with $1K per month?? It looks to me as if the manufacturer can stay in business with a total payment of $132.50 (minus whatever CVS gets) so WHY do they say $1070?
I understand the concept of profits - that’s why businesses exist. But, dang, how much is enough? And why should an essential service or product, like one that keeps people alive and functioning, be for-profit anyway? I’m sure this has been discussed to death, but it still makes no sense. I don’t know what I’d have done if my retirement didn’t include such good insurance. (Yeah, to cover my husband and me still costs us over $10K per year, but at our age, it’s probably still a bargain.)
I hate to think what could happen if President Musk is allowed to continue his reign.
Fire Alarm
I am okay. The building is okay. I am upset for other reasons.
I and the other tenants gathered in front of the building. Somebody walked across the street to the management office to ask what was going on. Management did not even know the fire alarm was going off. I was reasonably sure the alarm did not call the fire department. I asked if anybody had called them. Nobody had. I figured the fire alarm going off in every apartment in my building was a valid reason to call 911, so I did. A few minutes later, the alarm stopped and everybody went back inside.
While entering my apartment, the door stuck. It sometimes does that. I can get it open easily enough but generally end up scraping my thumb badly on the door jamb. I cannot find any band aids. I thought I had some. I keep having to use a paper towel to wipe my thumb and prevent blood from dripping onto my computers.
Today revealed management to be even more incompetent than I had previously thought. I don’t know how I feel about this. It means I would need to take care of any minor repairs myself. But, it also means that they don’t care what I do as long as I am not too loud and pay my rent on time.
On Preview
Yes, that is exactly what it means. Some of the many medications I have been on are that expensive. I had to fight with my insurance company to get them to pay for Qelbree. They said they would not cover it, but it would be no trouble at all to switch to one of the three alternatives they did cover. One of those was Guanfacine. I had tried it before I found Qelbree. Guanfacine had no helpful effect at all on me. It did cause constant pain throughout the entire length of my urethra. Eventually, my insurance company agreed to pay for Qelbree.
Yes, that is the entire point of the universal health care discussion. Opposition to it usually involves people who argue that the cost will be too much of a burden if we switch to it (which is BS, many countries with a lower GDP per capita than the US can do it so clearly we can too). The other argument is that the free market drives innovation; that if people can profit off of it, they will devote more time and energy to it, which gives us more advanced medicine. (Which I also call BS; it just means that innovations will happen for advances that lead to more money rather than advances that actually help people the most.)
Two Min Rants, One Anti Rant
As I mentioned earlier I scraped some skin off my thumb opening my apartment door today. It is not a deep wound. It is not a large wound. It took about 3 hours to stop bleeding. I cannot find band aids in my apartment. Fortunatey, I keep a roll of papar towels on my desk. Despite wiping my thumb with towel every thirty seconds, I managed to bleed on my personal laptop, the desk, the mousepads, and both mice (mouses?).
My Gobhi is filing paperwork to become (I forget the proper term) ‘a citizen of India living in another country’. She does not particularly want to move back to India. I really don’t want her to leave the country. As American democracy ends, I cannot in good conscience tell her she should not go.
In good news-
My Mom is visiting Philly from Sunday to Thursday. While looking for things she may want to do (She was born and raised in Philly so she has seen all the museums and the usual things tourists want to see) I discovered the Science History Institute. I don’t think my Mom will like it. My Gobhi and I are going. It is free. It sounds like hours and hours of nerdy fun. They currently have an exhibition showing reproductions of engravings from 17th century alchemical books.
Great news
As my Mom will need me to help get her settled in the hotel Sunday, and that we are having a meet up with some relatives on Sunday at an Ethiopan restaraunt (Mom loves Ethiopan food), this leaves me tonight and Saturday to get things ready.
I have no idea what they are looking for. I may be evicted.
The mechanical room was leaking water a few days ago. They’ve been working on it, still are.
Now the area is closed meaning no one can get to the first floor laundry room.
There are washers and dryers on the other floors but the machine that you use to put money on your card (2$ to wash and dry) is inaccessible.
I don’t know how many apartments my building has. There is one washer and one dryer on the second floor. Some one put a hand written sign on the dryer saying that smoke was coming out of it. The sign did not say if maintenance had been notified. I keep forgetting to call and notify them.
They said a pipe underneath broke in half. Its taking them awhile. I can just pray it doesnt flood the building.
I have strong suspicion my friend with cancer is overmedicated. A nurse friend (worked in cancer research) tagged along on a visit to him and they went over his meds. She identified several Rx bottles that raised concerns. He said they’re prescribed by different docs but for the same thing in addition to other meds that do not play well with each other in your system.
Yet he never questions his docs, I think he will now,
Cross-posting from the 'Raffe.
There’s a bridge over the very busy freeway (California 101) in our town. Through the years the bridge has become a place for MAGAs to hang flags and Trump banners. Locals have mockingly named the bridge “Trump Tower”.
When I looked on nextdoor this morning, I see that one of the MAGAs had also hung out a nazi flag over the freeway. There were photos of the flag and of the man who had done so, and some folks knew him and named him. Nextdoor erupted in a war of accusations back and forth. The nextdoor MAGAs instantly accused the guy of being a Democrat who was trying to make the MAGAs look bad. One nextdoor poster looked the guy up on some website called “spyfly”, and saw that the guy is a registered Republican, and posted a screenshot of his find. But the MAGAs are ramping up their posts falsely identifying the guy as a Democrat.
The guy’s name is slightly unusual, so I looked him up on fastpeoplesearch and I know where he lives. It’s a well-to-do place on a rural street near here.
The nextdoor threads about this will probably be shut down shortly, as they have become a political shitshow.
Bleh, I hate that this is happening to my great small town.
Not sure this rises to a rant, but … I was watching a TV show live (as it was being broadcast vs. streamed, if that’s the wrong usage) so I was actually watching commercials. Two that were aired back to back hit me:
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For some “all natural” herb and nuts or whatever treatment for thinning hair.
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For some regular production company’s anti-dandruff shampoo.
The first had four or five people giving testamonials about how much this wonder product had improved their hair and how they were constantly getting compliments.
NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM had good looking hair. Not healthy looking, not well styled, not well groomed, not even neatly combed in a couple cases. Lots of long straggly hair that looked thin and messy because it didn’t have anywhere the needed heft to make that style look good.
The second commercial had (I think) just two supposed users (though I don’t think they said they actually used the stuff), both blonds with hair so shiny it practically glowed in the dark, both combing their fingers through their glossy flawless dos. (Hey, the first guy was so good-looking I’m sure he picked up dates just letting the hair ripple through his fingers. I don’t actually remember much about the second model, a female, I was just so struck by the first guy. Heck, I’m ready to buy the second shampoo even though I’ve never had dandruff. And don’t remember the product name, that’s a problem I guess.)
ANYWAY, what the hell was the marketing department for the first company thinking??? Is that the best anyone who uses their product ever looks like???