Truly not an April Fool’s Day prank. Just thought I’d catch up one more time before we head out on the cruise. Yesterday was a trip to the Doctor to review my lab results. In spite of an hour wait for the PA, what do we care? We’re retired. The lab work basically came back normal with AIC just a bit in the pre-diabetic stage so will have to watch our diet a bit more closely. Everything else looked spiffy but the PA did add a couple of new meds for inflammation and elevated blood pressure. Nothing to significant, but it is running a bit high and with a family history better to be safe than sorry. Also didn’t have a direct injection in to the hip rather a pair of broad spectrum steroids in the tucus! Apparently it was dull needle, inject the patient with hot lava day at the clinic. The nurse said I should rub it to spread the medicine out. Could I get my professionally trained and experienced nurse wife to help me out? Not hardly!!! Mostly she just shared giggles and laughter with the MA. Although it did remind me of when Elisabeth was 3 and fell on her roller skates. She landed on her bum, came into the house in tears and wanted Vicki to kiss it and make it better. Vicki asked “Kiss your butt???” and tearfully Elisabeth said, “Yes, kiss my butt.” When she realized what she had said they both broke out in hysterical laughter and all was better. Me…not so lucky.
Let me take just a second to rant on medications if I could. Having received 4 new meds I had the doctor fax the prescriptions to CVS to be filled. Went to the Pharmacy only to discover CVS doesn’t have a contract with BCBS of Texas. Seriously? One of the biggest insurance providers? Someone screwed up somewhere! But that’s tangential to my rant. Who names these drugs and their generic equivalents. Celecoxib? I’m sure people in white lab coats came up with a perfect formulation to combat inflammation but had trouble naming it. So they sent it up the chain of command and it ended up in IT. My guess is some troubled thirty somethings were playing Boggle and then had a fist fight over the name they invented because it uses an “X” and it must be a real word. But that’s just conjecture on my part as I have no hard facts to back it up.
As you can see from the picture above, Port Homes in Texas spare no expense when wiring the switches and plugs. My next door neighbor asked me to come over and help him wire his garbage disposal. Not having any electrical experience but access to YouTube, I said sure, why not. What could go wrong. After several attempts to figure out which wire was which. Which meant several trips to the breaker box to reset breakers, a few sparks here and there, yet shock free. We went to the YouTube machine and discovered our errors. Primary that we had the dual switch wired backward. My neighbor made another trip to Home Depot further proving Fred’s Postulate of home repair which states, “When making any home repair, after getting the parts you think you need, you need to go to Home Depot (or similar home improvement store) at a minimum of two more times to get the proper parts, replacement parts destroyed during initial repair, or tools needed to do the repair”. An axiom to this postulate is that you ‘must watch 1 hour of YouTube videos that show 6 different ways to make the repair, all of which are different and for the most part worthless!’ We noticed that this was wired with no junction box. (No way close to being building code) So we are going to remedy that as well. Once we get that done, wires stripped, reconnected we should be good to go. We tested our circuits yesterday and all seemed in good order, so hopefully we can finish, close it up and not burn down his house.
Today is Oliver’s 12th birthday and we can hardly wait to see him tomorrow. Then it’s our turn to get in a pressurized aluminum tube going 600 mph 35000 feet above the ground to Florida where we’ll catch the cruise ship for 6 days of adventure and pampering. Can hardly wait. Did I mention we are still loving retirement.
