Wednesday Wanderings
Welcome to NaBloPoMo Day #3! I know… today is Thursday. But Wednesday is my favorite day of the week because it’s my day off. I do grumble when I have to go to work on Saturdays, but it’s a fair trade-off. I love having a day to myself in the middle of the week! Here’s how yesterday played out… with a couple short rants thrown in for the fun of it. I dropped my daughter off at school at 7:45 and continued on to a park with a cross country trail where I ran five miles. This is a real luxury for me in the middle of the week- all my other weekday runs are done in the semi-darkness near my house. After a quick stop at home to shower and change, I went to Starbucks and sat for a couple hours drinking tea and appreciating the free wifi. Anyone who’s doing NaBloPoMo knows that it’s actually a lot of work! It’s not just publishing a post every day, but also reading everyone else’s and commenting. Luckily this is “work” that I love so I enjoyed this time. Then I went to Walgreens to pick up my thyroid medication. I’ve been taking meds for hypothyroidism for the past sixteen years. It is insanely expensive- for a long time I paid around $50 a month, while my insurance kicked in $6. Ahem. THEN I discovered GoodRx. It’s a free app- you just put in your prescription and it pulls up a coupon for you. I now get a three month supply for what I used to pay for ONE month. Yay for GoodRx! Here comes the first rant… I’ve been wanting to get the shingles vaccine so I asked the pharmacist about it. I’m over 55 so insurance pays for it… right? She explained that it varies from one insurance to another. There can be a co-pay. Oh, okay- could you run it through MY insurance and tell me what I would have to pay? After several attempts, the answer to that was no- she couldn’t seem to get that pulled up for me at the moment. WHY. WHY is it that no one can ever tell me how much a medical procedure/shot/office visit is actually going to cost? The answer always seems to be, they’ll run it through insurance and let me know what my payment is afterwards. Would you drive your car to the gas station without knowing the price per gallon and just fill up your tank? “Oh, we’ll run it through your auto insurance and then let you know how much it is later.” No! You wouldn’t. For everything else it seems reasonable to know how much it costs beforehand- but not healthcare. I left Walgreens without scheduling a shot, and let me tell you, if I get shingles now I’m blaming them. Next up- voting! Early voting was conveniently held at my library, so I returned a couple books first… Voting was quick and easy, and now I don’t have to worry about it next Tuesday, when I have to work. With a glow of accomplishment, I headed home for a nap. I’m a big napper, and my favorite thing to do on a day off is take a nap on the couch with my cat. Not Charlotte (er, Beyonce) who I wrote about yesterday. This is my extra-snuggly calico cat. As soon as she sees me lie down on the couch she runs towards me, meowing excitedly. It’s the cutest thing in the entire world- and there’s nothing more soothing than a nap with a cat curled up next to you. After that refreshing nap, I had to clean the house. I’ve had evening activities the last few nights (more about that next, second rant coming up!) and that’s all it takes for the house to fall apart. I did laundry, ran the dishwasher, and generally tidied. The Halloween decorations are still up, but that’s going to have to be a job for another day. I picked my daughter up from school and we had to rush off to an evening rehearsal. I’m always astonished by how much the parents are expected to do nowadays for school activities. You’ll get a notification like “Congratulations! Your child has been selected for the all-county jazz band!” and then there will be a list of rehearsals and performances, and it’s your responsibility to provide transportation. It’s always far away, and some of them are during the day. I mean… what if you WORK? Don’t get me wrong- I’m grateful for these opportunities for my kids, but it seems like when we were in school, if there was an extra event, the school provided a bus. My parents certainly didn’t change their work schedules to chauffeur us around in the middle of the day. In this case, I had to get off work early one day, and the other rehearsals are in the evening or, next week, during the day on Wednesday. I think the answer to this conundrum is that the schools don’t have enough funding now to provide things like extra transportation. And luckily my kids are into music- my friends with kids who do travel soccer tell me that’s much, much worse. It’s hard to be a parent these days! So last night found me at another Starbucks, again taking advantage of the wifi while I waited for my daughter. While I was there they started unboxing something VERY EXCITING, which I will reveal in tomorrow’s coffee date… can you guess what it is?