An Extra 5 Weeks of Pain

Jumping into the middle of the story, I tried cortisone injections to help with my chronic pain, but they only seem to have made things worse. A friend at church gave me a whole new approach to try, but I needed a referral from my primary care physician.

My PCP wouldn’t do the referral over email. She insisted that I needed to make an appointment, and that it had to be a 30-minute one. Because of the length of the appointment, I couldn’t get on her schedule for FIVE WEEKS. But I thought, hey, I have other requests. Maybe because I’m seeing her, she’ll address them.

I just had the appointment. She was 15 minutes late to a 30-minute appointment, and only used 10 minutes of the time. She told me she wouldn’t address my other concerns, and pushed them on the referral. She agreed that this was a good next step, but added 5 weeks of unnecessary extra time to my journey.

Obviously, I’m in a bad mood, and there’s just literally no comfort or rest to be found. Excuse me while I order a pizza, and stick my head inside a video game until I’m exhausted enough to go to sleep.

44 Years Later

The nostalgia is strong with this. I loved being able to make forms with the glyphs on the Vic-20 and Commodore 64. These keycaps have been “out of print” for a long time, but Signature Plastics is now making them to order. I thought the grey colored accessory keys were going to be more of a lime green color, but that was too bold anyway, and I like this color better anyway. It’s much more similar to the color of the function keys on the original keyboards.

Anthem Sucks, Health Insurance Will Get Socialized, Water is Wet

Once again, Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield has denied me a prescription. It’s like the 4th time in the past couple of years. I spend $10,000/year on all the insurance I can get, while my company pays the other $20K of the mortgage-sized premium. Then I have — whatever it is — $1,500 of deductible, or something. Then I have co-pays. Then I go to the doctor, and he prescribes me something — after looking at their own guidelines, and choosing the worse of two formulations, because they won’t cover “the good stuff” — and then, after ALL OF THAT, Anthem looks over his shoulder, and says, “No, he can’t have it like you prescribed it. You can only prescribe it once a day instead of twice.”

So my doctor submitted a prior authorization, which they also denied. I finally got the letter “explaining” why. Apparently, someone in the bowels of this corporate behemoth went to a government web site which has label information for every drug, and the label for this drug says to take it once a day. Therefore, according to Anthem, a doctor cannot prescribe it twice a day. Period. I’m not sure which is more stupid, this one or their last excuse, which was to steadfastly claim that I have a disease my bloodwork repeatedly shows I do not have.

In the 80’s, when “the bean counters” took over corporations, we made fun of them. We watched as companies who actually built things lost the will to invest in R&D, and abandoned long-term planning for a focus on quarterly returns. It was kind of funny to us at the time, one, because we couldn’t do anything about it, and, two, because the long-term effects wouldn’t be felt for decades.

You don’t have to look too hard to see what it’s done to the American corporate landscape. There’s no heart or soul; there’s only a question of how can they extract another dollar from the operation to return to the shareholders, whether by squeezing the customer or the employees. (I saw a comment the other day that this trend started with Jack Welch of GE fame, and I think that’s probably true.)

When it comes to, oh, I don’t know, making mufflers, this whole attitude and approach is one thing, but when that capitalistic machine gun is aimed — not at health insurance — but actual health care — well, this is what we get.

Uncle Buck’s Niece

The movie Uncle Buck was released in 1989. Like other John Hughes movies, I enjoyed it, but the real highlight for me was the girl played Uncle Buck’s niece, Jean Luisa Kelly. To me, she was nearly the epitome of feminine attractiveness: a perfect mix of cute, pretty, and hot.

Jean Louisa Kelly

Little did I know that I would meet the following smokeshow just a couple of years later. The first time I saw her, our mutual friend was introducing her down a line of people, and I was at the end. By the time they got to me, I had picked my jaw back up off the floor, and tried to play it cool.

Right after we met, she went to Colorado to get a paralegal certification. She came back. We started talking. We both got jobs working night shift. We spent hours on the phone every night. After four years, I put a ring on it.

I kept thinking that I had seen someone that looked just like her, and I finally put two and two together. I was just reminded of all of this because I just rewatched Uncle Buck on some streaming show, and then I happened to see some of Sue’s old pictures from high school on the floor of the bedroom.

The thing that slays me, to this day, is the fact that she revealed herself to be even more beautiful on the inside, as if such a thing were possible. She’s my rock and my best friend, and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

My Shame is Ever Before Me

Here We Go Again

A couple years ago, I broke free of playing Elder Scrolls Online, for the second time. I had quit before, in frustration of not being good enough to run the end-game content. It annoyed me that there were parts of a game I was paying for on a monthly basis that I effectively could never take advantage of, so I quit.

Then I picked it back up again for a little while, mentally bargaining with myself that this situation was acceptable because there is so much to do in the game besides the vet-level dungeons and trials. But, as a massively-multiplayer online game, it tends to suck you in, and dominate your leisure time, so I decided to quit again. And, since ESO was the only thing I was using it for, I literally threw my 12-year-old, Athlon-XP-based dinosaur of a PC in the trash, as a sort of “burn the ships” move to prevent going back to playing it. Playing ESO on a Mac is basically a non-starter due to crappy performance, so it wasn’t a realistic option.

Then I developed a medical problem that causes me to live with constant pain in my abdomen. That’s a whole book’s worth of another story, but the relevance to this story is that I now spend basically all my extra time playing games. I mean, I was a pretty heavy gamer before, but this is a whole other level.

Bored with everything else, I tried going back to Fallout 4. I couldn’t stand it on the PS5, because it only runs 30 FPS. Bethesda recently released a refreshed version of Skyrim on PS5 with all the Creator Club content, and running at 60 FPS, and it was like a whole, new game. I replayed it all over again, and love it. But I can’t go back to 30 FPS for Fallout.

I decided to buy an Xbox Series X, for several reasons, and waited for Starfield. Then, after the Redfall launch fiasco, Bethesda admitted that Starfield would also be capped at 30 FPS on console. Like I said, I can’t go back to 30 FPS.

So I sold the X, and bought a new PC.

I know, I know.

This one is a loss-leader from Microcenter. Realistically, it’s a $1,000 build, which you can get for $700.

The amount of friction from trying to run Windows again is astounding, and everyone just glosses over it because it’s so pervasive. I’ll be complaining about these things in later posts.

The New MicroCenter in Indy

What is going on?

I went to the new MicroCenter in Indy, and was immediately confronted with this when I walked through the front door. Is this the checkout line? Do I have to grab tickets to inventory, and get them fulfilled at this counter?

No. I asked a girl standing close by what I was looking at, and she said some “YouTubers” were live-streaming doing builds. Sheesh. Seriously? What’s hard about building a computer, especially these days? I’d like to see these guys navigate the dip switches and slots and interrupts we used to have to deal with.

When I checked out, the streamers had people whooping and hollering for some reason. I just wanted to go home, where I spent the next 4 hours configuring what I bought. Story forthcoming…