Oxy

Oxycodone
My pills are the one at top left.

I took (53) Oxycodone tablets, 5 mg each, since my surgery on January 13, 24 days ago. Divide 53 by 22, since I quit taking Oxy 2 days ago, you get 2.4 tablets a day. At first I was only taking 1 or 2 day, probably because I was still full of the anesthetics from surgery, but a week later I was up to 3 and then 4 tablets a day. A week after surgery I dropped down to 2 tablets a day.

The instructions on the bottle say 

TAKE 1 TO 2 TABLETS BY 
MOUTH EVERY 4 TO 6 HOURS
AS NEEDED FOR PAIN

At 2 tablets every 4 hours, my bottle of 40 tablets would only last 3 days.I guess different people have different pain nerves.

Middle of last week I would start feeling cold 6 to 8 hours after I took an Oxy. Found if I took another Oxy the cold went away. Now I am beginning to suspect maybe I should stop the Oxy, so I did, and for two days I couldn't sleep for shit, so I started the Oxy again and two days later, about 9PM, I started feeling cold, colder then I have ever felt, even when I was at winter camp with the Boy Scouts, back in 1963. I spent the night camped out in the recliner in front of the gas fireplace, piled high with blankers. OK, that's it, no more Oxy.

That was two days ago and I am finally starting to feel human.

When I went in for my two week checkup, a week ago, I got a refill script for Oxy. When I was filling in the intake form I selected Walgreens on Cornell as my pharmacy. Well, it's on Cornell, if you forget that Cornell makes two 45 degree bends before it gets to the Walgreens on 10th. So we went to the Walgreens on 10th and Baseline, waited in line at the drive up window for 15 minutes, only to be told we were at the wrong pharmacy.

Huh, here I thought a script was a script. I mean you have to pick up prescriptions for narcotics in person at the doctor's office and then hand carry it to the pharmacy. I'd never seen a script like this, it was printed in color on some fancy paper, it was almost like the title to a car. Great, now we get to drive four miles to the Walgreens on Cornell and dropped off the script. 

It was going to be a 20 minute wait so we went and had dinner at the Copper River restaurant. This place has kind of weird layout. The front door opens on to Cornell Road. It's 35 feet away from the curb, so you aren't stepping into traffic. Meanwhile, it's 100 feet from the parking lot. I suspect this is because of the plague of cuteness infecting city planning. Somebody has got the idea that everyone is going to walk everywhere and no one is going to drive cars anymore so we need big fat sidewalks and no parking for automobiles. I'll give them that it's cute, but it's also very stupid.

After dinner we head back to Walgreens to pick up the script, and miracle of miracles, they have all the paperwork in order so all I have to do is identify myself. Did I have to show my driver's license? Don't remember, probably.

There were some times early on when I would get into a very pleasant dream state. I would like to go there again, but not at the risk of feeling cold as ice.

Fun with doctors and plumbing

Yesterday morning I went to see Dr. Schmidt, the urologist. Mom went with me. He listens to my tale of woe and prescribes Oxybutinin. I'm already taking Tamsulosin to cope with an enlarged prostate gland. When the prostate gets enlarged it becomes more difficult for it to relax enough to let urine flow, so the bladder, a muscular organ, has to work harder to push the urine out. The Tamsulosin lets the prostate relax so the bladder doesn't have to work so hard. Near as I can tell, after a long period of having to deal with the recalcitrant prostate, the bladder gets to be in a state of constant tension. So now I've got Oxybutinin which is supposed to relax the bladder. I took this once before, about a year ago, for a month, and it helped, but now the same problems have returned, so it looks like I will be adding one more drug to the handful of pills I take every day.

Get done with all that and doc asks me if I want a prostate exam, cancer screening you know, and mom says yes. I'm pretty sure I had one of these a year ago, but with the two of them ganging up on me I submit. It's annoying and unpleasant, but it only takes a few seconds and I should be good for a couple of years. I suspect the doc offered to do it because he knows that medicare will pay him $25 for the exam and it will only take a minute. $25 for a minute works out to $1500 an hour, which is pretty good pay in anybody's book.

After 30 years the stopper in the sink in the upstairs hall bathroom bit the big one. Found one on Amazon for $5 and had it delivered. In the drawing above, note how the Pivot rod goes through a little ring at the bottom of the stopper. The ring had broken loose from the stopper but was still on the Pivot rod. The Pivot rod goes through a hole in the side of the drain pipe and is held in place with a nut. Unscrewing the nut allows the Pivot rod to be removed, but when you do that the ring is going to fall off into the P-trap. If might get flushed down the pipe and out the sewer, but it might just hang around there collecting other bits of trash and eventually block the trap. 

P-trap

Best to get it out. Normally, the P-trap can be easily removed, but because our custom cabinets have drawers underneath, there is a shelf directly under the P-trap, so in order to remove it I had to unscrew the down pipe that contained the Pivot rod access hole, which slid into the P-trap and allowed me to pull the whole thing out. Of course water pours out when you open the P-trap, but my brain was operating so I had an old towel on hand to mop up the spill. The back of the shelf had water stains that appeared to come from the shut off valves, but the valves were dry, so I just put everything back together. 

I'm working blind getting the Pivot rod into the hole in the new stopper, but must have I got it right  one because it's working.

This morning we drove out to North Plains to let the shutter man into our old neighbor's new house. They decamped for Palm Desert, and the shutters hadn't yet made it to shutter man, so we got to be the good neighbors. The shutter man got the worst of it. We had a ten minute drive from our house, but he had an hour and a half drive from Oregon City. Morning rush hour through some of the most congested highways. Normally that drive would take half that time.

We stopped at McDonalds and got a couple of breakfast burritos and coffees and it cost like $10. You order from a big flat-panel touch screen. Tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, tap, tap. Every item takes at least 3 taps, and final check out takes several more. It seemed a bit ridiculous, but we got through it. The only people we saw was one person behind the counter, one person mopping the floor and the person who delivered our order to our table. I don't know if I like this, but the food was fine and the price was excellent.

Now we head over to Providence Hospital on the east side where the striking nurses are out in full force. The parking garage was fuller than usual today. We parked on level F and took the elevator down. Sign by the elevator says level D for the skybridge, level C for walkway to main entrance. Get down to level C and find we have to take the stairs down one more level to get to the street level.

Mom gets checked in and the fire alarm goes off. Very loud and very obnoxious and everyone has to leave the building. Me, fearing the worst, suggests we start walking. I mean, who knows how long we are going to be stuck outside, and it's freezing. Maybe we can find a coffee shop. We walk two blocks and indeed we find a Starbucks where we order a couple cups of coffee and a couple of the smallest scones in the world for $15. Meanwhile, mom gets a message from her doctor in the same building, so she calls her back and finds that the fire drill is over and we can go back inside. Seems that was the third fire drill this morning, and it's only ten o'clock. If we hadn't gone to Starbucks we would still be standing outside, freezing, because god hates us.

The dexascan reports that mom's bone density has gone up, which is good. It looks like that her expensive personal training regimen is paying off.

I stop in the bathroom on our way out. I'm sitting on the toilet thinking I ought to send a note Providence to compliment the janitor for keeping the restroom so clean. Then I lean over, the toliet flushes and squirts me in the butt. Dang it! Apparently I leaned over far enough to trigger the automatic flush trigger. Bah. 

Wash my hands (at the sink) and reach for a towel. There is an automatic, wave-at-me towel dispenser. It  rolls out six inches of paper towel. Wave again and I now I have two pieces of paper towel, each six inches long, barely enough to qualify as one sheet. Try the other dispenser. It rolls out a nice long sheet, at least fifteen inches. So not all automatic gadgets are junk.

Back home we head to Walgreens to pick up my drugs. It looks like there are half a dozen spaces in the parking lot, but they're all allocated for special people. There is the requisite handicapped double spot, a spot to pick up online orders and two spots to charge your electric car. Is there an ordinary empty parking spot? Oh yes, there is! One. Bueno.

We go inside, I go to the pharmacy to pick up my drugs. They have some, but not the whole order. Serrrano tells me that the rest will be here this afternoon. I know his name is Serrano because he has it written in big letters on his forearm and when I asked him about it he told me.

I'm done and go look for mom. She's waiting in line to buy toothpaste. The only reason we're buying toothpaste here is because because Medicare or our health insurance gives us $25 a month to spend on stuff, presumably health related. Shoot, if you're gonna give me money, I'll take it. You'd have to be in pretty bad shape to need money for toothpaste, but I imagine there are scads of people who have been driven into the ground by effing Biden and his commie cohorts. The line is long, and I'm gonna have to come back anyway, so we head home, eat tuna salad for lunch and write this story.

Drug Cartel Delivery Trucking

Monster Semi-Truck

Being in the trucking business has got to be very exciting these days, well, exciting if you like turmoil and unexpected problems. Kind of like the ancient Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times'. You wouldn't expect that given that the trucking business is like the foundation of modern commerce. Every single cotton pickin' thing gets delivered by truck. Okay, except for air, water, natural gas and electricity. Those just appear by magic, everything else comes by truck.

If you ever try to ship anything you will find out how expensive it is, and it can be steep. I mailed a couple of  packages of drill bits that only weighed a couple of ounces and it cost me four bucks each. No wonder free shipping is so popular. We've got Amazon Prime and we use the heck out of it. If I need something, I dial it up on my computer and in a short while it shows up on my doorstep, often the next day, sometimes later the same day. It's almost freaky how well it works. Okay, it's freaky when it works, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes I order something and a week later I wake up and say, hey, where's the whatsit I ordered last week? And I find that next day delivery wasn't offered on that particular item and it's not going to be here for another week. So you need to keep your eyes peeled, your eye on the ball and your nose to the grindstone when flying your desk through cyber-space, Chucky.

Amazon may be destroying the American retail industry, but Walgreens and Costco have already got us well down that road. I dunno, maybe we do need a guaranteed basic income. Give a tax break to employers based on the number of employees they have. But that's a whole 'nuther can of worms. We'll leave that for another post.

Amazon Prime isn't free. I think it's like a hundred bucks a year now, but that's a pretty good deal considering it costs a hundred bucks to fill the gas tank these days. Driving used to cost about 50 cents a mile, but with the recent gas price increases, it's more like 75 cents per mile. If Amazon Prime saves me from making a trip to the store just once a month, it pays for itself.

And then there's Walgreens. They also offer free shipping on mail-order prescription drugs. I am on a permanent regimen of half a dozen drugs, so I need a constant supply of them. Walgreens reliably ships them out on a regular basis, except when they don't. A month ago I noticed I was low on Losartan, a pill that is supposed to help control high blood pressure, so I dialed up Walgreens website and placed an order.

Now the modern world sticks it's pointy little beak into my affairs. Losartan is no longer available, as least not from any of Walgreens suppliers. Call the doctor's office, talk to the nurse, she talks to the doc, the doc talks to me and a couple of days later, we've got a new script crawling its way to Phoenix over our mostly stable communications network.

Drug Delivery Tracking
In Reverse Order - Most Recent Event at Top

Eventually Walgreens  gets the new script, packages it up and hands it off to DHL (the German version of UPS (United Parcel Service)) who takes a week to get it to Seattle where it is going to be handed off to the USPS (United States Post Office). So maybe it will get here this week.

Obviously things are not going as smoothly as you or I or Walgreens or DHL could want. Seems I've been hearing conflicting news about the trucking industry this year. Seems like earlier some people were complaining that there was a terrible shortage of trucks or drivers or something, and now some people are complaining that high fuel prices are impacting the shipping business and we have a bunch of trucks and drivers sitting idle. So there you have it, exciting times in the trucking industry.

P.S. Walgreens used to offer automatic reordering for permanent prescriptions, but that stopped recently, possibly because I turned 70 years old or possibly because of a rule-change with Medicare. No point in shipping drugs to a dead man. If you are still alive and still need these drugs, you need to tell us.

P.P.S. Could it be that the War On Drugs is being fought between the North American and South American drug cartels? Which one should be given a bigger tax break based on the number of employees? Which one sells more drugs? Which one has more customers?

Our Modern, Computerized Life

Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer. - Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania

Seems like lately we have been running into a plethora of computer system problems. Not the computers in our house, they are all working fine. I'm talking about the big computer systems at the other end of wire, the systems we are talking to to get what we want.

RUST sports took over the Trail Blazers basketball games from NBC Sports Northwest (I think I have the names right) a couple of months ago and ever since we have been seeing video glitches during the games. I can understand one once in a while, but we are getting glitches every few minutes. It's annoying because it shouldn't be happening. It's very annoying when it happens in the middle of some high paced action, you can't see what happened. We are paying big money for this stuff and their ham handed handling is irritating. 'Big money' is a relative term, I think we paying about $60 a month to watch the Blazers, which is like four times as much as Netflix.

Two days ago we tried to watch a movie on HBOMAX and we couldn't. We pointed and clicked, dialed numbers, listened to stupid robo-cop answering systems, but got nowhere. Everything goes through Ziply Fiber and they were reporting widespread problems in Oregon, and at the end of a long slog we got a message saying that customer service was only open during business hours, like 8 to 5 Monday thru Friday, so we gave up for the night.

We got back on the problem yesterday afternoon. After what seemed like a couple of hours, two laptops,  and endless repetitions of logging onto sites I haven't used since the last time we ran into this problem, we finally got it resolved. I think the trick that finally got it working was to logoff of HBO on the ROKU box and then log back in. I didn't even know you could do that. On the plus side I learned something new about the ROKU, but on the negative side it was information I didn't want to know. I would say we never have this problem with Netflix, but I am afraid I might jinx us and I don't want that, so I won't.

It seems I have been having to call Walgreens every month for the last six months or so, ever since they hooked up with Alliance Rx to do their delivery-by-mail service. It usually takes two phone calls. The first call reliably fails, either I get disconnected or I get an operator who doesn't know what they are doing and nothing gets fixed, but the second usually connects with someone who is able to correct the problem in short order. It's probably not always two, but that's the way it seems. Maybe two is just the average, but I don't keep track, but that's what my memory is telling me. Always reliable, me memory.

We won't talk about how a couple of changes in the medical business took an endless number of calls to get sorted. My cardiologist closed his practice and moved to another one, and my wife decided to change my prescription insurance. Either one of those events would have been a nuisance, but together they were a nuisance squared.

Having a decent speakerphone in my smartphone means I don't have to hold the phone, I can lay it on the desk and let it blare the very poor quality muzak and the super annoying bullshit while I continue to play solitaire on my computer and wait to be connected to someone who can actually help. I swear, the announcements from these outfits are designed to be extra long and as aggravating as possible to encourage people to hang up. I mean, is it really necessary to tell people to call 911 if this is an emergency? (P.S. I wonder if there has been a spike in calls to 911 by people who just got fed up with this crap.)

At a Sitel Group call center in Metro Manila.Photographer: Xyza Cruz Bacani for Bloomberg Businessweek

Of course, customer service is an expense and companies are loath to spend any more money than absolutely necessary, so you get crap phones, crap computer systems, and crap training. I really feel for the people who work these jobs. I would hate to be a position where I had to do that kind of work. On the other hand, misery loves company, so if you are in with a decent bunch of folks it might be okay. Plus there might be coffee and donuts. Mmmm, donuts.

On the other hand we have an endless supply of high quality video entertainment, which is great, though we watch so much I might be getting burned out. Probably ought to take a couple of nights off each week to read. And when mail-order delivery is working, it's great, I don't have to run to the pharmacy.

Stupid Walgreens, Part 2

Filling my pill minder this morning and I run out of one of my drugs. I think I ordered refills last week, but did I really? So I go to walgreens.com and this is what I get:

Walgreens Message

What? Two hours after what? After I log on? Bozo on a pogo. Rx refill status is useless, let's just try the refill page.

Walgreens Error

Great. You know what happened? I'll bet I know. They put bureaucrats in charge of the system, and the one person who actually knew how the system worked got fed up with their bullshit and bailed. Now they have a bunch of clowns scrambling to find their shoes. Effing corporations.

P.S. Walgreens has appeared here at least a dozen times in the last nine years. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

Stupid Walgreens

Pill Minder

I take a handful of pills every day to combat being old. I have a couple of pill minders I fill up once a week to make it easy to take the right pills the other six days. Yesterday I ran out of one drug, so I ordered a refill from Walgreens. It should show up in the mail in a week or two. It showed up yesterday afternoon. If the package had been from Amazon, I wouldn't have been too surprised, but Walgreens has never been this fast. Their website, which normally does a good job of keeping track of which drugs I am likely to need and can be ordered, must have slipped a cog. Oh, look, it's not Walgreens anymore, they've farmed out their web services to something called AllicanceRx.

You would think a big company like Walgreens would do a better job of ensuring their web service was working properly before they turned it loose on the world. Not only does it not keep track of orders properly, it can't even remember my logon and password. Even my bank does that. It might be incompetence on the part of the programmers, or if I put on my mud tinted glasses, it might be someone's stupid idea to keep people from stealing opioids using grandma's prescription.

And what's the deal with requiring the pharmacist to 'release' drugs? I go to the drive through to pick up drugs for my wife and the pharmacist wants to tell me things about these drugs. I don't want to know, I'm just the courier. Presumably the patient discussed this with their doctor. All this information is written out in the papers that accompany these drugs. There is no reason to waste the pharmacist's time with this kind of nonsense. Except, some people are (1) unable to read and (2) can't remember what happened two hours ago, but they are still allowed out in public.

I suspect the real reason for having the pharmacist 'release' the drugs is public relations. Some people want to talk to the pharmacist, not just some clerk. I admit talking to the clerks is a little annoying, they operate from a script that requires both of us to recite the correct phrases in order for them to hand over my gift from the gods. The pharmacists are a little more free, and some of them are interesting characters. Immigrants, mostly, from obscure places.

I will admit that the papers that come with the drugs are like just about every pamphlet included with every other product on the planet. They do include two or three lines of useful information, but those few lines are buried in twenty pages of useless bullshit. Yes, I know, we need lawyers to mediate disputes, otherwise this country would be like Syria, but do we really need to have all this legal crap intruding on our otherwise peaceful existence? Can't they keep it confined to the courtroom?

P.S. Blogger's spellcheck doesn't recognize opioids.

Boots the Chemists Ltd

Anne Louise Avery has written a brief history of the Boots' lending library, which got me started on a wiki-wander. Stories about England are always interesting because they point out subtle differences between our two countries. Boots is pharmacy chain in the UK. I imagine it is similar to Walgreens or Rite-Aid in the USA. From Ms Avery's story it appears that public libraries in England got a much later start than they did in the USA. Of course, we had Andrew Carnegie and they didn't.

She starts by mentioning a scene from the movie Brief Encounter from 1945. YouTube has the whole movie. Here is the scene:


Brief Encounter - David Lean (Legendado) - 1945 [HD] Laura (Celia Johnson) nips into Boots the Chemist
In this scene, Laura picks up the latest novel by Kate O'Brien, who was a real writer:

Sisters Nancy & Kate O'Brien

The [movie] soundtrack prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.


Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2 op.18 - Anna Fedorova - Complete Live Concert - HD
I'll have to listen to this sometime.

Update, a couple of hours later. Realized I hadn't looked up the prime instigator - Florence Boot, so I did.

Jesse and Florence Boot

Found this picture on the "theislandwiki, a gateway to two historical websites featuring the Channel Islands, a group of small islands in the English Channel, close to the French coast, which are possessions of the British Crown and part of the British Isles."



Via reddit

Out on the fringes.

My trip to Miami was a frigging disaster. It was expensive and we accomplished nothing. As a bonus, I got sick, which was depressing on top of depressing. No wonder I'm depressed.

I bought an airline ticket using my VISA card. I rented a car, a hotel room and a condo for a week with no problem. But when we went to Target, both of my VISA cards were rejected. Chase sent me an email asking me to verify my existence, but it had no effect. It was only after dutiful daughter spent an hour on the phone were we able to get me reinstated as a good corporate citizen.

We went to Walgreens to buy a Tracfone, because nobody has landlines any more and a phone could come in handy. Walgreens didn't have any Tracfones, but they had a Verizon flip phone for $7, which sounds like a deal until you have to buy some airtime and the smallest increment they have is $15, which isn't really enough to actually get your phone turned on. For that you need to spend another $30. So I spent $50 to make maybe two dozen phone calls.

The car rental kiosks are a good mile from the airport terminal. They have carpeted halls, slidewalks and a train. Kind of a pain when you are hauling 200+ pounds of luggage. Yes, we rented a cart for $5. Finally get to the car and they have upgraded us to a full size SUV, a Chevrolet Tahoe. What a beast. It feels like you are encased in six layers of armor, and in between adjacent layers of armor there is a layer of rubber, so every little bump sets up sixteen different harmonic vibrations. It had more jiggles than a go-go dancer.

This week I'm home trying to fix some broken stuff. I order a new Liftmaster wireless keypad for the garage door from Amazon. It's the same brand as the receiver we use, but will the two play together? They will not. What does Liftmaster have to say? Nothing. Sent the keypad back, cost me $7. What happened to free returns? Me thinks Amazon is feeling their oats, don't need to be giving away so much stuff anymore. Went to Lowes, bought a Genie keypad, same brand as the opener, even has the same buzzword: 'Intellicode'. Didn't work. Never mind that the opener is 20 years old, more or less. You use the same buzzword, they two ought to play together. What does Genie have to say? Nothing. They're closed on the weekend. On Monday they promise to call back, but they don't. I send them an email. They may respond someday. I don't care, I'm gonna buy one of them no-name, universal do-ma-flachers, screw these brand name outfits.

Update June 25: I ended up with a Chamberlain KLIK2U Clicker Universal Garage Door Keypad. It works fine.

Walgreens Officer Friendly

I just ordered a prescription refill by talking to a Robocop. Perhaps not as quick as a quick-witted human, it still managed to get through the whole transaction without having to restart, repeat, backtrack, or even wander off into some useless byways. The cherry-on-top was that the prescription I needed was first on their list, which meant I didn't have to wait for it to go through it's spiel for all the ones I didn't need. How did it know? Did it look at the last time it was renewed and use some logic to decide which one to start with it? Or did it default to whatever internal order their database has them listed in, and it was just blind luck that they got the right one first?

Of course, the speech recognition is the hard part from the standpoint of computer programming, but once you have it working, you can make all the copies you need. The logical flow of the interview is relatively simple, but some people still have a hard time with it, even people like programmer's, who should be able to reduce a logical equation to its simplest form.

Holiday Inn Sioux City Iowa

Portable HD Video & Audio Recorder

About half way from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Sioux City, Iowa, a distance of about 80 miles, we stopped for gas. As we are leaving the gas station I decide to stop and make sure I got the gas cap back on. We left my wife's favorite pillow at the hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota, this morning, and I don't want to make another stupid mistake.
    The gas cap is in place, but as I walk back to the driver's door, I notice the rear passenger window is open. What's going on? Did I push the button by mistake? No, the mechanism is broken. Pushing the button has no effect. I can slide the window closed and it stays that way until we hit the first bump on the highway. Now it is open again, and at 80 MPH the wind noise is deafening. My wife crawls in the back seat and holds the window closed until we get to Sioux City. We go directly to the Walgreens across the street from the Holiday Inn and buy a roll of duct tape and tape the window closed.
     Later on that evening we go back to Walgreens to get some essential supplies and I notice this video recorder for sale for $40. When I bought my first video cam-corder 25 years ago it cost $1600 and it stored the video on a VHS tape, which has what? A quarter of the lines of resolution that an HD video has? It won't be too long before they are giving them away in Cracker Jack boxes.

Rx Rx Rx

Buttersafe

Blue Cross recently ditched Walgreens as their pharmacy of choice, now they've hooked up with some other outfit with a made up name I can't remember. We signed up with them a couple of months ago when it was first announced. I've been back a couple of times to try and order some drugs, but they have forgotten who I am. Well, I'm not going to waste my time fooling around with them. I figure the longer I wait the more time they will have to get the kinks ironed out. Meanwhile I can still get my daily dose from Walgreens, it just won't be covered by insurance. The stuff I need is really cheap generic stuff, like $2 for a months worth, so no big loss there.
Walgreens has a website that works pretty well, and my computer remembers the site, so I can just point and click and presto my drugs are on their . . . oops, wait a minute. What's the problem here? Call their help line and it seems their local store is holding one of the scripts, so she's going to transfer me. Wait! No! Don't do that, because that will require more of their 'are you the person to whom I am speaking' rigmarole, and I don't want to go to the store, just mail my drugs to me, just like the other bottle of pills. Gotta stay on your toes to thwart these oh so helpful people who are helping you step off the platform and into the path of the oncoming freight train.

You know what's weird? She couldn't find me in her computer. She has my name, my birth date and my phone number, and the only thing she can find is my son, who doesn't use this phone number. So I give her my wife's phone number and now she can find me. (Had to think long and hard about that number. She calls home every day and I see the number displayed on the phone, but I seldom, if ever call her, so it's not cached where it can easily be shunted to the output queue.) An hour later I get a robo-call wanting to know how their service was. Phuk you robo-cop, I ain't wasting my time with your stupid survey. If you paid any attention at all you'd know that the one thing I HATE is stupid machines calling me on the phone, especially when it's just an announcement for something that is already being taken care of. Geez. What a bunch of imbeciles. But that's corporate efficiency for you. Statistically, making a zillion robo-calls is probably helping some flunky make their quarterly bonus.

Who Am I?

Queen Esther Revealing her True Identity by Lilian Broca

    I went by Walgreens yesterday to pick up a script. Whenever you do this they always want to play 20 questions: What's your name? How do you spell that? What's your address? What's your phone number? What was the name of first pet? Before the Affordable Care Act and all the "Privacy" crap all you had to know was the name of the patient, and be able to pay for it. Besides the fact that you are broadcasting all this supposedly private information to anyone within earshot (I heard every bit of the transaction that transpired with the car in front of me in the drive thru), it's obnoxious, time consuming and annoying.
    I thought I would bypass the 20 questions by giving them my drivers licence, that should shut them up. So I open my wallet and . . . what? Where's my license? Where's my ATM card? What the heck happened? Did I leave my wallet unattended and someone just swiped those two cards? For the life of me I can't imagine what happened.
    So I docilely submit to the 20 questions, collect the script and head home. On the way I realize that about a week ago I went to the bank and to get some cash, and since I went thru the drive thru there as well, the cash and the paperwork came back in an envelope. Sure enough, when I got home I found my missing cards in the envelope with the (pitiful) remains of the cash. What's really surprising is that in that week I never noticed that those cards were missing, and I had been in my wallet several times. That's just a little scary.

P.S. I had an insight about drive-thru facilities. They seem kind of frivolous. Are you really that lazy that you can't walk from the parking lot to the store? (I think I got this attitude from my parents.) Last night I realized that it isn't the walking, it's the parking. Finding a spot, maneuvering your car into the spot, shutting down the car, gathering up your stuff, climbing out, locking up. Now, admittedly, it doesn't take more that a few seconds to do all this, but it is kind of a complicated hassle, and going through the drive-in eliminates all of this. Plus you don't have to wear shoes. Or even pants, for that matter.

Hot Dog

California Bob starts the discussion:

The 40 best hot dog joints in America, ranked
...plus Portillo's in Chicago.

Iaman responds:

Here in Tucson they have a Sonoran Hotdog:
The Sonoran-style or Estilo Sonora hot dog, found in Tucson, Metro Phoenix, and in neighboring Sonora, Mexico, is a hot dog wrapped in mesquite-smoked bacon then cooked on a grill or on a griddle or comal, then topped with beans, grilled onions, fresh onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, cream sauce, mustard and jalapeño.
But I am not fond of beans, mayonnaise, nor too much jalapeño.

Uniberp chmes in:

OK Bizinsider is way off. The put KETCHUP on hotdogs in Grand Rapids. It's disgusting.
Portillos is good, but Byron's in Chicago is the best. I am not going through that list.

Iaman cooks lunch:

Ingredients
Mezzetta Peppers $2.29
Dill Pickles (course chop, fresh pack)$1.99,
Celery salt $2.79
Tomatoes $0.61
Frankfurters $2.99
Onion $1.17
Hot dog buns $1.00
Total $12.84. approximate total pro-rata $5.34 / 8 hot dogs = $0.67 each
28 miles round trip to grocery store  @ $0.50 per mile = $19.00 / 8 Hot dogs = $2.37 transport cost per each hotdog. (but the trip was combined with visits to Lowes  and Walgreens and pool)

Secret technique,  drain all pickles peppers & relish in a strainer & tamp dry.

I used both the Fresh Pack Sweet Relish with Sea Salt (MtOlivePickles.com) AND the dill pickle ( Kroger).
The onions and tomatoes are essential, in my taste.

Issues:

A single Hotdog is is too little, 2 are too much.

I've just been using cheap hotdog buns,  nice & fluffy the first day, they get stale and crumbly  after 2 days. The bun I seek would be wider, thinner, a tiny-bit tougher with a poppyseed coating. Maybe like these: Rosens, Chicagos bakers since 1909 Poppyseed Hotdog Bun or Make your own hotdog bun.

Must be that time of year because Dustbury has something to say as well.

Me, I get my hot dogs at 7-11 or Costco and the only thing I put on them is plain yellow mustard.

Fax Machine Blood Feud

I don't know what the connection is, but this was best picture that turned up when I Googled the title to this post. Yuliya Snigir plays Irina in A Good Day to Die Hard, who mainly makes an impression because she's beautiful and a shot of her stripping out of motorcycle leathers was heavily featured in the film's marketing materials. That shot was almost completely cut from the movie itself.

Got a letter from Walgreens, a form letter out of a computer, but an actual printed-on-paper, delivered-by-snail-mail letter the other day. It's telling me that one of my prescriptions has expired, and the doctor hasn't stepped up and authorized any more. All this requesting and authorizing is done with fax machines, so if the doc is going to authorize more drugs for me, he's going to need the fax number. Well, where is it? It's not in the letter, it's not on their website, so I call, fight with the robo-cop answering machine, wade through an armload of protocol with the operator and finally get the fax number. Call the doctor's office and they tell me they don't need the fax number, all this prescription s*** is handled electronically now.
     So now I see how Obamacare has started a bunch of blood feuds in the Republican party. Big businesses like Walgreens want automation and elimination of unnecessary paperwork, while small businesses, like your local fax machine dealer, like things the way they were.

Suburbia

This weekend I had to go pick up a script from Walgreens, but not the one I usually go to on 10th. No I had to go clear over to the one that is over by Kohl's on Cornelius Pass. Okay, it's not really a big deal, it's only a couple of miles over there, and there are some other stores over there as well, so we can kill a couple of birds with this one stone. But I still didn't like it because that area, newly built up, epitomizes everything I hate about suburbia: landscape trimmed to within an inch of its life, wide sidewalks that no one walks on, gently winding streets full of people who couldn't get out of the way if their life depended on it (all charter members of the anti-destination league I'm sure), wide expanses of new asphalt paved parking lots with lots of free parking for places I have no desire to go, and lots of stores full of useless stuff that I neither want nor need. Tell me again why we are over here? The place is like the ultimate product of soulless corporate hucksters and government officials protecting you from yourself. I hate it.
    But then I had an epiphany. The entire construct is just a tool, a tool to distribute consumer products to consumers, and it does that very well, and that's why it exists. Hating it is like hating your hammer because it has a red handle. The color of the handle has no impact on how well it does it's job.
    Tools are used to build things, so my next question is: what are we building with this tool? Near as I can tell we are building the next generation of soldiers to continue our fight in the war against the rocks, which is basically what life is, right? Rocks are the very opposite of life, they don't think, they don't care, they would just as soon crush little rocks as big rocks. So the mere existence of all life on this planet, all life anywhere, is a blow against our rocky oppressors. Right now we have a little breathing room. We have walked all over this planet and pretty much pounded all the rocks into submission. Oh, there are still a few upstarts here and there that give us some trouble from time to time, but things are generally quiet. However, that could change in a heartbeat, so we best be getting prepared for whatever the next calamity might be. Because you know another thing about rocks? They never give up.

P.S. On our stone's throw we were walking down the sidewalk in front of Winco (a local monster grocery store) and a kid pulling a train of grocery carts crosses our path. No big deal, right? He'll have his carts across the sidewalk in a few seconds and we'll be on our way. But then I look to see how many carts he's got and it must be a zillion. There's some kind of motorized tractor pushing them along. It's like a freight train, and just like a train it gets halfway in the building and then stops. It's just a hiccup right? They'll start rolling again in a second, but no, they don't and we have to venture way out into the parking lot (a dozen steps at least) in order to get around this thing. I suspect the grocery carts are in league with the rocks.

Shopping

Google Street View of the Hillsboro store, just slightly out of date. They finished the landscaping well over a year ago. I don't know how far over, not my job to remember stuff like that.

Went to Walgreens this morning to get some drugs, man, and while I was there I thought I would pick up a couple of other things, cause like, I'm already there, ya know, man? I don't like Walgreens, they just reek of soulless corporate bean counters. We had a nice little home grown pharmacy down at the local grocery store that worked just fine, but then they got bought out by the evil empire and moved down the street to this huge, new store that is just full of the most worthless crap in the world. I mean who needs four hundred shades of eye shadow? I certainly don't, or at least I don't want any. Other people might think I need it, but they're crazy and you shouldn't listen to them.
    In any normal sales transaction, you have a buyer and a seller, and a business cannot be "bought out" unless the current owner is willing to sell. So we can't blame Walgreens entirely here, the previous owner of the pharmacy had to be willing to sell. Maybe they were tired of running the business and wanted out, or maybe Walgreens made them such a generous offer that they felt it would be foolish to pass it up. I doubt whether Walgreens would have made them "an offer they couldn't refuse". I just don't see that there would be enough profit in it to make it worthwhile.
    Anyway, I need some toothpaste. I've been making do with sample tubes that I get from the dentist, but we seem to have used them all up, so I'm going to have to break down and actually buy some. I'm here for the drugs, but they ought to have toothpaste, so let's see if we can find any. Of yes, of course we can. They have a whole section with 47 different varieties. Do they have the original Crest paste that I grew up on? No, Crest stopped making that stuff years ago. Now you can't buy toothpaste unless there is something special about it. The least expensive tube of Crest was $2.79. There was also a tube of Walgreens brand for under $2, but I couldn't bring myself to be that cheap. Too many years of using Crest has got it firmly engraved in my brain. Score one for Madison Avenue.
    Any time I go to a store and hear a canned line ("would you like to apply for a blankety-blank credit card", or "Welcome to blankety-blank", for example) my hackles go straight up. I am not by nature a chatty person, and I don't want to engage in meaningless chit chat. Hello, thank you and good-bye are more than enough. But what really bugs me is that the people working there are required to repeat these annoying phrases. It's like we are all cogs in the corporate machine. Employees repeat the meaningless phrases that cue the customers to open their wallets and shovel money into the cash register. It all makes the money machine go 'round, products get dispersed and maybe ten percent of them actually prove to be useful. Maybe if you do it for eight hours a day it would become automatic and you wouldn't even notice it, much less let it bother you. I wonder if anyone actually enjoys that kind of work?

New Bookstore in Town

Things are in flux in downtown Hillsboro. The coffee shop / antique shop that was on the corner of 2nd and Main has closed up and moved out. A second shoe repair store (!) has opened up next door, and the bookstore next to that has been replaced by another bookstore. I stopped in there yesterday. I thought they had been there a month or two, but the woman at the cash register said they had been there a year. I was shocked. Probably because I am getting old. Whether I like it or not. In any case, the new business seems to have a more, I dunno, with-it? inventory. Seems like they had more stuff that I might be interested in and less useless old stuff that I wouldn't. Found two used science fiction novels and got the pair of them out the door for six and a half bucks. Much better than Powell's. Oops. Am I speaking out of turn? I don't care, Powell's hasn't sent me any money, even though it's been a week and a half since I posted their little search box.

The new bookstore is called Jacobsen's Books, and they have a url, but there isn't anything there yet. However, they are hooked into a book buying website, and that one it working.

Meanwhile, a couple of blocks away, down at Hank's Thriftway grocery, the pharmacy is closing up shop. Walgreens has built a new store a couple of blocks farther East, and they bought Hank's customer list. Isn't that nice? All the pharmacy employees, except the pharmacist, are out of luck.

American Express

I have an American Express card I got through Costco (one of the big membership discount stores). We typically run up a monthly bill of about $1000 for gasoline, groceries we buy at Costco, medicine, lunch, what-not.

Last month, at the height of the political campaign telephone calls, I got a call from an AMEX (American Express) robo-cop. Since I was full up on robo-cop phone calls, I hung up on them. Later on I checked the messages on my voice mail, and low and behold, they had actually left a message. Something about unusual charges on my card. Well, that's nice, they are actually on top of this kind of thing. So I call them back and find that someone tried to buy a $1000 laptop from Walmart using my card number. Well, that wasn't me. Since it seems someone has gotten hold of my card number, they send me a new one. Okay. That wasn't too painful, and we stopped this thing before it got out of hand.

The only problem is now when I go to buy gasoline at the local station where I have been buying gasoline for years, they want my zip code. This happened once when I was in San Francisco a couple of months ago when I bought something at Walgreens. I was surprised, it had never happened before, but given the location, it seemed like a little extra security might be in order. And it seemed like a reasonable request. Not knowing the zip code might trip up a credit card scammer. But now I'm back in my residence and they are still asking me my zip code. You know it's no big deal, but it's like the Camel with his nose under the tent, or the TSA. It's just one more annoyance that I don't like, need, or want.

So now I'm wondering, did AMEX up their security across the board all at once, and it just happened to be when I was in SF? Or did the bogus charge flag my account no now I get asked for my Zip Code wherever I go? Or is it just the gas station I normally go to that has gotten this extra question? Am I going to have to get a different card, or are all credit cards doing this now? Geez, I might have to go back to using cash.