3.31.2007:
wonky bad week turns into good week - recap
It's tough when it's school vacation. This is not because there are more teenagers on the street or because the library isn't open as much. It's tough when it's school vacation because the pool schedule gets erratic becaue most lifeguards are on vacation. When I'm having an otherwise good day that goes south, I can't work it off in the pool. Or, I may show up all ful of piss and vinegar expecting to swim and then can't. In this case only vegetable soup will save me, apparently. I'm up to 35 miles for the year.
In any case, these are the milestones from this week, both up and down.
In any case, these are the milestones from this week, both up and down.
- Ola is getting relocated to Botswana. I got a series of confusing emails from her where it looked like she was leaving Kiribati because of safety/transportation issues (not hers personally as I understand it, but the country's generally) and might be back soon. I went through about 24 hours of "Oh my god, I just got this place working like a finely oiled machine" Then she emailed and said she'd be going to Botswana instead. She's getting back to California on Monday and heading out to Africa in mid-April. I will likely not see her, but I'll probably talk to her on the phone. She seems okay with the change, but she'll have done more plane travel than me without all the fun vacation part of the trip. I'll keep you posted on her whereabouts.
- I had a Kafkaesque run-in with the health insurance company. They bill on the 15th of the month. If you haven't paid by the first day of the next month they cancel your health insurance, effective immediately. Now, I'll jump through a lot of hoops for low cost health care, but I sent a check and... something happened to it. I was jetlagged, who knows where I sent it, or maybe it arrived and slipped through a crack. By the time I figured it all out, it was Tuesday and I spoke to many nice people who claimed that the ONLY way, the only way to pay my health insurance bill was via check, via the mail. No person could take my money, no phone representative would take my credit card, no state worker would confirm my check had been delivered, no one would take my eleven dollars. Their back up plan was to give me an address to Fedex a check to when I asked where I could drop one off. I was very nice and, in my most pleasant phone manner asked if they were really going to cancel my health insurance because their system was so antiquated they did not have a post-1950's system for taking my money. Eventually I got through to someone whose job title included the word "grievance" and was given an address, in Waterbury, where just this once, I could drop a check off. It felt like a somewhat hollow victory but at least I don't have to worry about getting his by a bus.
- I went to see a fancy ear doctor about the ringing in my ears that's been going on for the past few months. She says my hearing is fine, but the ringing may not go away. It was nicer the way she said it than the "suck it up" way my doctor said it. I'm not being driven crazy by it, but that's partly because I've been doing my best to ignore it -- been working okay so far. Don't expect to hear anything else from me on the subject, it's one of those weird topics where endless talking about it actually makes it seem worse than it is.
- I got an article published in Library Media Connection magazine (yay!) and they screwed it up (boo!). One of the hardest things for me about writing is that I dislike being edited, a lot. I've found a few editors I work really well with, but maybe it's the profession or maybe me being a perfectionist but I swear I've had more errors injected into my articles via editing than taken out of them. In this case a perfectly good screenshot that I'd supplied was replaced with a different screenshot, of a completely different part of the website, that didn't illustrate what the caption said it did. My first inkling that this had happened was seeing it in print. I got a very nice apology from the editor but also a "gee I don't do layout" admission so it's still a mystery what exactly happened.
Labels: botswana, fedex, health care, jessamyn, kiribati, maine, swimming, tinnitus, vermont