Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Just My Imagination

This has been a bizarre week. Today is the 1800th day that, in my opinion, PERS has been breaking the law towards "Window retirees." I'm still waiting for them to implement the Strunk opinion literally, not in their own interesting and twisted interpretation. July 1, 2003 was exactly 1800 days ago today. FYI.

The USA Today photographer stopped to shoot off 40 or 50 shots of yours truly. God knows which of the pictures and which of the quotes will show up in the article. The photographer was a very amiable young man whose day job is with the Salem Statesman Journal, but who does contract work with other papers. We talked cameras and lenses; he and I share the same passion for Canon products. I don't know when this PERS article and photographs will appear, but I promise to let you know when I do. I suspect this will be a more focused article about Oregon PERS than I originally thought. The reporter told me that he had talked to Paul Cleary and to Randall Edwards, State Treasurer, earlier. Today I found out that he also interviewed Randall Pozdena, former head of the Oregon Investment Council, who was concerned about the PERS funding situation back in 1999. This suggests an article that is more focused on PERS, or that covers the various "success" stories in public employee pensions than I originally suspected. Of course, one man's success usually means another's failure or loss. Voila, our loss! Liars all of them.

The dog got her stitches out yesterday and can run free again. That was a two-week ordeal that left us about $1000 poorer. Yellow labs are high maintenance. At least she's loveable and fun. All her injuries are self-inflicted and result from an unquenchable curiosity and uncontained enthusiasm. Not to mention, her ability to reduce anything breakable into microscopic particles in mere seconds.

I took a nasty spill on Sunday and have hematomas (doctor-speak for nasty bruises) on my arm and elbow, coupled with the most incredibly nasty and triangular bruise on my tailbone. It is practically the shape of my tailbone, which shockingly enough, is more-or-less triangular in shape. I'm OK, but my dignity is diminished, my personal trainer laughed at me, and I discovered that the pain medication I take for my hip and knee won't touch the pain from this kind of trauma. I think the pharmacy and I have finally reached some truce about refills about the pain medication. I was having to call them in 4 weeks in advance just to insure that I got them on time. I got pissed and started on a rampage through pharmacy supervisors, membership services, and anyone else in a position of power. What rattled me was that I could see electronically that my doctor had approved the refills weeks before the pharmacy filled them and none of us could figure out why it was taking so long. We still don't know, but the chief cook and bottle washer of pharmacy services assures me that things are now straightened out. I'll believe it when I see it, but for now, it provided a way to relieve some of the anger built up over Judge Kantor's decision late last week (or was it the week before?).

My daughter's belated birthday present was a set of concert tickets to a concert held last night at the Rose Garden. As promised, I escorted my daughter and her friend to the concert, dropped them off, and then went off to my PSU office to hang out until the concert was over. Around 11 pm, I booked over to the Rose Garden, parked the car illegally and waited, and waited, and waited. While waiting, I listened to the BBC news. Interesting to hear about US politics from a British perspective. In any case, about 11:45 I spot my daughter and her friend coming towards me and I go to start the car. Uh oh. No start. I just then discovered the peril of parking a car for a week at a time before getting it out to drive. Dead battery. Not enough driving time to charge the OEM battery on a 4 year old car. So, I called AAA. At midnight. The battery guy showed up at 1:15 a.m. He jump started my car, tested the battery, assured me the battery itself was OK, and so I drove it home to Lake Oswego. I finally got to sleep about 2:30 this morning. Fortunately, the car started fine this morning. I think it is getting time to think about replacing that battery. Don't think I can be inconvenienced at that time of night again in someplace like the Rose Quarter.

So you tell me. Is it just my imagination, or has my week been more bizarre than normal?

2 comments:

Rivrdog said...

I've had those R/X refill problems, and have ALWAYS cured them by going to the doc's office, getting a PAPER prescription in my hand, and taking said paper to the pharmacist to put in HIS hand.

mrfearless47 said...

I could do that easily since my wife is a partner in this very large practice. But the goal here is to avoid all the running around and gas utilization that shouldn't be necessary with a very efficient mail-order pharmacy. The real problem in my case (and others like it) is that the DEA will not let pharmacies accept secure digital transmission of CII prescriptions. They're fine for anything else, but with CII (DEA Schedule 2 controlled substances), there must be a hard copy of the original prescription transmitted from doctor to pharmacy or from doctor to patient to pharmacy. I've been doing this mail order thing for 20 years now and haven't had any difficulty. The problem now seems to be associated with the tracking mechanisms used to get the Rx from the docs office to the pharmacy. I think I have the matter under better control as I've gotten the doctor to agree to reduce the frequency of refills needed by issuing me 84 days at a time. Before, I was getting them 28 days at a time. This now lets the pharmacy work on autopilot to send the refill request to the doctor 28 days prior to the shipping date, which will ensure I have the needed medication a few days before I run out. And I'll only have to go through this fandango 4 times per year rather than 12. I can cope with that.