April 2024
Caturday.
Truman is our second floor sentry when it comes to activities in the backyard, particularly in the bushes the surround the utility area near the back of the house.
Eye-yeye-yeye.
Every year we pay a little extra in health insurance for vision care. The vision care company is quite well known and it’s not a huge expense, but in these weird financial days every penny counts, so I’m aware of what we’re paying per month for eye care.
The other day I received a flyer in the mail urging me to get my yearly checkup. Last year I went to our local Target Optical department, and while the eye exam was free, the glasses were not. My glasses with progressive lenses were well over $300 AFTER insurance coverage. I ordered a second pair from Zenni Optical for just shy of $120 WITHOUT insurance coverage.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
When we lived in Chicago I had an eye exam and picked up a pair of glasses from Warby Parker for a forgotten sum of money, but I remember that my insurance coverage plan wasn’t particularly fond of Warby Parker so they only contributed $50 to the whole experience.
Like many of my fellow Americans, I’m really getting tired of the health insurance shenanigans constantly in progress, and as I get older I just know it’s going to become more and more of a factor. One of the reasons my husband and I keep pushing out my retirement date is due to health coverage and the associated costs around health insurance. There’s a part of me that figures I’ll be dead and buried before I’m able to retire.
In the meanwhile, I’m sticking to cheaper, online sources of eyeglasses. Our current vision insurance coverage plan feels too much like a scam.
Staging.
It’s nice to see my chemtrail co-patriot pilots are staging the atmosphere for the upcoming eclipse. I can’t wait to see all the mystical things purported to occur during this natural phenomenon.
Engagement Fatigue.
No, this doesn’t have to do with a wedding. Our wedding is well in the rearview mirror and after all these years we are still happily married. We’re beating the odds while we refrain from beating each other.
I’m off track and it’s only the second paragraph.
What I’m actually talking about when it comes to “Engagement Fatigue” is the fatigue I feel after dealing with people all day long, mostly through electronic means. All of my work interactions are through Zoom-like meetings, that PTSD inducing “ding” noise spewed by Microsoft Teams, or responding to an obviously chatbot crafted email from someone that felt they had something important to say. That’s my work day. Then, if I choose to partake in a little social media, it’s all electronic there as well. Everything is digital, digital, digital, and quite frankly, by now I’m super tired of the bits and the bytes. This is one of the reason I enjoyed living in Chicago up until the pandemic; one could go to a neighborhood pub and talk to people in an analog sort of way without having to star in a sitcom with Ted Danson and Shelley Long. I like analog. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy my storm chasing trip; I talk to people I don’t know and that I’ll probably never talk to again, and it’s face to face in the way humans were originally intended to communicate. Sure, they may have written a book and there’s a super slight chance (less than .0001%) that I read their book about their wife’s quilting hobby but it’s a book and like face to face communication, that’s analog.
I’m getting Engagement Fatigue from digital communication all the time. It’s probably as tiring as watching me pop in and out of “Bewitched” like videos on a regular basis. I need some analog in my life.
Maybe I’m turning into an 8-track tape.
Expiration.
It was June 1985 and the first day of a new job. I was on the crew that would clean the high school during summer vacation and it paid more than minimum wage. We started with the cafeteria. If there was anything left we could eat it, drink it, or throw it away. Unfortunately, there was none of the famous apple crisp that was served on the last day of the school year left behind. I had hope. There was plenty of half pint sized containers of milk though and even though the date showed we were a wee bit beyond that stamp, the head custodian said it was fine and everyone should have a chocolate milk on their break.
I opened mine up, took a swig, and was introduced to something akin to chocolate cottage cheese. Typing this sentence is about making me gag a little bit.
Since that chocolate milk incident I have lived very close to the dates stamped on food packaging. I live by them. At one point in my life, before I met my husband, I wrote them with a sharpie in big, bold notification style numbers on the container when the item was purchased. I wasn’t going to mess around with another incident akin to that chocolate cottage cheese. I abandoned the practice when I moved in with my husband because I didn’t want to scare him away. But I ALWAYS keep an eye on the dates on food packaging and I usually have a running inventory of what’s what in my head.
So I went to get some orange juice this past weekend and noticed the date was nearly two weeks in the past. I brought up my concern with the family, and my husband being my husband, assured me that was the “sell by” date and not the “expiration” date. I don’t care. If there’s a date and it’s food, I’m not consuming that which exceed that date. If it’s not good enough for the shelf at the Safeway, it’s certainly not good enough for me.
I really wish there was a standardization in the date stamps containing this sort of information. “Freshest by”, “sell by”, “discard when”, and “best before” are all different things. I want one date: “discard on this date”. That’s it. Until then I’m going to treat any date as a “discard date”. I know I’m buying into a capitalism trick of forcing me to discard and buy before necessary but I’m not chancing it. Nope. I’ve seen moldy chemical cakes from Entenmann’s. I’ve been served McDanishes with ants living inside the styrofoam. I’ll eat just about anything, as long it’s dated and the date has not come to pass as of that moment.
But I really wish they’d stop using these date stamps as marketing ploys. That’s a little irritating to me.
Blue.
Things have calmed down on the weather front here in the Sonoran Desert. While quite chilly, as the daytime high was below 70ºF today, the sky was beautiful and the birds were chirping. A complete turnaround from the weather yesterday.
When we moved here three years ago, we went nearly 45 days without seeing anything but sunny skies. This year has been a complete 180º on that front.
Things should be fairly quiet on the weather front through Friday. It looks like another storm system is going to move through on Friday, bringing high winds and rain, with snow on the mountains again. It’s not completely unheard of at this time of year in this location, but it’s not very common.
We are scheduled to fly on Saturday morning but I’ll be keeping a close eye on the winds. It’s not a lot of fun to go up there and just bounce all over the place. I’d rather save that energy for a smoother day where we can enjoy all the beauty General Aviation offers.
