Tag: Admin

Killin’ Time

And work-at-home Friday has rolled around again, and I have a lot to do. Nothing I am going to give myself stress over by any chance–nothing is worth stress, especially now that my anxiety is medicated and under control–but I feel pretty good this morning.

Sparky let me sleep a little later this morning, which was lovely. I didn’t sleep great–I woke up a lot, and was often in that halfway asleep halfway awake state. But I do feel good, so it must have been better sleep than I had thought. I need to make a plan for the weekend. I only have two days in the office next week, so am hopeful, very hopeful, that I will utilize that time well. I have a meeting this morning and a lot of Admin work to get done today, before I can return to the comfort of my easy chair and finish reading the Cain novel and a Shirley Jackson short story I saw mentioned on social media the other day. It’s also sunny and bright outside, with a potential high of sixty. It’s also going to keep getting warmer every day until we hit 80 on (sigh) Christmas. Yes, we’ll be running the air conditioning on Christmas. It is interesting, though, isn’t it, how we’ve all been trained to think of Christmas as cold with snow and ice….if the Jesus story is true, it don’t snow much in Israel, so that was a “tradition” that was added much later by Christians. Why shouldn’t it be warm on Christmas?

We started watching season two of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, based on the Rick Riordan series, and it’s very well done. The cast has also grown a bit since the first season, and look like high school kids now; the first season they looked like tweens. I also want to start some of the other shows that have been released that we’ve not started yet–like the Emma Thompson crime show (love her), or various other crime shows that have been uploaded to streaming services. I also want to start my holiday rewatch of The Mummy movies, to go with my essays on Egypt and the deep fascination I’ve had with the ancient civilization since I was a little boy–and the wonderful novels that fed it over the years. It’s also how I discovered the Amelia Peabody series by the magnificent Elizabeth Peters–I always picked up and examined books set in Egypt whenever I visited a bookstore. I was also a little disappointed that neither Nancy Drew nor the Hardy Boys ever visited Egypt or solved a mystery there. As you may have noticed, before December got underway I was alternating the traditional hot guy images for the blog with Egyptian scenes, and will probably go back to that after the new year and Twelfth Night, adding in Greek and Roman images before moving on, at some point, and then Mayan and scenes from European history.

Oh, and we have another episode of Heated Rivalry dropping tonight–I thought they came out on Wednesdays? Must have been wrong–and I also have to figure out the weekend and how I intend to have it play out; what errands to run, what groceries I need, etc. I know there are football games tomorrow, but don’t care terribly much about any of them, honestly, other than Tulane, my favorite long-shot team to make it to the finals. Indiana-Tulane would be amazing, wouldn’t it? Who would have ever thought either team would be in the play-offs, and I can assure two years ago had anyone predicted Indiana would be the number one seed, they would have been laughed at, or placed in a psychiatric hospital for observation.

The Vanity Fair fallout continues, and I was highly amused to see that their subscriptions spiked on the day they released the article and images on-line. I also love how the photographer (whom I hadn’t heard of before) doubled down with his responses to the criticism from the Right who claimed foul. Hey, no one made Karolyin’ Leavitt get the lip injection so close to the shoot, and you know they all thought the images would be filtered and photoshopped and airbrushed to make them look pretty and powerful and impressive…only to be shown exactly how they are: small, petty, cruel, and utterly banal. That close-up of Leavitt deserves a Pulitzer Prize.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. I know I’ve not been very interesting lately, but hopefully I’ll get more interesting as this dreadful year comes to a close, with no guarantee that next year will be better. Have a lovely Friday before Christmas, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

I really need to write a Christmas story about muscle-daddy Santa.

Song Sung Blue

Weeping like a willow….

Apparently, per my last bloodwork, I am a bit anemic. My primary care doctor isn’t concerned; he thinks it’s a result of the illness-related weight loss, so I am probably going to have to have the bloodwork done over again to see if the anemia is persisting, or if getting more back to eating, with its concurrent weight gain and feeling better, has improved the situation. My deductible is paid in full, so yeah, I am all about getting tested and doing all kinds of things for the rest of the year so I can get more value from my insurance. I am assuming that since the deductible shows paid off, that I will most likely be getting the bill from Ochsner Baptist soon, and I am curious to see how much six nights in a hospital and all the care that went with it actually costs. (The pharmacy bill from the stay is the only one showing yet on my insurance account; and it was over twenty two thousand dollars. Just for medications, but I am assuming that includes the IV’s, too.)

But yay on the deductible being paid off at last! I’m not thrilled about how it happened, of course, but it’s quite delightful to know everything isn’t going to cost me a cent for the rest of the year, mwa-ha-ha-ha.

I also wrote last night. The story isn’t finished yet, but I put in over two thousand words yesterday, so my writing muscles are getting stronger and looser and that’s lovely, isn’t it? The story now sits at just over three thousand words, and yes, it’s quite horrible but I feel confident I can do something good with it once I finish. But it felt good to get those creaky muscles back to work, and maybe I can get even more written this weekend.

I wasn’t terribly tired when I got home from work last night; it was a very slow day in the clinic and I was able to get caught up on a lot of Admin work. And now I am working from home today, with more Admin work to do, too. It’s supposed to be a rainy weekend, too, which is always nice. Hoping to get some good reading time in while I do chores and around writing this weekend. And if I don’t, well, as long as I get some rest that’s really the most important thing, really. I like feeling better–at some points while I was sick I wondered if I would ever feel better again, or if that was my new normal. God, that was unpleasant, and I’m glad it’s over for the most part. It may come back, which is the scary part, so you can bet your ass I will do whatever I need to do in order to be sure that doesn’t happen.

But my breakfast and my morning coffee are really hitting the spot this humid morning. The rain isn’t supposed to be here until later this evening, which is nice. I think I’ll run my errands tomorrow instead of today; today feels like a good stick around the house day, to be honest. I did do some chores last night, so this morning I just need to empty the dishwasher and do some laundry, and then the floors, which somehow always look terrible by the weekend every week. I also finished writing a newsletter last night that I’ll probably send out this morning before I start working.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later or tomorrow morning; stay tuned to find out!

Anubis in Queen Nefertari’s tomb, Egypt, Valley of the Queens

Puppy Love

Thank God, my sister was never into Donny Osmond or his brothers. But he was everywhere on Top Forty radio in the 1970s, and later he teamed up with Marie–which was actually worse than his solo/with his brother efforts, but for some reason they were enormously popular1, which I never understood. But then I’ve never understood a lot of things that were popular in our culture.2

And “puppy love” is kind of a creepy saying, anyway.

My first infusion is now scheduled, for this coming Monday morning. I am winding down the prednisone; half a pill this week and next, then a quarter pill for the next two, and the massive swelling of my ankles and feet (side effect of the prednisone) has gone down significantly, which is why it is easier for me to walk now than it was before. There was a slight hang-up, of course, with my insurance (I know, gasp) but it got straightened out and the treatments are now approved. For the record, I will never take the word of an insurance company trying to make money for its shareholders about what is or isn’t “medically necessary,” thank you very much. How much of everyone’s time did this waste? How on earth is this considered an effective use of staff time? Our system is so broken. I am getting good care, and I am very grateful for that, but at the same time I shouldn’t have to spend so much time stressing about what is going to be covered and what is not when I am trying to get well. It seems counterproductive to the healing process, but I am not an insurance company employee, so what do I know?

I worked a bit on the story yesterday–broke through the middle and realized what I am writing will need to be restructured in the next draft, but I do like where it’s going–and was also kind of tired by mid-afternoon. I think it was the relaxation from the insurance approval; I hadn’t realized how much that was bothering me under the surface. It also rained all afternoon–marvelous downpours with thunder and lightning, which kind of made me sleepy. I think we’re going to have a very tropical summer this year in New Orleans, where it’s so humid it rains every afternoon. I didn’t read anything when I got home–the traffic on the highways was dense and moving very slow–but just kind of relaxed for a moment before working on the story very briefly. I’m glad I figured it out, though–I was getting a little worried, as I always do when writing doesn’t come as easily as it used to. The story is over two thousand words now, which pleases me; it’s been a hot minute since I wrote that much on anything, so that’s a win, thank you very much.

But it’s Thursday and my last day in the office for the week. The schedule is very light in the clinic today, so I’ll be able to get a lot of Admin work taken care of, which will have me all caught up on the office work before Remote Friday, which will again be admin work, just at home (I save stuff that I can do at home for Remote Fridays), and then it’s the weekend. I should do chores tonight, so I don’t have to do them this weekend, but the house does need to have some picking up and cleaning done. I want to finish writing this story and work on some other writing this weekend, all the while getting the reading done. I should be able to finish my three current reads this weekend before moving on to the next three; I think probably Mia Manansala’s new y/a, along with a Jay Bennett 3reread of one of his y/a’s, and my adult reread will probably be another Barbara Michaels, perhaps The Crying Child, which I’ve not reread in forever.

Those are some really good choices, don’t you think?

I also have some library books for research that I need to get through and make notes so I can return them. One is for Chlorine, and the other is for my deconstruction of Gone with the Wind and Lost Cause mythology–primarily focusing on how the Confederate widows and their daughters drove that mythology (because they couldn’t accept the fact their husbands, fathers and sons were treasonous losers, so they deified them, to the detriment of the country to the present day).

And of course, LSU plays this weekend in the College World Series, so I’ll definitely have that on, too.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.

  1. I did like his comeback hits in the early 1990’s–“Sacred Emotion” and “Soldier of Love”, though. Go figure. ↩︎
  2. Don’t even get me started on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was the Number One bestseller for two full years in the early 1970s. ↩︎
  3. Bennett is mostly forgotten today, but he wrote y/a noir/suspense, won two Edgars from three nominations, and was a master. I’ll probably do a newsletter about him someday, once I get through his entire canon. ↩︎