Coffee with Bug this morning.
And… we’re off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. ⛺️⛱️
Our granddaughter found herself a friend. A little firefly. Her name is Sparkles.
I had such a rough night sleeping. I didn’t sleep much due to pain and not being able to find a comfortable position.
I’m thankful I had some Hydrocodone/APAP left over from knee surgery. At least it takes the edge off. 😊
American Healthcare is substandard
My trip to the ER today was a success, in a way, but also a failure.
My hope was I’d get an MRI to better understand what’s going on with the discs in lower lumbar. It’s where my pain is focused.
I arrived, got in pretty quickly, and had a great doc visit me. I explained what was going on and my hope for the outcome of the visit. She listened intently and asked a series of questions I answered.
She explained to me the only thing that would result in an MRI is the inability to empty my bladder, being unable to defecate, or weakness in a leg or legs. That’s it.
She shared that my insurance company would outright reject the MRI because I didn’t meet any of those conditions. She also said “You can pay for it yourself but I don’t know how you feel about a $10,000 MRI bill?” 😳
TL;DR - I don’t qualify for an MRI because I’m just in, at times, excruciating pain. But I can still walk (kind of) and pee and poop. 🤬
So, I got two injections; a muscle relaxer and a steroid. I don’t recall the names. The doc also prescribed a different muscle relaxer than I was prescribed prior because it did funny things to me.
This afternoon by 3PM or so the pain was back to a bearable level. In that regard, it was a success.
The lack of an MRI is a complete failure. Sure, I had X-rays a few weeks back so we know the bony parts are in rough shape, but we have zero clue how the soft tissues look. Do I have a bulging disc, or more? Who knows? The doctors don’t know and the physical therapists I visit won’t know exactly what PT plan I need to, hopefully, feel better.
We live in one of the richest nations in the world and our healthcare industry is driven by penny pinching insurance companies claiming we don’t need certain procedures, even though they don’t know.
One of the questions I was asked by the doctor was “Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”
Think about that for a minute. Chronic pain can really screw with your mind. You get tired of it physically and mentally and just stop caring.
Yes, people commit suicide because of pain and insurance company games; Delay, Deny, Defend.
People also murder insurance company CEO’s because of their crap policies that delay and deny people the care they need.
I said “No” to both questions because I haven’t reached that “I can’t take this anymore” phase. I’m doing ok and I hope I’ll bet an MRI after my physical therapy, but I’m losing hope.
Oh, yeah, this seems to be the way in Virginia. I’ve had MRI’s in California that were never challenged by the insurance company. Maybe it’s because I have a different insurance company now? It’s probably the latter.
If you don’t need a back I’d recommend against having one. 🤣
Off to the ER we go. I’m hoping they’ll do an MRI so we know how much damage there is to soft tissues.
I’m so over the pain of it all.
WTF is he talking about?
Can someone smart please explain what this knucklehead is saying? 😳
How can people making less than $200k benefit from tariffs? Ultimately we pay for the tariff because the poor small business has to raise their prices to pay for the tariff. Right? RIGHT!
Calling Paul Krugman, come on Mr. Krugman. Can you please explain what the hell Marmalade Messiah is saying?
Captured a good picture of a Snowberry Clearwing.
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. 🌞
Trump has lost his mind
In his meeting with President Nayib Bukele today in the White House, President Donald Trump told his Salvadoran counterpart that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would “need to be build about five more places” to hold American citizens.
So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.
We’re approaching a time when violence is going to be the only way to defeat this fascists regime. Constitutional crisis? The Constitution is on fire and his Orangeness is defying the Supreme Court. Law and order are gone, out the window.
If ever there’s been a time to storm D.C, now is it.
Violence is coming.
Did you know that Paolo Pasco, the winner of both the 2024 and 2025 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, uses MY APP, Black Ink?
That is so cool! I’d be thrilled to hear from dedicated Stream or RxCalc users!
Gracie is enjoying all the sniffs and Kolby is chillin on the front door mat. It’s a gorgeous day here, suns out, blue sky.
Sitting out on the deck this afternoon with the pups enjoying a beautiful day.
Introducing Microsoft Rob!
I mentioned on Mastodon I’d had a dream I went back to work at Microsoft so Thomas Brand made this for me.
I love it! ❤️
Spring hasn’t sprung yet but is sure is a beautiful morning!
Old Man Rob
More snowfall today. ❄️
Thinking about Death and Dying
As I’ve gotten older I’ve been thinking more and more about my mortality. There are some things I’d like to keep but after discussing it with my wife I realized I need to rethink things.
I wanted to keep all of my main domains; fahrni.me, crabapples.net, and hayseed.co. There’s also curmudgeon.cafe, which I’d like to have around for the folks who remain on it. That one I will be able to hand off to someone on the instance. The other three I need to do something else with.
I was talking to Kim about keeping them, but that takes money and time to maintain them. I’m now thinking I can just pull everything into my github account, leave my github credentials with Kim and just let everything else go. Rot off the vine so to speak. I won’t be alive to worry about it any longer, no need to put that stress on someone else.
To that end I think I’m going to stop using Carrd for maintaining fahrni.me, hayseed.co, and all of hayseed.co’s sub domains with plain text files, so they’re completely static and easy to move around.
Under fahrni.me I have iam.fahrni.me which is my old WordPress blog. I’ve pull all of it down as HTML, CSS, and any images it had. I can do iam.fahrni.me now. I’m no longer using it.
Most of the data under crabapples.net is completely static with the exception of my blog, rob.crabapples.net. That is maintained at Micro.blog, which I really like.
I’ve been thinking about moving rob.crabapples.net out of Micro.blog and to a manually maintained weblog. Completely static. I was inspired by Louie Mantia’s website. He manages everything manually. How can you not love that? 😃
Of course, like a knucklehead I want to put together some tools to take care of that. I’m thinking I can put everything on github and write something to help me generate my blog’s main page and publish each post as static HTML.
I’m sure as I lay dying I won’t really think about this, but I am now. 😄
The snow is still falling and it is absolutely beautiful.
Here it comes! ❄️
I do love it!
More Winter
Tuesday looks like fun. We had snow on the ground for most of January. Had a week without it. And it looks like we’re gonna get some more.
This time it’s not gonna be deep freeze city afterward. The rain that follows on Thursday and through the weekend should clean it up.
I guess Punxsutawney Phil did say six more weeks of winter. 🐿️
Random Stuff
We expected rain with a chance of sleet or snow overnight and this morning.
We have an active thunderstorm passing through. That wasn’t in the forecast. I’ve never experienced a thunderstorm with snow, not that it’s happening now, but I’d imagine it could happen? ⛈️
Speaking of under the weather. I’m still feeling terrible. Clogged sinuses and it just won’t go away. I’m also exhausted. Why can’t I shake this? 🤒
Today, expected high of 69F, nice and sunny, just a perfect day. 🕶️
Tomorrow, high of 37F, chance of snow. ❄️
It just cracks me up. The East is a weird place. 😆
It’s a real shame Substack loves Nazis so much. I thought it was a great platform up to that point.
Their iOS app is really quite nice and the styling of the website and app are fantastic. It gets out of the way and lets you do what you’re there for, reading.
Cotton Bureau Sales! 🥳
Got my first sales report from Cotton Bureau and was super excited to see how many t-shirts and cases I’d sold! 😃
One. I sold one phone case and zero t-shirts. Oh, and that one case was sold to me, so it doesn’t count. 😳🤣
If you like the Stream icon head over to Cotton Bureau and buy a t-shirt or phone case!