When my father was in an assisted living facility, I was taking care of his house during my many frequent trips to Phoenix. His answering machine was constantly getting automated messages from CVS, saying he had prescriptions ready for pickup.
I’m now having the same problem with my cellphone. There is no option in the CVS app to stop the calls, let alone turn off automatic refills. So I resorted to Facebook.
So an old-fashioned phone call is what it’s going to take? I’ll give it a try on Monday.
With another $119 having gone to Amazon to renew Prime, I felt justified in sampling a TV series I’ve never watched, that my subscription makes available for streaming. I think of “House” as a recent show, but it started a couple of years before this blog, which is coming up on its 15th anniversary.
The series is old enough that it was written to a formula that isn’t ideal for binge-watching. The sequence of events is essentially repeated in each episode. “Okay, here’s where they try the wrong thing and it causes a heart attack or seizure,” etc. So, like my experience watching “The Walking Dead,” I was losing interest at the start of the second season. Then I saw this scene in S2:E3.
My mother lived for seven years after surviving a deadly Aspergillus fungal infection in her lung, by undergoing an extremely difficult course of Amphotericin treatments. Two of my sisters — one an MD, the other an RN — installed the central line themselves, after brushing aside the attending physician and nurse. The drug’s side effects are so awful it deserves to be called “amphoterrible.”
The impossibly intertwined personal lives of the “House” characters is typical TV soap opera writing. But physicians breaking into patients’ homes to find clues to the cause of their illnesses, and never getting caught during or afterwards? Ludicrous! But… hmm… come to think of it, there were times at work when the quickest way to fix a problem was to open a VPN tunnel to a hospital without prior permission, and use RDP to access a system console with administrative privileges. (Note: This is the method cyber criminals prefer to introduce ransomware.) Okay, so the idea isn’t so ludicrous. Maybe the breaking-and-entering plot device is resolved later in the series.
As expected, Hugh Laurie is fun to watch. I’m sure he made a lot more money playing Gregory House than he did appearing with Rowan Atkinson on “Blackadder”…
… or when he teamed up with Stephen Fry. This is about as British as British comedy gets!
Dealing with a nightmare situation resulting from having the deck demolished, in preparation for replacement. The work is now on hold, pending review by the town’s building inspector. When can he get here? No idea. I’ll try to cheer myself up by looking at this delightful Jack Davis illustration.
Click to enlarge
Follow-up: After crawling around in a small and very dirty space, all is well once again. The inspector is still required, but for a routine reason.
“The Internet really has sped things up. It takes only a minute for me to sort the two Sunday papers I get, and not much longer than that to read the tiny comics sections.” Hmm… that’s 170 characters. Ten too many? I’d better trim it down.
“The Internet has sped things up. It takes only a minute to sort the two Sunday papers I get, and not much longer than that to read the tiny comics sections.” There, only 156 characters.
I’m not on Twitter, but I’m on Facebook, and every time I go there it asks, “What’s on your mind, Doug?” How about what was on my mind 55 years ago?
No, this isn’t a selfie in the manner of Anthony Weiner and Jeffrey Toobin! That’s my chest hair in the photo. Some of it was shaved before having a cyst removed. Like an iceberg, it was much bigger under the surface. The size of a grape, the dermatologist said. Too much information for an otherwise pleasant Saturday?
