A Rant - and more quilting.......And the Sign of the Devil in my Floor

Bet that caught your attention!

Rant first!  Since my knee surgery I have enjoyed the benefits of sleeping.  But since I am one of those total insomniacs who rarely sleep, I convinced the old doc (not really, he is younger than me!) to continue giving me the Ambien that Dr. Gorgeous gave me.

At some point, my pharmacy did not have the 5 mg tablets so they gave me half the number of 10 mg tablets with instructions to cut them in half.  Well, now that seems to be the standard.  Yes, I have a splitter.  And Yes, I do cut them in half.  But it is not always a clean cut since the tablets are pretty small.  And why should I do it when there are 5 mg tables out there anyway?

It would be just so much easier to have the 5's and not have to do all that.  Now the pharmacist says he cannot give me 5's without calling the doctor, getting his approval for the change.  Oye!  THEY were the ones who changed it in the FIRST place!

So I guess I need to find someone who takes 10's but gets them in 5's and trade!  Would that make me a dealer?  Aughhh!


I need to get my Modern Robin round put on before the meeting on Monday.  And I need to finish up the Cotton Robin so it can be mailed off in two weeks.  And the next color for the Rainbow Challenge is light blues and I pulled fabrics for some foxes.  Since I have already done a number of lighter blue foxes, I decided to do teal foxes instead.  And I need to do some fishes and some asterisks, and some cranes.  I might just ditch the cranes, I think i am over them.

So I need to put another quilt on the frame and start off June with a good finish.  I have several to choose from.

The Houses, which was a Mystery Quilt I did two years ago.
Spools, which was  Lotto block set I won 4 years ago.
Stars, which was  quilt I did 8 or 9 years ago.
Black Random, which needs a backing still.

OR

Any number of quilts I have sitting in the box in my room.  Maybe I need to just do it and stop talking about it!

Oh, let me tell you about my foyer floor!  It was dark dark wood parquet and we hated it, so I called my good friend David Iles at the Floor Store and asked him to come lay me some tile!  I chose the center medallion at one of the hardware stores like Home Depot, I think it was Home Depot.  Lowe's was not built over here yet.

Anyway, when David's crew came to lay the tiles I gave them the center tiles and they did a fabulous job.

About  year later, I was having David do my bathroom, the one I just spent all that time on.  I let the crew in the front door, dogs out the back, and showed them the bathroom they would be working in.

Devil's Tower, WY

One guy freaked out.  Like MAJOR freak out.  He said that the medallion was the sign of the devil and I must be a devil worshiper to have that in my house.  And to have it built into the floor was the worst thing I could do.  I think he even mentioned Charles Manson.

I can assure you, I chose it from Home Depot not the Hell Depot, and that I liked the Mariner's Compass reference, not the Devil's Compass.   We did go to Devil's Tower in Wyoming, but even that doesn't look like my floor.  (You might recognize this as from the movie Close Encounters.)

I assure you, I am not worshiping anything!

OK, I am frustrated by, shall we just call it a lack of customer relations?

I have spent most of the morning on the phone with:

1 - physical therapy group
2 - doctor's offices
3 - pharmacy
4 - medical insurance
5 - prescription plan insurance

Have I gotten anything resolved yet?  No.

This is the deal:

At the doc's office on Wednesday, he gave Frank a prescription.  Frank took said prescription to pharmacy.  Later, when he went to pick it up, they said they needed approval from the doctor.  (I figured his prescription would be his approval for the prescription, but obviously not.)

At the doc's office on Thursday, he gave me orders for physical therapy.  The PT group called me Thurs afternoon and said they needed to get pre-certification from the insurance company before scheduling me.  I have never needed that before, but hey, Obamacare is changing things.  So, OK.

Fast forward a week, neither of us have gotten our stuff.  So I call the insurance company.  Which takes several degrees and a couple of PhDs to get through.  For some reason I must have a really bad Southern accent because the automated system keeps saying, I am sorry, I did not understand what you said.  Geez.

I get through to a human.  Who verifies that I do not need pre-certification from them, that I can have my PT appointment with no strings attached.  I call the PT office who says, oh, yeah......we knew that on Monday but just have not gotten around to doing anything about it.

Then I call the Prescription people, who say, we can't talk to you because you can only answer 4 of the 5 questions we need to verify that you are the party who can hear the answer.  The question I can't answer is what strength is the prescription written for.  I CAN answer, SS#, DOB, ID Number, Employer Number, what doctor wrote it, what the date was, what the name of the drug is and how many times I blinked this morning.  You would figure that after all the info I DID know, that I was pretty much who I said I was.  But they thought I might be an illegal drug runner trying to get his heart meds without authorization by pretending to be Frank.

So I call the doctor who says they have never received the fax from the pharmacy requesting authorization.

I call the pharmacy to ask them to send the fax requesting authorization, but they say they did it and whined about how much work they have to do, and how important their personal time is and, heaven's forbid, I call when they are at lunch.  This is Walmart, kiddies, Walmart.

I called the prescription drug people, and got caught in a loop where they wanted to know Frank's date of birth and didn't understand the way I said "2".  I was thinking of some other things to say to them by this time.  I think I speak very well, indeed.

So there I sit, a week later, a morning of frustrating phone calls and teeth gnashing, and still no PT appointment and no prescription.

glen