Why yes, I do get a little excited about a nice baking dish. If it was mine, I’d be inspired to make this Artichoke, Potato, and Portobello Mushroom Casserole recipe.
Migraine Log – Week 11
I’ve been taking Petadolex for my migraines for 10 weeks now (The first week I wasn’t taking it). I’ve got 2 more weeks before I get to the 3 months mark – the amount of time it can take for the medicine to start working. I’ll be taking it for 2 or 3 weeks beyond the 12 week mark whether or not it appears to be working 1) for better data 2) because I have that many extra pills.
Revelations
I mean no disrespect when I say that prescientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, and trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe into the unknown has yielded zero. No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics.
Weekly Top 5
So this is the crunch week of my scary February. Cross your fingers! Luckily, there are some pretty good chocolate sales this week.
Universal Healthcare, please?
I went to the ER in 2006. I received a bill shortly thereafter for some extraordinary amount of money. I called the hospital, gave them my insurance information, and didn’t hear from them again.
Late last month, however, I received a bill from a creditor for $1200 from the ER visit. I called the company I was insured through in 2006. They confirmed that they’d paid a portion of the bill in early 2007 and that I did indeed owe a remainder of $1200.
I called the hospital. They said, yes, I did owe $1200. But when I asked why I hadn’t received any bills and why I’d been contacted by a creditor instead of them, they got very confused.
A week and 8 phone calls later, we’d determined that I’d been sent bills starting in 2008. Since they were sent to an old address, I’d never received them. Many more phone calls later, I’d convinced them that there was no way I could have known to change my address with the hospital if they’d waited over a year to start sending me bills.
The bad news is that I have to pay $1200, which I would rather spend on new glasses and fixing a cavity and maybe even doing something extravagant like eating in a restaurant. To give those of you who are not poor college students an idea of how much money this is to me: it takes me almost 2 months to make $1200.
The good news is they fixed my credit report and are letting me get on some sort of payment plan. It sucks, but at least I’ll be able to make rent AND buy groceries for the next few months.
I looked at the bill in detail hoping there was some sort of mistake and asked some questions about the charges. One in particular, EMERG RM $730, caught my eye. I’d already been billed for every poke and prod and medication and supply and by every doctor who’d even glanced at me – so what did this vague charge cover? The answer made me very very annoyed.
The ER has 5 levels of admissions. Level 1 is patient has a cold or has scraped a knee. Level 5 is patient is dead, but could possibly be revived. They charge you a fee based on this level to (and I quote) “walk in the door.” This fee increases with the level. Since I was level 4, they charged me $730 to walk through the door. I think this is particularly unfair since not only was I certainly not walking, I don’t even remember the door.
At least I no longer feel the least bit guilty about vomiting all over one of the doctors!
To any ridiculously rich people out there (or people with an extra $5), there’s a paypal donate button on the sidebar (Under “The College Fund)…
Oops! We did it again…
In 1979 villagers from Shantiniketan in West Bengal cut down a palm about to flower because they feared it could be a “ghost palmyra tree.” This was the last Corypha taliera alive in the wild. Years later, a cultivated specimen from an Indian botanic garden flowered and the seeds were collected. Some of the seedlings were sent to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, where these pictures were taken.
In the 50s a professor at Dhaka University in Bangladesh noticed a strange palm. Recognizing its potential rarity, he convinced university administrators to protect it. It turned out to be C. taliera! Since it was discovered on an undeveloped part of the campus, it was considered by some to be the last known specimen growing in the wild. However, it flowered late last year and is now dead or dying. Hopefully, attempts to grow the seeds it produces will be successful. While there are some other C. taliera alive in cultivation, the more genetic diversity and the more plants there are the more likely this plant will stick around.
Without well funded academic institutions, we wouldn’t even know that species like this were in trouble. And now governments around the world are slashing education and research budgets. Sarkozy gave a particulary ignorant and harsh speech about the performance and funding of French universities and research institutes. Go, sign the petition supporting French research! (And don’t forget to click the confirmation link in your email.)
Berry Go Round #13 is up!
This is old news, but if you haven’t checked out the latest edition of Berry Go Round at Watching the World Wake Up, go! My favorite entry this month was about the oldest tree on earth.
I’ll be hosting the next edition of the carnival in a few weeks, so email your submissions to enchantressofnumbers (at) gmail.