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Mar. 21st, 2016 08:15 amI am behind on answering comments. That may mean that some don’t get answered. That may mean that some don’t get answered until after we’ve all forgotten what the exchange was about. I’m torn because things that need just a 'Thanks!' are really, really easy to answer but I also feel that they don’t necessarily rank high on the list of priorities to answer. I’ve been tired and headachy, so the mental wherewithal to respond intelligently (or even coherently) has been lacking. I’m also giving priority to answering family emails and things that relate to medical stuff.
The patient portal for Cordelia’s pediatrician is truly terrible. I tried to send a message to her doctor, and it kept sending while I was in the middle of typing the subject. I didn’t hit return or tab or anything, just typed letters. I skipped the subject the third time and managed to get a message in, but the stupid thing won’t send without a subject, so I had to fill that in eventually. I also scheduled Cordelia for a dermatology appointment during spring break. The form for that kept glitching with drop down menus that wouldn’t actually allow me to select things and required fields that I couldn’t click on, so I’m not actually convinced it went through.
Cordelia tells me that she’s helping write a letter, on behalf of the Gay-Straight Alliance at her school, asking the principal to designate at least one gender neutral bathroom. I hope that goes through. I’d rather like to see all the bathrooms be gender neutral. None of the bathrooms have urinals, so that’s not an issue. I don’t think any of the bathrooms have tampon/pad dispensers either, even though they could be very useful for the girls. And, having such a dispenser wouldn’t be something that would make a bathroom not work as gender neutral.
Cordelia says that there’s a kid in her class who identifies as gender fluid and that they have given general permission for everyone to use whatever pronouns they want to. Cordelia uses masculine pronouns. I suspect (but didn’t ask) that that has to do with how the kid publicly identified when they first met. The kid has changed name to the more or less gender neutral 'Chris.'
I should note here that I’m terrible at remembering the preferred pronouns of people on DW/LJ. Because of that, if I’m not absolutely sure how someone identifies, I default to 'they' because I’m hoping that’s the least offensive way to be wrong.
After we did the weekly trip to the library, Scott took me to the nature center near our house, and we walked around a little bit. I was extremely wobbly by the time we got back to the car, but I did manage some walking around. Scott’s goal was to have me visit some of the Ingress portals that are a little way into the woods. I hacked them (and got keys for all of them!). Scott currently holds all of the science center portals except the one I own.
I upgraded some of Scott’s resonators, the level 1 and level 2 resonators, specifically. Any one person can only place so many resonators of a given level at a portal (and that varies according to their level). I’m only level 4, but that’s enough to upgrade a 1 or a 2 at least a bit. Scott is level 8. I placed some shields on Scott’s portals, too, because I’ve got a lot of them and really don’t get out enough to do anything else with them.
Of course, someone from the other faction rolled through between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. The park closes at 11:00, and several of the portals can only be reached by walking into the woods. I’m not sure if the deer cull is over yet or not, but I think that wouldn’t have been happening on a Sunday night, so they weren’t potentially being lethally stupid, at least. Whoever it was didn’t capture all of the portals they cleared and didn’t heavily fortify the portals they were able to capture. They only placed two or three resonators per portal. I’m not sure I’m physically up to getting there, but the notion is tempting. I can’t fortify anything very heavily, but I could capture the unclaimed portals and ask Scott to finish them out later.
It’ll probably take another two to three weeks for me to advance to level 5. I expect I’ll reach a point where advancing is more effort than I’m willing to put in because, at a certain point (I think after level 8), you have to do more than accumulate points in order to advance.
Scott’s current intention is to try to get me out for five minute walks as regularly as he can. I suppose Ingress is as good an excuse as any, and getting out will be good for me. The biggest difficulty right at the moment, apart from tiring easily, is that I overheat very fast. Wearing a cotton shirt on top of a tricot nightgown makes me sweat a lot. I took my coat off while we were walking at the science center even though it was only about 45F.
Scott opened the envelope for my long term disability paperwork yesterday. I was going to wait until I was ready to take it in, but it turns out that it’s a good thing he opened it. The new monitoring company only gives me fifteen days from the date on their letter to get everything back (the old company allowed thirty). They also wanted a heck of a lot of information from me that the old company never wanted. I’ve filled all of that out, but I keep worrying that I’ve said or not said something that will mean they take away my LTD benefits (about $1000 a month, backup health/dental insurance, access to the clinic where Scott and I have been going forever, and a few other perks of technically still being an employee of the local university). I mean, I don’t think they could take away my benefits as long as the federal government still considers me disabled, but Social Security hasn’t bothered to review my status in about eight years, so… I suspect they looked at the fact that I’ve been trying different medications for anxiety since I was about 22 and that not a single one of them has worked and pretty much assumed that nothing else is likely to work, either.
I had to laugh, though, they wanted a list of every doctor I’ve seen in the last year. That’s a long list, and I still haven’t managed to dig up the name of the guy I saw for five seconds about my broken foot/sprained ankle (he said, "Yep. Broken and sprained," and turned me over to a PA to do everything else). That’s kind of borderline on being within the last year, though, as it was March of 2015, so I’m not sure I need to do that work. I also decided that they really didn’t need the names of the radiologists who dealt with my mammograms or whoever did my biopsy. And I can’t find the name of the surgeon/breast specialist I saw last May who left the program before we did the follow up mammogram in August.
The patient portal for Cordelia’s pediatrician is truly terrible. I tried to send a message to her doctor, and it kept sending while I was in the middle of typing the subject. I didn’t hit return or tab or anything, just typed letters. I skipped the subject the third time and managed to get a message in, but the stupid thing won’t send without a subject, so I had to fill that in eventually. I also scheduled Cordelia for a dermatology appointment during spring break. The form for that kept glitching with drop down menus that wouldn’t actually allow me to select things and required fields that I couldn’t click on, so I’m not actually convinced it went through.
Cordelia tells me that she’s helping write a letter, on behalf of the Gay-Straight Alliance at her school, asking the principal to designate at least one gender neutral bathroom. I hope that goes through. I’d rather like to see all the bathrooms be gender neutral. None of the bathrooms have urinals, so that’s not an issue. I don’t think any of the bathrooms have tampon/pad dispensers either, even though they could be very useful for the girls. And, having such a dispenser wouldn’t be something that would make a bathroom not work as gender neutral.
Cordelia says that there’s a kid in her class who identifies as gender fluid and that they have given general permission for everyone to use whatever pronouns they want to. Cordelia uses masculine pronouns. I suspect (but didn’t ask) that that has to do with how the kid publicly identified when they first met. The kid has changed name to the more or less gender neutral 'Chris.'
I should note here that I’m terrible at remembering the preferred pronouns of people on DW/LJ. Because of that, if I’m not absolutely sure how someone identifies, I default to 'they' because I’m hoping that’s the least offensive way to be wrong.
After we did the weekly trip to the library, Scott took me to the nature center near our house, and we walked around a little bit. I was extremely wobbly by the time we got back to the car, but I did manage some walking around. Scott’s goal was to have me visit some of the Ingress portals that are a little way into the woods. I hacked them (and got keys for all of them!). Scott currently holds all of the science center portals except the one I own.
I upgraded some of Scott’s resonators, the level 1 and level 2 resonators, specifically. Any one person can only place so many resonators of a given level at a portal (and that varies according to their level). I’m only level 4, but that’s enough to upgrade a 1 or a 2 at least a bit. Scott is level 8. I placed some shields on Scott’s portals, too, because I’ve got a lot of them and really don’t get out enough to do anything else with them.
Of course, someone from the other faction rolled through between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. The park closes at 11:00, and several of the portals can only be reached by walking into the woods. I’m not sure if the deer cull is over yet or not, but I think that wouldn’t have been happening on a Sunday night, so they weren’t potentially being lethally stupid, at least. Whoever it was didn’t capture all of the portals they cleared and didn’t heavily fortify the portals they were able to capture. They only placed two or three resonators per portal. I’m not sure I’m physically up to getting there, but the notion is tempting. I can’t fortify anything very heavily, but I could capture the unclaimed portals and ask Scott to finish them out later.
It’ll probably take another two to three weeks for me to advance to level 5. I expect I’ll reach a point where advancing is more effort than I’m willing to put in because, at a certain point (I think after level 8), you have to do more than accumulate points in order to advance.
Scott’s current intention is to try to get me out for five minute walks as regularly as he can. I suppose Ingress is as good an excuse as any, and getting out will be good for me. The biggest difficulty right at the moment, apart from tiring easily, is that I overheat very fast. Wearing a cotton shirt on top of a tricot nightgown makes me sweat a lot. I took my coat off while we were walking at the science center even though it was only about 45F.
Scott opened the envelope for my long term disability paperwork yesterday. I was going to wait until I was ready to take it in, but it turns out that it’s a good thing he opened it. The new monitoring company only gives me fifteen days from the date on their letter to get everything back (the old company allowed thirty). They also wanted a heck of a lot of information from me that the old company never wanted. I’ve filled all of that out, but I keep worrying that I’ve said or not said something that will mean they take away my LTD benefits (about $1000 a month, backup health/dental insurance, access to the clinic where Scott and I have been going forever, and a few other perks of technically still being an employee of the local university). I mean, I don’t think they could take away my benefits as long as the federal government still considers me disabled, but Social Security hasn’t bothered to review my status in about eight years, so… I suspect they looked at the fact that I’ve been trying different medications for anxiety since I was about 22 and that not a single one of them has worked and pretty much assumed that nothing else is likely to work, either.
I had to laugh, though, they wanted a list of every doctor I’ve seen in the last year. That’s a long list, and I still haven’t managed to dig up the name of the guy I saw for five seconds about my broken foot/sprained ankle (he said, "Yep. Broken and sprained," and turned me over to a PA to do everything else). That’s kind of borderline on being within the last year, though, as it was March of 2015, so I’m not sure I need to do that work. I also decided that they really didn’t need the names of the radiologists who dealt with my mammograms or whoever did my biopsy. And I can’t find the name of the surgeon/breast specialist I saw last May who left the program before we did the follow up mammogram in August.
