The skeezy side of my neighborhood.

The other day like Sat. just after 5pm, as I'm coming back from the local library branch and then the dollar store, I walk through a side street to get to my house, and there's a cracked out looking (middle aged) (white) guy in shorts hobbling along the sidewalk, and he yells out to someone passing farther down the street, "Got any pain pills, man?".

That guy, who looks respectable, calls out, "Go check with [someone], they're a nurse!", and the guy crosses the street towards me and goes to walk up some steps.

I pretended not to notice, and shifted walking to the other side of the street, as the guy moved towards my side.

A nighttime urban sight:

A few weeks ago, I'm bicycling home from school very late at night, and everything is quiet.

As I bike across a major brightly lit street where there's no cars, I happen to look left, and I see a raccoon just finishing loping across the four lanes, and it disappears between two parked cars.

Big Scrabble news!!!: My first "bingo" ever.

For the first time in my life, I cleared my rack and used all 7 tiles in a single play, and so got a 50-point bonus.

In Scrabble slang, that's called a "bingo", and it was my very first.

The word was "CREATURE", and it was during my 2nd turn of the game.

I had suspected I could get a bingo in my first play since I had a good rack of letters, but I couldn't manage, and fortunately the new letters I drew allowed me to play "CREATURE".

I'm so happy.  I've been waiting to do that for years.

A British accent story: "Underlay".

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend was showing me the latest in his apartment renovations the other day, including the hardwood floor that he was putting down.

When we walked into one room, the floor was all torn up, and there was some kind of green see-through foamy thing all over the floor, partially starting to be covered by yet unvarnished hardwood pieces.

"What's that?", I was like, tapping my foot on the green see-through foamy thing all over the floor.

"Underlay," he was like.

Then, all of a sudden, he shifted into wacky (British) humor mode and started mimicking a Spanish accent, and was like, "Underlay, underlay!"

(Because in his British accent, "underlay" sounds a lot like "andale".)

A Friday evening purchase.

The other Friday evening, it was ass cold and I wanted a glass of wine and some gummy bears, so I ran up to the local chain drugstore to get some.

"Wine and gummy bears, isn't that going to be a good evening," I was like, to the (taller) (young) (gay-looking) (hispanic) cashier.

"Oh my God," he was like, "Are you going to try that?".

"Try what?", I was like

He then told me that he saw something on Facebook the other day where you actually put gummy bears in wine and let them sit and then eat them or drink it or something like that, and I had to explain that no, it was just a coincidence, I was planning to consume them separately.

Private insurance doesn't have its basic shit together.

From my latest insurer:

1) From back in January, a doctor had tests done but didn't send my new insurance number to the corporate lab place, who then billed my old insurer, so I had to call them up again to change my number...  Only to get a bill from them this month, saying my insurance number with my latest insurer doesn't exist.

I then call up my new insurer, and it turns out that my new insurance number on all my documents actually *isn't* my real insurance number used for the forms that matter, you have to add an "01" on the end.

I mean, what the fuck?  How is anyone supposed to know that?

2) I get assigned a primary care doctor automatically, but it turns out she's an Ob-gyn doctor, and the number for her office they give me is actually the anesthesiology department at a hospital where she occasionally does care.

So, I call them up, and they assign me a new doctor, and then right after I hang up I call his clinic for an appointment...  Only to find out that he doesn't work there anymore.

So, I have to call them back again to make sure it's okay that I have a doctor they didn't assign at the same clinic, which still accepts the insurance, but would just have me see a different doctor (I was worried about random charges, though they said it was okay).

I mean, what the fuck?  They didn't know he left?  Is their system listings that out-of-date?

. . .

I really don't know what "value added" these places give to healthcare.  They just seem like a big bunch of incompetent leaches driving up costs.  With government, at least there's direct oversight.  I can't wait until the day I can buy into Medicare and have some consistency and sanity with the process.

Odd Memory at a Graduation Celebration.

So, at the post-graduation party for a friend of my one lawyer friend from Missouri, who had just gotten her Masters and with whom I've hung out from time to time, I got to meet some of her other friends and relatives, including the family of her husband.

As it turns out, his brother's wife is from New Jersey, and her dad was in one of the Twin Towers, like a lot of people who went to her high school, since all of their families worked in Manhattan but commuted in from northern New Jersey.

They didn't know what happened to him at first, and then he showed up two days later on foot "covered in ash", since all the transportation was shut down and he just kept walking across the main bridges and down the roads and everything, till he finally got home.

She was also watching from across the river when the Towers fell, and could feel shockwaves through the ground.

She also also says her high school got a piece of one of the Towers to display, since so many people's families were affected, about thirty directly, whether their family members ultimately lived or not.