Resthome meals.

Lately at the resthome whenever I've been working, it's been chicken all the time.

I always wrap up the bones and skin to take home and freeze so I have it in order to boil up some broth.

Person on the subway the other afternoon...

 ...when I was going into work:

A(n older) (thinner) (out-of-it-looking) (black) man who was slouched back in his seat, and who would on and off flick the ends of some card that he had in his hand, for more than a half hour, and occasionally slowly put his arm back onto the back of the seat, and tap his fingernails there on some metal part.

Health insurance annoyances.

Since I need to start getting colonoscopies because colon cancer runs in my family, I'm starting to set one up for this summer.

(I had meant to do this last year, but Covid got in the way.)

Setting up an appointment with a specialist wasn't that big a deal on my new insurance that I have off of the Affordable Care Act, but what came next was a bit surprising.

I had to make sure that the hospital was in-network, then deal with trying to figure out if the anesthesiologist will be in-network, which you really can't do till a week before the procedure, it turns out.

I also have to get cleared for the procedure by my primary care doc a few weeks before the test, and that includes bloodwork, and it turns out that the new in-network primary care doctor doesn't do bloodwork tests out of that office, so I'd either have to go out to a far suburb to see them, or set up a separate bloodwork appointment at a separate lab place at a separate location.

So, that makes quite a bit of work, in addition to figuring out how I can get affordable colonoscopy prep, since the kit I got prescribed costs $100 even with insurance.

I'm thinking of this overall as a test case in how good my health insurance is; you never really know until you start having to use it.

More on (Tibetans) in my city.

This week at the resthome, my one (older) (blockier-built) (Tibetan) coworker was saying that the (Tibetan) association in our city was raising money to send to India, and she had donated over a hundred dollars.

"Did you manage to raise a lot of money?", I was like.

"Two, three thousand," she was like, and then she added that the (Tibetan) association in our city is an official thing with a president and a vice-president and everything, and when I asked if they had a website, she was like, "Oh, yes," and so I got the exact name and then I looked it up on some downtime on that very same shift.

And, it said that there was only a few hundred (Tibetans) in the whole metropolitan area, which was a lot less than I had thought, though my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor, who was also working that shift, said that that was old information and that it was maybe five hundred now.

So, I counted up all my coworkers in my head, as well as their relatives who I've met, and then I pulled up my calculator on my smartphone, and I realized that I've met like 1.5% of the entire (Tibetan) population in my city's metropolitan area.

When I told that to my one (older) (blockier-built) (Tibetan) coworker, she was like, "Really?", and then she added that she doesn't know how to calculate fractions.

Two reading coincidences:

1) At the resthome, I tell the one resident who's a retired school nurse that in my ongoing "read the entire Bible" project I'm currently reading First Maccabees and so I feel out of synch with the (Jewish) liturgical year, and she's like, "Oh yes, them, they got too friendly with the Romans."

Then, that night I read some more First Maccabees, and it's exactly the part where they start getting friendly with the Romans.

2) Like a night or two later, I'm sitting in my apartment listening to a local classical radio station and reading more First Maccabees, and the next thing I know they start playing a few selections from Handel's Judas Maccabeus.

Lost pepper spray.

Around the same time that my bike helmet got vandalized, I also was going home from work one night and I realized that my little thing of pepper spray was gone.

As I figure it, I keep both that and my little hand sanitizer bottle in an external pouch on my one backpack, so when I went to go pull out or go put back my hand sanitizer, the pepper spray must have slipped out and fallen and I didn't notice it and so I lost it.

So, the very next time that I went in to the resthome, I left early, so I could go to a hardware store nearby before work and pick up a replacement pepper spray.

I felt very bare without it.

Bike vandalization.

Like a month or so ago when I got home from a Sunday shift working at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I walked out of the subway stop and went to go hop on my bike and bike the short distance back to my house, but my helmet that I had locked up onto my bike had been vandalized, where someone had worked off the latch clip and just taken it, so I didn't have the part that latches my helmet and so my helmet was useless and I had to bike back to my house with my head uncovered and unprotected.

And, the next morning, I noticed that the caps on my tires had also been screwed off and taken.

"What a turd," the guy at the bike shop was like, when I popped in there to see if they carried helmet clips.

He also wondered it had been some drunko from a nearby bar, which is what I had been wondering, too.