Weekend Roundup! [NOT 31/7/22]

31/7/22 brightersideoflife 26

Hi, friends!

I hope your weekends went well. Did you get stuff done? If it was stupid hot where you live, did you stay indoors and cool?

Thanks to the double monsoon this week, we had a cool weekend. I did some yard work I’ve been putting off – weeding the front garden beds – but I finally got most of it done this morning. One area had too many bees for me to comfortably weed but oh well, got the rest of it. Bees are pretty chill but I didn’t want to rustle too much near their snack time, I too don’t like being interrupted while eating. Also I found 2 pair of squash bugs in the process of mating, so that felt like an amazing victory in the neverending battle against squash bugs.

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26 Comments

  1. 106 here today. Went out on SUPs this morning, quickly mowed the back lawn when we got home, and then sheltered inside for the rest of the day.

    Not that I feel sorry for them, but I do want to point out how unfortunately named the squash bugs are.

    • Mostly people are told to drown them because they have a strong odor, similar to how stink bugs have a strong odor.

      But I just usually squish them with my fingers. Whether or not I’m wearing gardening gloves. Yeah they smell, but to me it smells like sweet tarts candies so like who the fuck cares if that smell lingers for a little bit? Also if they’ve infested a sweet pepper plant, when squashed to death they just smell like the green peppers they’ve been eating. The little fuckers.

  2. Made tedious cookies requiring a press, supposed to taste like coffee and marmalade. I now have many dozen animal cracker sized and tasting cookies. Disappointing.

    • @Elliecoo I hate when I feel like I’ve wasted my time. But sometimes when a task is very tedious it’s hard to judge the results at the time. Maybe they’ll taste better to you tomorrow.

    • @elliecoo

      This might be a good FYCE theme for a week. Maybe leading up to (American) Thanksgiving or Christmas. Stuff that’s a PITA to make and doesn’t pay off. I think I’ve made my loathing of homemade meringue quite clear; I’d start with that. Also that time is Prime Cookie Season and I’m pretty much hopeless with those. Every single year when we had the Holiday Open House I’d waste a morning or an afternoon attempting simple, “can’t fail” from-scratch cookie recipes and they were always a disaster. A couple of years I ran out and bought boxes of those Entenmann’s sawdust/sugar chocolate chip cookies and just heated them up and passed them off as something I had created using a Martha Stewart recipe. A flush rises to my cheeks. The shame of it.

  3. It rained off and on all weekend. It cooled things off nicely here. But in the eastern part of the state it’s been devastating. My next door neighbor’s family is there. Her brother’s home was destroyed, he lost everything. Her parents home was damaged but livable. I was going to donate to the disaster fund. Would it be weird to offer it to them to go directly to her brother?

  4. We got the first bill for the rabies shots for my son — $14,000, with the total for all of the shots closer to $20K.

    Fortunately insurance will pick up almost all of it. But of course all of this is crazy.

    The cost of the vaccine charged to the ER is wildly inflated. The ER’s bill is wildly inflated on top of that. The insurance company will get the part they pay negotiated way down. But in the meanwhile endless forms fly black and forth, money is created and destroyed, and everything exists in state of quantum uncertainty.

    And of course you have to pity the souls of people going through this without insurance. Every freak on the wrong side of the national health care fight should have to deal with the fear of bankruptcy and the anxiety of wondering if they can afford life saving treatment.

    • There are literally millions of people who are on the wrong side of the national health care fight and who do deal with the fear of bankruptcy and wonder if they can afford life saving treatment.  The problem is that these imbeciles keep voting for Republicans because they are gullible and stupid.

      • Or there are the “keep socialism out of my Medicare” types.

        Part of the problem is we live in a country where the debate is so corrupted from the beginning in favor of the wrong side. Even basic facts like how much better things work every time they’re nationalized can’t be discussed honestly. The press can’t allow it.

        • Back in the beginning of April (so almost four months ago) I had an outpatient procedure done. Granted, it was performed by the head of the cardiology department himself, who is my cardiologist. Soon thereafter I got a bill, I feel like I’ve mentioned this before. The bill was something like $40,000 or $50,000 and the breakdown was:

          Insurance company: LOL, we’ll give you $12,000. [“Negotiated discount”.]

          My ultimate payment: About $2,000.

          Just last week I got a further bill from that same outpatient procedure, this one detailing the cost of the drugs that were pumped into my hand to make the procedure painless and other supplies and the cost of the non-MDs who, if you could do the math, might be assumed to be making in the high six figures themselves but that of course is not the case. It was pretty much the same thing. $50K; Insurance company: LOL we’ll give you $12K; cost to me $2K.

          I called the hospital billing department. This, at least, was not outsourced and the friendly woman on the phone mentioned that two of her children went to a charter school very close to my apartment and wondered if I had children of my own. Sadly, no, but she set up an interest-free repayment plan for me that will stretch out for 24 months. With inflation going the way it is she basically gave me at least a 10% discount, probably higher, but of course the cost of health care will rise by at least double that rate, as it has since the 1970s, so no one really wins in this situation except for the CEO and executives of this “non-profit” hospital corporation.

          • Yep. It’s the same story, except slightly in miniature, for the day I went to the ER on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned (no cause or effect there, but it certainly didn’t help): A $10,000 procedure was whittled down to $1,500. I negotiated a payment plan for the first bill but then got two others I’m still on the hook for as well.

  7. In Ontario suburb of Canada City, the holiday long weekend continues.  A friend of mine (divorced) wants to hit the local casino so I’m going off on a rando unplanned road trip. Don’t plan on losing (LOL) too much money though (but I’ve said that before.) He probably will.

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