We are starting with the report on Sunday.\u00a0 Again, the rain turned to snow last night, but now this morning returned to rain. John and the dogs had a wet trip out to exercise and feed the horses.\u00a0 I spent time with frozen vegetables on my sore shoulder, and putting together my meds for the week.\u00a0 I realized I need to order Prilosec and the question came up, after hearing my neighbor was put on it for acid reflux and heartburn, why I was taking it.\u00a0 We found some information on line, and I read the patient instructions with my refill, so I have the right questions to ask my doctors\u2019 nurses.\u00a0 Tonight I go to the Taize\u2019 service.<\/p>\n
Last night I had a long phone conversation with a friend I have know since she was 17.\u00a0 We sold her a Brittany for her graduation present.\u00a0 She was a hunter.\u00a0 She now lives in South Lake Tahoe and has a 17 year old daughter.\u00a0 We were amazed at thinking of the past and our friendship over the years.\u00a0 She is 15 years younger than I am, but we were real buddies while I was in Idaho.\u00a0 We went to dog field trials and shows together for years– till I left Idaho.\u00a0 And, our friendship has endured.\u00a0 Those are the best kind.\u00a0 I also visited her in her new home several years ago when I was down for a conference, and one day she took me on a trip around the Lake there at Tahoe.\u00a0 It was a very interesting day together.\u00a0 We visited lots of tourist sites, had lunch, went through museums and wildlife parks, and had a wonderful day.<\/p>\n
Sunday night\u2019s Taize\u2019 went well, but we only had a piano, 2 violins, and a clarinet.\u00a0 Dinner after was great:\u00a0 Spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, and a birthday cake for the husband of our clarinet player, made by his wife.\u00a0 Chocolate cake with white creamy frosting, made from scratch with Crisco.<\/p>\n
Monday: \u00a0I joined two geographers for lunch at The Dakota Caf\u00e9 to discuss scholarship funding for geography students at CWU. There is a gap between the State\u2019s current and future dollar intake and outgo.\u00a0 The recent national economic meltdown brought this issue to the here-&-now but it looks to get much worse as the boomers crash \u2013 that is, age, and thus burden the entitlement system they have been promised. \u00a0After we solved the government\u2019s funding woes, I went to SAIL exercise class at the Adult Activity Center.\u00a0 John met early in the morning with the farrier to trim some of the horses feet.\u00a0 It was nasty weather with winds up to 50 mph. \u00a0Wind makes horses nervous, they being prey and everything else in their environment is a predator.\u00a0 Wind causes things to move and make noise and if they decide to flee one does not want to be in their escape path.\u00a0 Never a dull moment.\u00a0 All the day\u2019s activities ended well.<\/p>\n
Tuesday:\u00a0 Started out snowing, then sunshine, then cloudy, then clear, then snowing again, and ended clear.\u00a0 Sad story.\u00a0 A friend from Yakima died of an apparent heart attack.\u00a0 He was only in his fifties.\u00a0 This was a person I worked with at CWU in Career Services, with many of my students.\u00a0 He was a dear soul and really cared about helping students formulate their resumes, job application letters, and do a good interview for their career.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a gentle wonderful man who will be missed by all his friends.\u00a0 This generated an extra load of e-mails throughout the day.\u00a0 Busy work for today included receipts, bill paying, and sorting things in the den, but nothing\u00a0 looks accomplished.\u00a0 I washed a load of dishes.\u00a0 Then I went to town for playing music and John fixed a good dinner, but we didn\u2019t eat till I returned, after 8:00 p.m.<\/p>\n
Wednesday:\u00a0 Long day of capturing pictures from the WSJ for my colleagues, and working on tax receipts and undoing problems with medical insurance claims submitted incorrectly.\u00a0 That in itself is a full time job.\u00a0 Medicare\u2019s reporting year begins on January 1 while Group Health begins their new round of paperwork in October.\u00a0 Both have deductibles.\u00a0 Thus, when a bill is submitted each entity decides what part of the cost they might pay but won\u2019t because the deductible part hasn\u2019t yet been met. For us now, Medicare is billed first.\u00a0 Often before the doctor\/clinic\/hospital hears from Medicare and\/or Group Health the computer software triggers a delinquent notice.\u00a0 As all the numbers, dates, codes, forms, and so on are indecipherable to anyone the only safe thing to do is to call and question everything.\u00a0 About half the time someone can figure it all out and explain it.\u00a0 Often, though, they will work on your question a little and come back to say a mistake has been made and they will re-code and re-bill.\u00a0 If you have sent a check to the doctor\/clinic\/hospital, they then will have to return a portion to you.\u00a0 Their check might arrive with another coded form that makes no sense and the time interval may be sufficiently long that you can\u2019t remember why you have just gotten a refund \u2013 or a new bill for a service performed 6 months ago.\u00a0 We wonder if the credit scoring agencies pay any attention to any of the medical billings?\u00a0 Hope not.<\/p>\n
Thursday:\u00a0 Up early and out to get Sunny in for neuter or spay by 8:30 a.m. at the vet.\u00a0 Turns out Sunny is a female, so she had a spay and will be at the vet overnight, for pickup tomorrow a.m..\u00a0\u00a0 She was not real happy being put in the crate for the car trip. The vet\u2019s assistant called to let us know the spay went well with no problems.\u00a0 John has taken to calling her \u201cSunshine or sweetie.\u201d \u00a0We left to drive to Costco in Yakima because we were almost out of dog food.\u00a0 While there we got other good stuff, and some for friends and neighbors, to save them a trip.\u00a0 Filled up John\u2019s Subaru with gas for $3.05\/gallon and thus saving $2.60 compared to a local purchase. That doesn\u2019t pay for the trip so the rest has to come from savings on monstrous packages and quantities at Costco. \u00a0\u00a0Got a good lunch at Quiznos, and not cheap, even with a special coupon.\u00a0 I guess we saved $5.49 on the purchase, however.\u00a0 On home and back soon for me to play music and John to get our phone outage (hence Internet access too) reported in person.\u00a0 If the phone doesn\u2019t work it\u2019s hard to call.\u00a0 Well, we do have cell phones but didn\u2019t have a number to call, and, on the way to town we found we had left those at home anyway.\u00a0 Then we attended a lecture about the changing society in Bali (lots of great photos) at CWU in the late afternoon.\u00a0 Home.\u00a0 Supper. \u00a0John went in again after dinner for a meeting of the trail riders\u2019 club, for which he writes the monthly newsletter.\u00a0 I stayed home.<\/p>\n
Friday:\u00a0 John just went to pick up Sunny – Sunshine.\u00a0 The bill was $124, actually only 70 for spay, and she had shots and rabies for 50.\u00a0 This morning I go for a massage and to play music at the soup kitchen at the food bank, then back to exercise\u2026 and tonight is another play with food gig.\u00a0 Lunch today at the soup kitchen after we played was quite good.\u00a0 Barbequed chicken wings, tater tots, green salad, and chocolate cream pie; and, I ate tonight too after playing music. \u00a0I will need to go on a diet.<\/p>\n
Sunny came home this morning, but I didn’t see her till I got home this afternoon.\u00a0 John said she was thrilled to be back to her litter box.\u00a0 She ate a little and went under the bunk bed.\u00a0 He hadn’t seen much of her, but when I came home, she came out to greet me and jumped up on the table but then left to go back to the back of the house.<\/p>\n
I did get a slight power nap before driving back to town to the LDS church for playing music and a dinner in payment.\u00a0 Boy, was it good.\u00a0 We had turkey (there was ham too, but too salty for me), rolls & corn muffins, baked potato, salads, and several great desserts (best was cheese cake with strawberries on top).\u00a0 We enjoyed playing for a small group of appreciative folks.\u00a0 We had a pretty good turnout of musicians: guitar, banjo, and 3-4 violins (one alternates on a mandolin).<\/p>\n
Saturday will be a full day and night. I’m going to drive to Leavenworth (1.5 hours) over the pass north of us for a birthday party for my former student, and will spend the night so I don’t have to drive home alone in the dark over Blewett Pass.\u00a0 This will be the first day I have spent away from home since returning from the hospital last year, well, from the Rehab center.\u00a0 Guess I was back in the hospital 3 times since then, in March, in June, and in August.<\/p>\n
Leavenworth is a small town along a river as that emerges from the east slope of the Cascade Mountains. One time it was a busy little place with lumbering and a railroad \u2013 one of three going over the mountains into Puget Sound.\u00a0 The town nearly expired until locals generated a rebirth as a tourist destination \u2013 a Bavarian village in central Washington.\u00a0 Here is a link.\u00a0 Check out the links on the left side, including the webcam near the bottom.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.leavenworth.org\/modules\/pages\/index.php?pageid=1<\/a><\/p>\n Might be some rain and a little snow on the pass I have to go over this afternoon, and return on Sunday morning.\u00a0 I don\u2019t leave till 3:30 Saturday afternoon, but I will give this to John to put on the blog, and I\u2019ll put my report about the rest of the weekend on next week\u2019s blog.<\/p>\n Hope you all have a good week.<\/p>\n Best regards from Nancy & John and all the critters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are starting with the report on Sunday.\u00a0 Again, the rain turned to snow last night, but now this morning returned to rain. John and the dogs had a wet trip out to exercise and feed the horses.\u00a0 I spent time with frozen vegetables on my sore shoulder, and putting together my meds for the … Continue reading “SATURDAY — A day\/night away from the ranch (Sunny & me)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-issues"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p72iNf-bO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":734,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}