Entry 758: Medicals

Finger update: My fracture has "healed" in the sense that the break is no longer detectable, but my finger is still very tender and swollen. I have really bad edema. It's not just a crossword puzzle word. This "Build up of fluid" or "Bodily swelling" is a very real thing. I can't quite make a fist, and if I bang my pinkie on something the right wrong way, it really smarts. I get that jolt of "electric" pain that courses through my entire arm for a microsecond.

It's really remarkable to me how long this thing is taking to get back to 100%. It happened over six weeks ago. By contrast, my son's little buddy fractured his heel three weeks ago and had to wear a walking boot for a bit, and he's already running around again. Kids are like little Wolverines, with their amazing regenerative powers, and they don't even realize it. That's one of the great ironies/tragedies of life. When you are at the peak of your physical powers, you aren't mentally developed enough to appreciate it. That's the problem with youth: It's wasted on the young.

I'm doing physical therapy for my finger, which is weird to me, but it seems to be helping. I haven't had a lot of success with physical therapy in the past. I've done it several times for my shoulder and on all occasions I ended up quitting because it's very time-consuming and expensive, and I wasn't seeing the results I was hoping for. It's possible I just wasn't patient enough, but it also was $50-$75 a session, and they wanted me to come at least twice a week. It's hard to justify paying that much for something that isn't doing a whole lot, and which I could do 90% of at my house for free. I still do daily stretches for my shoulder. It's been years, and it's definitely not back to normal, but it's probably better than it would be if I just did nothing. I don't know. I'm at the point now where trying to "fix" it is more burdensome to my life than working around it.

With my finger, however, I'm experiencing tangible improvement, and the sessions are only $5. I have no idea why it's so much cheaper. Maybe it's because it's just my finger; maybe it's because I'm doing it on-site at a little clinic in the doctor's office, as opposed to at a large center devoted strictly to physical therapy. I don't know. It's one of the many mysteries of our medical system. Unless you are willing and able to devote hours of your life studying the minute details of your insurance plan and the policies of the medical practice you're utilizing, you probably have no idea what you're paying for or why, and you don't know how much until your bill comes.

A great example of what I'm talking about: earlier this week I got a bill for $100. I asked the front desk what it was for, and they couldn't even tell me. They had to call the billing specialist who works remotely. Turns out it was for the splint they gave me for my finger. Now, first off, this thing only costs $26.99 on Amazon, so the fact that I got charged $100 for it is absolutely ridiculous. But even worse, in my opinion, is that nobody told me I would have to pay for it at all, let alone that it would be so much. The doctor just gave it to me and told me to use it. So, that's what I did.

It's all such a racket. And the thing is, if I complained to my insurance company and the doctor's office, if I made enough noise, I might be able to get the charge reduced. But at what cost? Likely a significant one, considering I put a high premium on my free-time. I'd rather be out the $73.01 than waste my time dealing with it. I have a colleague who fights everybody tooth and nail for every last cent if he feels he's getting a raw deal, and part of me admires that, but another part of me is like, that's way too much work. It's basically like having a shitty, low-paying part-time job, and I don't need nor want a shitty, low-paying part-time job at this moment in my life.

Alright, that's all for today. Pretty busy weekend. We have some friends in town visiting, we have a gala to attend later (oo la la, tres chic), and Lil' S2 and his friend have bothering me since before I got out of bed (literally) to take them to some place called House of Cards.

Until next time...

Entry 757: The End Of A Freeloading Era

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

My parents' long-canceled cable credentials have finally stopped working. I knew this day would come, and so it has. Yet, I rue not my loss, rather I celebrate what was mine for so long.

Some years ago, I don't remember exactly when, probably around 2016, my parents bought a cable subscription from a company called Click! Network. When we came out to visit once, my dad gave me the credentials to watch something on my tablet, and I just kept using them after we left. It was perfect because Click! was one of the few online providers that never initiated two-factor authentication. For a while, I used my friend JY's Xfinity account, but they started making me put in a text message code every time I logged in, and so I would have to text him to text me the code they texted him, and it just got to be too annoying, presumably for the both of us. But Click! didn't require that extra step. I could just put in the user name and password and start watching -- ESPN, TNT, TBS, FS1, and every now and then NFL Network would work for some reason, even though it wasn't included in the package. It was great.

Then, maybe three years ago, I was talking to my dad, and I mentioned that I still used his cable credentials, and he told me, much to my surprise, that he canceled their Click! account several years before that. So, doing the math, they probably canceled it around 2019, which means that I used cable credentials from a defunct account for about six years. That is a damn good freeloading run. The credentials just kept working. At first, I thought to myself Surely, this is the time they fail. But then they didn't, and so I started expecting them to work, and they did, right up until five days ago. I tried to log-in to TNT to watch a basketball game, and they don't even list Click! as an acceptable provider anymore. Then I tried ESPN, and Click! is still listed as a provider, but when I click the link, I just get a useless blank white box on the screen. It's possible that if I could get the Click! credentials box to pop up, like it used to, my parents' credentials would still work, but I can't figure out how to do that, and I can't exactly call tech support about it. So, I'm just accepting the L on this one, because it's not really an L. It's a glorious W that finally ended.

Nevertheless, this whole thing left me ESPN-less, and that wouldn't do, as ESPN is a must-have for live sports watchers like me. The Mother Ship might be losing its influence in the world of sport in other ways, but it is still very much a leader in live product, with Monday Night Football, the college football playoffs, the NBA playoffs, and the NHL playoffs, among other programming. It's also one of the few remaining pure cable channels, which makes it a super annoying must-have. To my knowledge -- and I just researched it fairly extensively -- there is no way to stream ESPN without buying a full-on cable package. It's not available with any other streaming service, and it's not offered as a standalone product. You might think it is, because they have something called ESPN+, but you would be wrong. ESPN+ is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since Lionel Hutz's case against the movie The Never Ending Story. Despite the name, ESPN+ doesn't actually contain ESPN. It's just a different network with less popular programming. It's like if Apple marketed their watch as the iPhone+.

So, I broke down and bought a subscription to something called Sling TV. It was the only service I could find that allows me to stream ESPN for under $50 a month. It's $110 for three months, but I think that's just a promotional rate, and I'll have to pay about $10 more per month after that. So, if I want to keep it, I'll have to decide whether I'm going to pay more or do the thing where you unsubscribe and subscribe anew with a different email address to get the promotional rate again. If I used all my and all S's email accounts, I could stretch it out a few years, and then maybe by that time there will be a better option. Or maybe if I just click the button to unsubscribe, they'll offer to extend the promotional rate. That's what happened with the New York Times. They sent me an email telling me my trial period was over, and I would soon be getting charged substantially more, so I turned off auto-renewal, and immediate got another email essentially saying, Psych! You can keep paying what you're paying now. We were just joking.

One thing I learned from all this is that despite all the cord-cutting and the advent of individual network streaming services, bundled TV packages are still very much a thing, and they are still very much overpriced. YouTube TV is like $85 a month; Fubo is the same; and the physical cable providers are even more expensive -- at least I think so. We get Verizon internet, so I decided to see what their TV packages are, and even after going to their website, I honestly have no idea. It's just a garbled, busy mess. One reason I went with Sling is because they have each channel explicitly listed in their various packages and the cost is clearly stated. It seems like every provider would do that, but that is not the case at all.  And Sling is still screwing me. They offer two standard packages (Orange and Blue) and one has ESPN (Orange) and the other one has FS1 and NFL Network and NFL Red Zone (Blue). So, I can't buy ESPN by itself, but I also can't buy it with the other sports channels I would want. Well, I could. I could buy their combo package (Orange and Blue), but then I'd be up near the $85 per month price point like I would with any of the other providers. It's a real racket.

What I should do is just eschew live sports altogether. It wouldn't be total unheard of -- I pretty much did this all throughout college. I just did math all the time and was pretty happy (not many dates, though). I've actually thought about doing this again -- not math necessarily but something else. Like, what if every time I got the urge to watch sports, I read instead, or watched a movie. What if I just gave up watching sports altogether? It sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't think it would work. The Seahawks would be playing the 49ers on Monday Night Football, and I would be sitting there trying to read, wondering what's happening in the game. Then I would pull out my phone and follow the play-by-play transcript, which is worse. I mean, if you're going to waste three hours of your life watching a game, at least you can watch the game, right? It's much more pathetic to waste it watching a little football icon move across a graphic of a field, while you wait for the latest text update. Play under review?! What do you mean? What's going on?   

Until next time...

Entry 756: TV

It's still difficult to type, but that's just how it's going to be until this damn finger heals. If you would have told me when it first happened that my pinky would still be purple and swollen a month later, I never would have believed you. It felt like a few-days type of thing -- a week tops. That's probably a big part of the problem. I didn't think it was that bad, so I didn't go to the doctor immediately like I should have (despite the urging of a colleague and my wife). I have a follow-up with a sports injury specialist on Tuesday, so I'll just keep it splinted and make do until then. Not much else I can do. Man, getting old sucks. 

In other news, there is a lot going on in the world right now, so naturally I'm going to write about a TV show that went off the air nearly four years ago. We recently finished watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a family -- all 153 episodes. I probably watched "only" about 140 of them, because when I was away they would watch without me, but somehow I was always able to hop right back into the story, hardly missing a beat (which reminds of one of my favorite The Onion headlines of all time). Overall, I found the series quite funny and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Captain Raymond Holt, played masterfully by Andre Braugher (RIP), is an all-time great sitcom character, and Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) was a hit with the kids.

Also, kudos to Stephanie Beatriz who plays Rosa Diaz. It's not that Rosa is such a tremendous character (although she is funny); it's that I've seen Beatriz in other things, and I can't believe she's the same person who plays this laconic, streetwise detective. I mean, she's the lead in Encanto, which just doesn't compute to me. There are really good actors, who are just kinda always versions of themselves -- like Tom Cruise is always Tom Cruise and De Niro is always De Niro -- and then there are others who cause a mental disconnect when you see them in different roles. It's why I thought Bryan Cranston should have won the Emmy every season for Breaking Bad. His sizzle real should have been clips of Walter White ("I am the one who knocks!") interspersed with reminders that he is the same guy who played the dad in Malcolm in the Middle. Beatriz is definitely in the Cranston camp, and it's super impressive.

The only major demerit on Brooklyn Nine-Nine is that the final season is straight trash. This happens to almost all great TV shows (*ahem* The Office), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine follows the same "jumping the shark" playbook -- the big names leave the show or take diminished roles; a bunch of characters start having babies or getting married or getting divorced; the small things that worked previously get brought to the forefront and played to death -- but it also had the added weirdness of unfolding in 2020 and 2021, when we were all kinda losing our minds with Covid restrictions and performative social justice expectations. It's so cringey to watch these episodes now. You can just feel the struggle of the writers trying to cater to the du jour anti-police sentiment while making a show in which cops are the explicit protagonists. Every stagy scene of self-flagellation (and there are plenty of them) made me think This is why Trump won reelection. I don't actually believe that, but I don't not believe it either. The kids were dead-set on finishing the series or else I would have applied my ABE principle of TV viewing: Always Bail Early.

In other TV news, the White Lotus Season 3 finale dropped last Sunday night, and despite being exhausted from helping to administer the ACPT again, I watched it as soon as it was available. This season has been pretty heavily criticized in the media (at least the media I consume), and having some time to reflect on it all, I must reluctantly admit: The haters are more right than they are wrong. I mean, I still enjoyed this season, but it's a B-, whereas the first two seasons are an A and A+, respectively.

One of the major knocks on the season is that it's way too boring and slow, even by Mike White standards. It could have been two episodes shorter was a common refrain. I typically don't mind a slow plot as long as the characters move and grow, but therein lies the biggest problem I had with this season. With a few exceptions (e.g., Saxon), I didn't feel like any of the major characters had fully realized story arcs. They all had isolated moments of excellence -- great one-off scenes and pull-out dialogues (Mike White is a master of this) -- but within the overall narrative context, it often felt like they were just running in place. I swear Mook and Gaitok have the same basic conversation every episode until the finale. It's like c'mon, we've already seen this, multiple times. What's next? And that was the entire series for me. I kept thinking Okay, here we go! This is when they're really gonna pull me in! But it just never happened. It almost did, in the finale, which I quite enjoyed, but there was too much to do at that point. It was all so unsatisfying. Almost every character felt undercooked or subject to a forced, unearned resolution.

Also, there's just so much throughout the series that doesn't make sense, from a basic human behavioral standpoint -- people doing things that nobody would ever do just because it's needed for the plot. I can't really say any more than that without giving major spoilers, which I don't want to do. If you've seen the season, you surely know what I mean. It comes off as lazy storytelling. I don't think it was, but that's how it comes off. I'm a big Mike White fan, but this one was a swing and a miss -- well, maybe not a miss, but it was weak contact to be sure. It happens. Nobody bats a thousand.

Until next time...

Entry 755: Fractured Finger

This will be a short entry. The finger injury (right pinky) I mentioned in a previous entry turned out to be a fracture, and so I have to wear a brace that makes it very difficult to type. This is when I wish I was a hunt-and-peck typist. But I'm not. I'm an asdfjkl; guy, and so it's really unnatural and difficult for me to have two fingers (my pinky in "buddy bound" with my ring finger in the brace) taken out of the equation. Plus, I have to cock my right wrist at a weird angle to keep my brace from inadvertently hitting random keys. I can manage, but it's tiring and annoying, and I swear I can feel myself actively developing carpal tunnel syndrome. So, for now I'll probably only type when I'm doing my actual job that somebody pays me to do.

Actually, I just had a thought: I could use my phone. That would probably be easier, but typing out an entire blog entry on a phone doesn't sound that appealing either. Maybe I'll try it next week though. Check back then.

Until next time...

Entry 754: Three-Inning Save

Long weekend, this one. I got back last night from an overnight trip to New Jersey. My good friend JY's son IY plays college baseball, and his team is playing a series in New Jersey this weekend, so I met JY and our other friend DK and his daughter EK out there to watch IY pitch. He's a reliever, so it's unclear if or when or how much he will pitch on any given night. If you want to watch him play specifically, which is what we wanted, then it's a bit of a dice roll.

Luckily, our number came up. In fact, it couldn't have worked out better. Friday night, with us all in attendance, he came into the game in the 7th inning with his team up 3-0, and he threw three innings, giving up just one run, on one hit (a solo homer), striking out six, and walking zero (although he did bean a guy). It was a dominant performance, and it was really cool to watch. Here's a kid I used to play Wiffle Ball with when he was a three foot tall toddler, running around in nothing but a pull-up, and now he's a six foot six behemoth getting the save in a D1 college baseball game. Like I said, it's really cool.

I was worried it wasn't going to happen, because the starting pitcher had a no-hitter going into the sixth inning, but then he gave up a hit and walked a guy, and it looked like he was going to come out soon. (DK and I were half-jokingly imploring the manager to pull him from our seats in the stands -- C'mon, skip, he's looking a little tired; let's get a fresh arm in there -- which cracked up JY, even though he was shushing us, because he knows all the other parents, and didn't want anyone to think we were rooting against their kid.) IY had been warming up in the bullpen, which means he would almost certainly be the next pitcher in, but then it started to rain, kinda hard, and I was worried the umpire would call the game. But he didn't, the rain gradually abated, and we all got to see what we came for.

After the game, we all went out to eat, but it was on the late side (9:30 pm), and a lot of places were closing soon, so it was slim pickings. We went to this Cuban joint, but it was not the vibe we were looking for. The menu was way fancier/pricey than what anybody wanted, and the music was so loud it was giving me a headache. It's difficult to overstate how high the volume was in this place. It was like dining on a dance floor. So, we pulled a move I think I've only pulled one other time in my entire life, we just left after we had already been seated. We had even ordered drinks already, but just soft drinks, so they didn't even charge us (although JY said they seemed offended that we were leaving).

It turned out to be the right move. We went to a place that wasn't Smash Burger, but was just like Smash Burger, and it was much more suitable to us at that moment. I got a double stack, and it was really good. I hadn't eaten a burger like that in long time, and it really hit the spot. DK's car somehow got a flat tire, and he didn't have a spare,* so throughout our dinner adventure, he was dealing with AAA. Thankfully, a tire guy came out relatively quickly and fixed it, so it wasn't that big a setback. Hat's off to EK, by the way, she was a trooper throughout everything, including sitting in the gloom and rain for hours at a baseball game (I don't think she's a fan, being that at one point I overheard DK explaining to her what a walk is) and sitting outside a parking garage with her dads' friends waiting for a tire to get changed. I don't think those are a 14-year-old girl's idea of an ideal Friday night. 

*He did have one of those spray cans that inflate your tire and seal it, but he didn't realize it until after he got it changed. It's probably better to get it changed, anyway. He had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day and drive several hundred miles, and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable doing that on a jimmy-rigged tire.    

JY took the red-eye in from Seattle that morning, so he was quite tired, and he's always been an asleep-when-the-head-hits-the-pillow type of guy, anyway, so he zonked out as soon as we got back to the hotel and started snoring very loudly. Thankfully, I was prepared. I'm such a fussy sleeper that I always travel with earplugs, and between those and the white noise playlist on Spotify I was able to drown out the sound of logs being sawed and get a bit of shuteye. I didn't get a great night's sleep, mind you, but it was passable. It apparently wasn't as good as JY's, as he was raving about his Fitbit sleep metrics the next morning.

I decided to drive back Saturday afternoon. Originally, I was thinking of staying another night, but since I had already seen IY pitch (and there's no way he would throw two days in a row), I figured I should get back. It would have been fun to hang out with JY another night, for sure, but I knew S was struggling at home (for reasons that will be revealed in a minute), and I also didn't want to get another night of hotel sleep and then drive back in the morning and then coach Lil' S2's football game (which starts in an hour and a half) and take him to his baseball game after that. I knew I'd be anxious about it the entire night, which would make it even harder to sleep. It was the right move, as I was completely wiped by the time I got home last night. I was not in condition to do anything other than sit on the sofa.

S was even more tired than I was because she had to pick up Lil' S2 two from a field trip at 1:15 am. No, that's not a typo. He took a class trip to NYC, and they left at 6:30 am and got back at 1:15 am. S is a morning person who is usually in bed by 9:00 pm, and she was already feeling a little under-the-weather, so this was especially hard on her. She was being cool about me going to New Jersey, because she knows I don't get opportunities to see these friends that much, but I knew she could use some relief. Also, I'm already going to be out of town all of next weekend (my annual crossword puzzle tournament), and I really didn't want to stick her with all the parenting duties for two full weekends in a row. So, I made the call to bail early. There are no solutions in life, only tradeoffs.

Alright, that's all I got for today. Last thing I'll say, however, is that Lil' S1's solo trip to Florida to visit my in-laws worked out very well. I picked him up at the airport for his return flight and got a special gate pass and met him as soon as he stepped off the jetway. He had icing on his face from a doughnut he bought at the airport in Florida, and I'm sure he did nothing but stare at his screens the entire flight, but he made it there and back safely and soundly, and that's by far the most important piece of this whole endeavor.

Until next time...

Entry 753: Solo Flights

The big news this week at the G & G household is that Lil' S1 is taking his first solo flight. He is currently tens of thousands of feet in the air en route to Florida to visit his grandparents for spring break. Somewhat surprisingly, I'm not worried about it at all. I thought I might be, but now it's here, and I'm not. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that Lil' S1 can handle it. He's good with this sort of thing. He's very much still a little kid in many ways, but when it comes to venturing out into the world on his own and not freaking out about it, he's pretty good. He's been doing errands on his own for years, and he takes the Metro to and from school several times every week. I'm sure it's safer by an order of magnitude to be in an airport and fly than to be in a DC Metro station and take the train. You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket and go through security in the latter scenario.

Also, S and her mom are on it. S took him to the airport and escorted him all the way to the jetway, and her mom and her mom's niece and her husband will be waiting for him at the gate on the other end. Plus, he has his cell phone, so we can always track him or call him -- provided he remembers to take his phone off airplane mode, that is. That's actually one of my only worries. That is exactly the type of thing he would forget to do. We might be saved there, however, by the fact that he'll try to watch something on YouTube and will have to turn it off airplane mode to get it to work.

This is the first year the kids have different spring breaks, so it's a little different logistically. Lil' S1 is going to Florida by himself, and then in a few weeks, S and her sister will take Lil' S2 there. I don't get to go at all, which is fine. I'm going on enough trips this year, and we go down there so often, it's perfectly acceptable for me to miss a trip every now and again. It's actually a nice time right now in our kids lives. They aren't yet in brooding teenager, too cool for school mode, but they also are past the need-to-be-monitored-at-almost-all-times stage. S is a bit sad today because she caught a glimpse into what it will be like when our kids leave the house (Lil' S2 went to a friend's birthday party and will likely be gone the entire day), but I'm just enjoying the break. Plus, the way things are going in the world today, with the job market and the arrested development of our youth, our kids might not ever leave our house for good -- and I'm only half-kidding about this.

-------------------------------------------

Alright, lightning round and then let's call it a post.

 

• My injured finger is slowly getting better. It's still bruised and tender, but I have a bit more range of motion. I had to put my Krav Maga gym membership on medical freeze for a few weeks. I can't punch, grip a barbell, or do a pushup, which makes it pretty much impossible to take martial arts or fitness classes.
  
  
• I can still do the stationary bike, though, thankfully. I also might -- just might -- be able to start jogging again. I quit about a year ago due to inflammation in my right knee, but it's been feeling pretty good of late. Once the weather gets a bit nicer, I'll test it out. That would be huge if I could go running again.
  
  
• I've been hitting Queen Bee on NYT Spelling Bee a decent amount of time (about 10%, which might not sound that impressive, but keep in mind, it's not at all an easy thing to do). Here's my daily Spelling Bee routine: I play until I get to Genius level, and then I have to get one more word (it's a game within a game that only exists in my head), and then I'm allowed to look at the number of possible words and the highest possible score. I'm not allowed to look at the solution, mind you, just the highest possible totals. If I'm sufficiently close, I then try for Queen Bee. Yesterday, I finished the job when I remembered that CIVET is a word. I don't know what it is -- I'm thinking a type of bolt, but I know that's wrong, because that's a RIVET -- but I do know it's a word.
  
  
  
• As it turns out, a CIVET is "a slender nocturnal carnivorous mammal with a barred and spotted coat and well-developed anal scent glands, native to Africa and Asia." Huh, how about that? In my Scrabble days I found that words I didn't know almost always fell into one of the Four-F categories: flora, fauna, foreign letters, foreign money. Examples are the Scrabble staples QAT, AI, XI, XU -- a shrub chewed as a stimulant, a three-toed sloth, the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and a monetary unit of Vietnam, respectively.
• I found out I can watch all the non-CBS March Madness games on Max, which is huge. The March Madness app is one of the few cable streaming services my parents’ defunct cable credentials don’t work for (and it’s not that their specific credentials don’t work; the app doesn’t accept the provider at all), so I’d have no good way to watch them otherwise. And I love watching March Madness games—well, the last few minutes of them, anyway. Even I’m not enough of a sports sicko to watch a random college basketball game, in today’s watered down NCAA, from start to finish.
  
  
• Update: Lil' S1 arrived safely at his destination. See, no need to worry, at all.

 Until next time...

Entry 752: Back In Palm Springs

I didn't post anything last week because I was in Palm Springs, my home away from home, apparently. It was a mix of work and personal. I flew in a week ago, Saturday afternoon, and spent the weekend and Monday with my parents. Then I stuck around for a work conference while my parents continued a two-week tour through the Southwest. All in all it was a good time, but not without its calamities. I accidentally paid double for our lodging; I injured, perhaps broke, my right pinkie finger; and our refrigerator apparently stopped working while I was gone. Also, my parents texted that they had to change their travel plans because roads in Arizona are being closed due to... snow?!

But let's start with the positive: It was great to see my parents. The main event was a trip out to Joshua Tree National Park. The eponymous Joshua tree is an interesting bit of flora. It looks like a tree drawn by Dr. Seuss. It makes for good scenery, though, and the park is quite nice. It was a good place for us to go, because a lot of the hikes are elderly friendly, and you can drive through the park and see the pretty desert imagery.

 

We tried to do a few other nature-y things but got stymied each time. We set out to take an aerial tram up the side of the mountain -- I've done it before and it's pretty cool -- but tickets were sold out online, and there was a line of cars a quarter-mile long just to get into the parking lot to even attempt to buy walk-up tickets. When we saw that, we did a u-ey and left.  Then we went to the trailhead of a hike at Tahquitz Canyon, but it was $15-a-person to do the hike, and it looked more treacherous than my 80-year-old mother could handle. She's still pretty mobile and can walk several miles at a time, but not through rocky, uneven terrain. She is 80, after all. So, we just walked around downtown Palm Springs instead. It's pretty cool -- tons of good restaurants. We ate at a half-decent Mexican joint one night and a pretty good Tuscan place the next.

We also ate at my friends' place in La Quinta. When I said above that the trip to Joshua Tree was the highlight, I had momentarily forgotten about visiting E & M (the couple whose wedding we attended last October).  They had us over for dinner Monday night, and it was terrific. They have a bungalow with an excellent backyard for eating and entertaining outside. Everything was great -- the food, the ambience, and the conversation were all top-notch. Just a wonderful night overall.

My parents stayed one more night at the condo unit I booked us in Palm Spring, and then set out the next morning for the rest of their trip. I went to a hotel for my work conference. I accidentally double-paid for our condo unit, but thankful Expedia and the villa manager were cool about it, and I got it resolved fairly quickly. The hardest part was finding the correct phone number for Expedia. They don't advertise their number on their confirmation emails, or even at their website (at least not that I could find), so I Googled it, and ended up with a couple false leads at first.

I guess the double-booking error was my fault -- I reserved two units instead of one -- but that's because the website I went through is hella confusing. It calls a full condo unit with multiple bedrooms a "room." So, I booked two "rooms" thinking a "room" was actually a room and not a full unit. I mean, would anybody ever say "Yes, I'd like to book a room with two bedrooms, please"? Look at the confirmation notice I received below and tell me if you think it reads as one condo unit, two bedrooms total, or two condo units, four bedrooms total. It's the latter, but I don't blame anybody, including myself three months ago, for thinking it's the former.

Alright, I'm quickly running out of time writing this. So, I'll have to be brief in my description of the other calamities. I played dodgeball on a team with my colleagues at the work conference and badly messed up my finger. They always have a big corporate party thing at the end of the week that features a dodgeball tournament. Usually we don't participate, but this time we did, and it did not go well. Actually, we won our first match, but then we got destroyed in our next one. I was probably our best player, and I kinda suck, because I can't throw hard anymore due to the arthritis in my shoulder. After our second (and last) match, I noticed that my right pinkie finger really hurt and by the next morning it was purple and swollen and I could barely move it. Getting old is a bitch.

Also, our refrigerator seems to be broken. When I got home, I noticed the milk was sour and everything seemed to be warmer than it should be. I put in this little thermometer we have (great gadget, by the way) and left it overnight, and the refrigerator temperature didn't go below 55 degrees, even though it's set at 35. The freezer is okay, but not the fridge. We have another fridge downstairs, so it's not the end of the world. But moving all our food to the basement before it rots is not the activity I had planned for this morning. It did kinda force me to clean out all the old stuff, though, which was long overdo. I felt like the "aunt" from that stupid Geico commercial: expired, expired, expired...

Until next time...