Window view

A while ago I came home and saw my neighbor’s cat in the front window, sporting the Cone of Shame.

Man, there’s something about that collar that makes every animal in it look super miserable. And this cat had it on for a while.

However, eventually it came off.

I like a story with a happy ending.

Crime in the 'hood

Let’s close out the week with one more bit of drollery from the People’s Republic, spotted on one of my walks:

I mean, littering is truly bad. But there’s no camera anywhere in the vicinity. So, nice try.

Property is theft

Right until about ten or 15 years ago, the vast preponderance of the People’s Republic was what you might call communal. The whole point of this particular planned community design was to maximize commonly-held ground (and social sharing) and to minimize private property.

But now that The Developers have arrived, there are a lot of No Trespassing and Private Property signs around.

However, long-time residents of the People’s Republic don’t give a toss about such things, as you can plainly see by this path that’s been worn by scores of feet right next to one:

Power to the people, baby!

Booted out

Let’s close out the week with a tale of suburbia, from the commuter parking lot where I leave my car most days. I got back one evening and saw this:

As I got closer, here’s what they were:

I just wonder what the story behind those boots is? Invent your own answers.

Gratitude Monday Resistance moon: Nothing is so beautiful

Saturday a friend and I went to a nursery in Northern Virginia—she needed to buy a bag of dirt, and I just wanted inspiration for a future garden. The day was quite cold, windy and grey, but my soul came alive as we wandered up and down the aisles in the greenhouse and then outside.

Herbs! Ground cover! Indoor-outdoor dwarf lemon trees! Hedge material (“Get something with thorns”)! Oh, it was like going to the animal shelter—I just wanted to hug everything and bring it all home.

And, oddly, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel a lot of joint pain after all the walking. There’s just something about the beauty and resilience of plants that restores your equilibrium. Despite the best efforts of humans to destroy it with war, pollution, urban sprawl and just plain arrogant destruction, nature does her best to resist and persist, showing us every Spring that she’ll take whatever bit is available—even if it’s just a weak place in concrete—to push up life.

So today, in grateful recognition of the recuperative power of gardens (whether designed by mortals or immortals), I’ll share a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets. Convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest, exceptional poet of any age.

In the past you’ve had some of his sonnets for Easter, and his “Pied Beauty”, which takes delight in the parti-colored elements of nature. But for Gratitude Monday today, here’s “Spring”. Just “Spring”.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.      

Mr. Blandings and I

Home ownership is supposed to be the ultimate American Dream, but I have to tell you, right now I am just not feeling the love.

Specifically, I have a squad of little things—electrical, plumbing and installation tweaks—that need doing, which are beyond my skillset. I do in fact have a drill, and I know how to use it, but I generally speaking do not mess with electricity, and my record with plumbing is not what you might call stellar. So I want to hire a handyman (or woman; it’s a job category, not a political statement) to take care of this stuff.

But this, it turns out, is not a simple matter.

Handymen, it seems, are rather thin on the ground. (I’m talking about ones who’ve come via recommendations. You can find plenty of them, but the trick is to separate the sheep from the goats. Although, tbh, I wouldn’t care for either a sheep or a goat in my house, but I suppose that’s a different post.) And they're in as much demand as orthopedists at a tennis camp. I started with two recommended by my realtor.

One (the woman) did not return my calls at all, and the other keeps trying to reach me via my mobile phone, even after I TOLD him to call my landline. Even so, I worked from home on Tuesday because he said he’d be sending one of his minions out to the house to take a look at the jobs. Well, the minion arrived about 30 minutes after the specified time, walked around with me without taking notes in somewhat bug-eyed silence, and then mumbled that he’d have to “talk with my manager” to get an estimate. Then he promised he’d return in an hour to deliver said quote to me.

Ah, dear readers, I know you see what’s coming. I sat at home the entire afternoon, like Meg Ryan at that hipster coffeeshop in You’ve Got Mail. There was no return visit, no call, bupkis.

But the manager called me Wednesday, at work, on my mobile. There’s crappy mobile reception in that building, so the call dropped twice before he made it known to me that he’d have to come out to my house himself to create a proper estimate. (So why didn’t he come out in the first place?)

Well, but by this time, I’d collected a fistful of recommendations from my neighbors on Nextdoor.com, and I was practically robocalling right down the list.

Well, of the ones who’d call me back, many of them were booked through April. For handyman jobs. And then you start to wonder: if a guy is able to come over on short notice to spec the work, do you want him doing the job? Is there a reason (or many) why he’s got an empty calendar?

For example, one fellow said he’d drop by yesterday morning between 0900 and 1000. I worked from home again, and finally around 1020, I rang him to ask if he wasn’t coming. Well, he did, but by that time I just wasn’t massively confident in his ability to show up on time to do the work.

Then, it was interesting getting the quotes. One guy just said over the phone, “I can do that in a day. It’ll cost you $300.” Eh… Mr. Can’t-call-my-landline eventually did show up  (more than an hour late), walked around, made long faces about what might or might not be feasible, scratched on the handyman equivalent of the back of a cocktail napkin and said, “I’ll do it for $420.” Nothing in writing, no line items, just, “I’ll do it for $420.”

The fellow from yesterday morning had a form, in triplicate, but his best- and worst-case pricing parameters were scratched out and scribbled over so much that it’s really hard to tell where the outside numbers are.

In the end, I’ve gone with a guy who showed up more or less within two hours of his promise, who took a good hard look at everything that needs doing, didn’t seem to think I’d need to rip out all the tile in the shower cubicle to replace a leaking faucet, and gave me an estimate that’s not the cheapest, but seems in the ballpark.

Now we face the prospect of scheduling the actual work. This will be like getting on the books for cardiac surgery.

American Dream my ass.

Moving stories

Y’all know how I love the sidebars of life all around me—yard decorations, business signs, bumper stickers and vanity license plates… I like playing with what the stories behind them might be.

Now, this one I’m guessing belongs to someone from western South America, and there were nine people also from that part of the world ahead of him/her at the DMV.

But this one is a little more interesting—it’s on one of those boxy Honda Elements that is often parked on the street outside my flat overnight (because there’s frost or dew on it when I walk to the Metro station in the morning).

Visual Basic is so turn-of-the-century. It dates right about to the time when pre-Time-Warner AOL had pretensions of being everybody’s on-ramp to the information superhighway. I wonder if the Element’s owner has had the license plate since before the dot-bomb, or whether s/he is just nostalgic for the Good Old Days?

Oooo-er...

As I mentioned yesterday, I made a Costco run at the weekend. And apparently it is not too early to be thinking of decorating your yard for Halloween:

They've got several racks of costumes; superheroes are obviously expected to be big this year.

And there was a whole table of…well, garish, fluffy little child skirts. Which, now that I think of it, might look quite fetching on that skeleton.

I suppose I should be grateful that I didn’t see any Christmas stuff. I expect that’ll start coming in before Labor Day.

Flight of fancy

I misjudged the opening time of the Arlington Costco on Saturday, so I took a walk around the neighborhood to kill half an hour.

The neighborhood in question is Pentagon City. It’s across I-395 from the actual, you know, Pentagon, but it’s kind of Pentagon-themed.

Apparently it’s a creation of the Metro system—when the Blue Line opened its Pentagon City station in the late 70s, it was onto an empty field. There were old neighborhoods nearby, but not at all what you might call happening, which is the way it’s promoted now.

Since then it’s been thoroughly developed: high-rise office buildings and apartment blocks, trendy restaurants, parking meters and the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City—a substantial shopping mall with all the usual chain and department stores that you’ll find a few miles away in Tysons Corner. Actually, when I lived in Northern Virginia before, the only reason I ever came to this part of town would be to go to the Nordstrom at Fashion Centre. And I didn’t do that more than about twice.

Well, as I said, the built-up area is Pentagon-themed. The apartments and parking garages that are part of the Pentagon Row strip mall adjacent to Fashion Centre are designated by branches of service: Air Force, Navy, etc. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised on my walk around the Costco area to find a little patch of green between the très expensive Millennium at Metropolitan Park apartments and the newly-opened Whole Foods with this sculpture:

I didn’t notice any other representation of our military might. I suppose there might be a tank somewhere, or maybe a multicolored submarine. Or perhaps those are for future development phases. You never know.

Paid parking

Being a fourth-generation Californian, one of the certain unalienable rights that should be self-evident to all is the fact that tax money supports the building and maintenance of roads. Therefore it’s an abomination to God and man to charge highway tolls or parking fees on public streets.

Arlington County obviously thinks differently. I don’t believe there’s a business district in South Arlington that doesn’t have either parking meters or pay-and-display devices, and every one of them burns my bacon. Even the parking lot between the Aurora Hills branch of the library and Virginia Highlands Park has meters at every space.

But what crisps me even further is this slogan that you find on all the meters:

I just cannot believe they paid money to slap up that piece of snottery on every single post.

Riding the rails

The Metrorail system in the DC area is undergoing a year’s worth of repairs to its infrastructure, which they call SafeTrack. (On account of they’re hoping to get the tracks in good enough condition that they stop setting trains on fire and killing passengers.) This involves periodic cutting or choking of services along different lines, which they are unaccountably referring to as “surge” times. And no matter where, exactly, the break or single-tracking actually occurs, there’s a knock-on effect throughout the system.

The past two weeks there was no service between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue in the District, a stretch of track shared by three lines, Orange, Silver and Blue. Metro management therefore decided that they would only run Blue Line trains between Alexandria and Arlington National Cemetery, not into the District. That meant that the only rail option for residents of Alexandria and South Arlington was the Yellow Line. And Metro increased neither the number of trains they ran nor the number of cars per train, because: Metro.

(It also meant that if you wanted to get to Arlington National Cemetery, normally accomplished fairly easily on the BL, you had a rather convoluted journey. Unless you were coming from Alexandria or South Arlington, whatever line you started on you had to transfer to a YL train, get off at Pentagon, then get on a BL train and go one stop more.)

The surge this week involves complete closure of YL and BL service between Braddock Road in Alexandria and National Airport. (And next week they’ll shut down the lines between National Airport and Pentagon City.) Metro purports to have free shuttle buses taking passengers across that gap, but let me just suggest the image to you of a Chinese fire drill.

Once again, they are not running trains more frequently; they’ve just begged people to find alternatives to riding Metro. And the commute home yesterday was quite the slice. L’Enfant Plaza, the last transfer point in the District for Virginia-bound YL trains, looked a little like a war zone; apparently an earlier train had broken down, with the predictable knock-on chaos and sense of despair. This isn’t actual footage of the station, but it could be:

And you know it’s bad when your train driver gets on the PA system to tell the passengers, “Yes, things aren’t working as well as people thought they would. Yesterday I was driving a train that broke down, too.”

A patch on history

Looky, looky what I found just a couple of blocks from where I live:

It’s a micro-park honoring Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer programming. It’s basically a patch of lawn and trees in front of RiverHouse apartments, which is apparently where Hopper lived late in life.

It’s nice to think that I might be walking paths that she did back in the day; a little connection with a kick-ass, brilliant woman, right here in the neighborhood.

At a grocery store near you

When I came out of Wegmans the other morning I noticed that another shopper was apparently disabled in places not immediately visible, except in their wake.

Because who, at 0820 on a Saturday morning, cannot be arsed to push their empty shopping cart 15 unobstructed yards to the cart return shelter?

Seriously—what sort of Leona Helmsley-delusional lout do you have to be to decide that only the peons need to get their carts out of the parking spaces? Are you expecting your mom to toddle behind you tidying up and putting your toys in the basket? 

Grow the hell up.

Primary portal

We now move from the “personal” aspect of my recent primary care experience with the practice associated with Virginia Hospital Center. Let’s look at the systems side.

Naturally, this practice has a patient portal. You’re meant to go there to find results of tests, keep track of your immunizations and so on. This is a whole Thing in contemporary healthcare—they tout it as putting the patient in charge, but what it effectively does is keep the patient out of the provider’s hair. It’s also a massive saving in labor costs. If you want information about your care, the first step is supposed to be to go to the portal and look it up instead of calling them.

That would be fine if the portal was easy to use, well organized and contained accurate and understandable information. The VHC portal does none of these things.

Not having heard anything from the nurse practitioner in the couple of weeks since my office visit, I went through the kludge of logging on to the portal (which is a white-labeled site run by an outfit that shows up as eClinicalWorks). Obviously what VHC chose was the least amount of customization possible, because the interface is as generic as they get.

The disdain for the user exhibited by this site is encapsulated in one design feature: you cannot use it to initiate contact anyone in the practice. Partly, I’m sure, because to have that capability the site would need to have an underlying database with contact details, which involves the expense of custom development, and partly because you’d also have to have providers who would be willing to be contacted. Either way, it would represent an investment in providing customer service, which would in turn eat into profits.

Note the message screen:

You cannot create and send a new message; you can only reply to one. (You can try to make an appointment, but that's an entirely different thing from communication.) It’s essentially push-respond. What does that say about the provider-patient relationship?

Back in the day, I bitched about the limitations of the portal run by Palo Alto Medical Foundation: you’d get an email whose sole purpose was to drive you to the site, so you had to log in and navigate to the message page to find out that they were confirming your appointment, or the like. PAMPF: I apologize. I had no notion how bad these portals could be; as they go, you are aces.

Because I could send questions and get responses from my providers throughout the system. It actually was a bi-directional communication system, not a freaking wall. I’d also receive notifications of lab test results (via the email-and-login route; but still…), which is better than hearing nothing but post-office visit crickets.

(Case in point: I used the portal three times in January and February to get interim prescriptions faxed to local and mail-order pharmacies, and to get a referral to physical therapy while I was still trying to find a PCP here. Each time, I originated a message online and my PAMPF PCP responded. It was like magic compared with this VHC nonsense.)

After receiving nothing in the nearly two weeks after my office visit, I soldiered through the kludge of logging into the portal and tried to understand the results of roughly $1100 worth of blood work. Want to know what I found?

Why yes indeed: a block of boilerplate covering liver-kidney-glucose-cholesterol-thyroid-vitamin D…and the X-ray results. All lumped together and pasted five times into the five individual tests. I wonder if they billed my insurer for that?

Okay—I believe that three days is enough of a rant. But if you’re in the NoVa-DC area, I’m still looking for a primary care provider.

Primarily not care

I promised you yesterday that I’d write about the second part of my Healthcare Hell Monday, so here it is.

It turns out that it’s right challenging to find a primary care provider (PCP) in the Metro DC area. Leaving aside the issue of finding a practice that accepts the flavor of CareFirst insurance that I have, I spent a solid two weeks a couple of months ago calling PCPs only to find that either they’re not accepting new patients or the first appointment I could get was months (as in more than eight weeks) out.

So I broadened my search and eventually found a nurse practitioner at a sizeable primary care practice affiliated with Virginia Hospital Center who could see me within a couple of weeks. The practice isn't on the same scale as my provider back in the Valley They Call Silicon, but I reckoned that as an interim measure (I needed new prescriptions for maintenance medications), I could tolerate this.

(And before you get up on your hind legs, I’m perfectly fine with nurse practitioners for primary care. They can be better diagnosticians and more attentive than actual MDs. As with any profession, it all depends on the individual.)

She wouldn’t prescribe without a full examination, which was okay with me. But when I discovered what passes as an exam in her eyes, I wondered what the point was.

Except, of course, for the revenue.

This is the first time in my life that an annual physical did not involve what you might call an actual physical examination. My clothes stayed on for the entire time I was with her. I had two issues I brought up—joint pain and skin anomalies (I have red hair and fair skin; any anomaly makes me nervous). She looked at neither. By which I mean, she stayed sat on the other side of the examination room and blinked at me while I described them.

She did order an X-ray to see if there might be a fracture, but she didn’t even take a look at the area when she did the absolute minimum: listening to my breathing and peering into my eyes and ears. Oh, and she tested my reflexes. And ordered blood panels.

This was also the first time since I was about 20 that an annual exam didn’t involve the physician doing a breast exam.

Well—I did get my prescriptions (and told you my sad tale about that yesterday). So I had accomplished my purpose. But as I was checking out, the admin staff handed me a document grandly called “Summary of Today’s Visit”. I’m glad that they didn’t take my blood pressure after I sat down at home and read that, because it was quite the work of fiction.

Here’s a clip from it:

Here’s my own summary: 

There was no discussion of ideal body weight, BMI or blah-blah-blah. I told her that I know I’m overweight and she nodded in what I assume is meant to be knowing sympathy. There was not a whisper of Weight Watchers or the ilk.

Sleep counseling? Dental health? Injury prevention? Safety?? (Bike helmet??? What the hell?) Guns? Seat belt? Alcohol? Not a peep. Seriously—not word one from her on any of those subjects. She didn’t even ask me about my drinking habits—first time in probably a decade that that question hasn’t been part of taking a patient history. (Yes, I filled out a questionnaire beforehand. But if she actually read it, she didn’t ask me anything about it and she certainly didn’t “counsel” me on anything.)

I told her I don’t smoke—on the health history questionnaire; there was no mention of it in person.

I brought up my concern about skin; I informed her that I never go out without sunscreen on; I told her that I stopped using the sunroof of my car six years ago. She never said a word, and she didn’t bother to look at my skin for damage even after I told her I had some areas of concern.

She said nothing about breast examination (and did nothing about it) beyond ordering a mammogram—preferably at the radiology department of VHC, which is a revenue source for the overall organization. When I asked if I could get it from another provider (one more convenient to my work), she got a sour look on her face, but said yes.

She did ask if I’ve had a screening for osteoporosis, ready to order that, as well. When I reported that I did within the past year and apparently have the bones of a 27-year-old (which appears to be the benchmark), she lost interest. That crap about dietary requirements for calcium and vitamin D—no. Never happened.

(I did report that I regularly take both vitamin D and Omega-3 supplements. She neither inquired about nor recommended dosage amounts.)

Obviously this “summary” was all boilerplate that she cut and pasted into the document. You can see that she didn’t even bother to do a good job of pasting; she just slapped it in willy-nilly.

I’m assuming that this crap was for the dual purpose of laying groundwork for showing comprehensive attention to care in the event of legal action, plus sending to the insurance company for payment. But for the first time in my life, I’m contemplating calling a health insurer and ratting out a provider. This kind of assembly-line whole-cloth fabrication doesn’t deserve to be compensated. If you’re too busy running patients through your practice to actually have in-depth conversations with them, okay. But don’t make up shit and attach it to your invoice as a statement of work performed.

And don’t assume that I can’t read. Especially since you expect me to engage with you exclusively through your website.

And I’ll write about that little joy tomorrow.

Summer of no love

Oh, deep joy—I’ve just discovered that the condo pool hours (for the pool that’s directly below the only windows in this flat) are 0800-2100, every day (except Saturday, when it's open until 2200), from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day.

For the past week I’ve been listening to the lifeguards train daily. Although they’re not splashing or shouting, if I have any window open at all they sound like they’re in my living room.

That’s my entire summer spent with no access to fresh air, then.

And now I understand why the owners have left the country.

Back to the stone age with Verizon

When I was working for a college newspaper, the professors/advisers used to threaten less conscientious reporters with going to press with a huge white hole in a page, slugged “This blank space brought to you by [name of reporter who didn’t get copy in by deadline].”

Well, today’s hot steaming pile of white space is brought to you by Verizon FiOS, a company that has accomplished what I had not thought possible: it’s made me wish I had Comcast back.

Both phone and Internet service went belly up on Wednesday. When I called their we-won’t-help line and got Eric somewhere in the Philippines, he ran a line test and informed me that the problem was with “the big box”. (Not the first time since I moved in two months ago that I’ve had to call Verizon about equipment failure.) This turned out to be the high-rise apartment building equivalent of the customer premises equipment (CPE) box that regulates the “last mile” of wire from a central line to each customer’s unit.

And Verizon would have a technician out to look at it…sometime between 0900 and 1700 on Thursday.

Checking yesterday on the Verizon trouble ticket got me this:

Their idea of "working hard" is a possible fix two days after the failure is reported.

So, without access to my normal blogging device (i.e., personal laptop), I’m doing a quick bootleg post from work.

Where I’m also checking out Comcast services. Because their equipment is working fine in my apartment building.

Low-riding

Okay, I’ll confess that this is something I never saw in the Valley They Call Silicon:

I’m guessing it’s some sort of motorcycle cover that was dislodged by winds or possibly would-be thieves. But it looks remarkably like a two-wheeled version of sagging.

Drive by

On one of my walks around the ‘hood I encountered something that nearly transported me back to the Valley They Call Silicon. Because y’all know how much I love making stories out of car art.

This sticker was a first:

And of course it was on a Prius.

The spook in the 'hood

I’ve written before about how big Halloween seems to be in the yard-decoration stakes in the Valley They Call Silicon. Some displays take weeks to install, and I wonder where the zombies and tombstones live for the other 11 months of the year.

This was not a big deal, that I recall, during my last sojourn in a Confederate state, but recent walks around my NoVa neighborhood makes me wonder.

Only about a block and a half from my current residence I encountered this as a permanent installation, in the front yard of a house that is otherwise perfectly anodyne: