{"id":33075,"date":"2023-03-23T12:17:41","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T19:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=33075"},"modified":"2023-04-01T15:43:21","modified_gmt":"2023-04-01T22:43:21","slug":"rez-dogs-modders-women-oh-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=33075","title":{"rendered":"Rez Dogs & Modders & Women, Oh My!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A20ED228-254C-4E52-99AA-BA70A8BB4FDE\"<\/a>Our friend Mary Anne brought Anthony the rez dog by for a visit. If it looks like our pups were seeking safety in Donna’s lap and by my side, well, that’s pretty much what was going on. They love it when Anthony comes over, but after the initial round of sniffing and nose-touching they pull back. Poor Anthony … all he wants to do is roll around on the floor with his pals!<\/p>\n

Fritzi, the piebald dachshund on Donna’s lap, started showing valley fever symptoms again after the vet told us we could cut her fluconazole dosage in half. We put her back on a full dose and after two days she was back to normal and symptom-free. We’ve got her back on a half-dose again and are keeping a close eye on her. So far, so good. She should have nearly kicked valley fever by now. Lulu, the black & tan, mostly has, and Mr. B, the brindle, has been free of it for months.<\/p>\n

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I wrote about woman fighter pilots in my last post<\/a><\/strong>. Well, woman fighter pilots peeing, if you want to get technical, but that’s not why I’m thinking of them again. It’s the word “woman.”<\/p>\n

When you say woman pilot or women pilots, it scans awkwardly. To say a pilot is a woman is one thing … it sounds and reads right … but to say a woman pilot did this or women pilots do that seems odd, not quite English as she is spoken. Shouldn’t it be “female pilot”? That’s the formula most (male) writers and speakers would use.<\/p>\n

My understanding is that most women … certainly the women I know … don’t much like people calling them females. And I agree. It rubs me wrong as well. Something about the word “female” conjures thoughts of chitinous exoskeletons, compound eyes, antennae, multiple pairs of jointed legs. So I’m forcing myself to get used to saying “woman pilot” until something better comes along. Like maybe the day when the simple word “pilot” will do.<\/p>\n

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\"91968D06-C9AF-4C09-88FF-C3E12E800DDD_1_201_a\"<\/a>I’ve entrusted this watch, one of my favorite Seikos, to a friend, who’s going to do a minor modification to it. It’s on its way to him by UPS; if all goes well I’ll have before & after photos to share in two or three weeks.<\/p>\n

A lot of collectors are into modifying and customizing wristwatches. They post photos of their work, polished and professional to my uneducated eye, on the watch forums I subscribe to. I wanted to tweak the appearance of this one, but didn’t have a warm & fuzzy about mailing it off to a stranger … the same forums are full of stories and warnings about unscrupulous modders who’ll swap out your original movement with a cheaper one, and how would I, a babe in the woods when it comes to watch innards, ever know?<\/p>\n

But lucky me, I’ve known the guy I’m working with since he was 12 or 13. He’s in his 30s now, living and working in another city, but we’ve stayed in touch. A few months ago we discovered we both collected wristwatches and he told me he was getting into modding them. That’s the push I needed. I mustered the courage to ask if he’d do a small job on one of mine and he agreed. More soon.<\/p>\n

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We signed on with a new dentist this morning. Last September, our dentist of 25 years told us he was no longer happy with our insurer, Delta Dental, and that henceforth we’d have to pay in full and up front for procedures. He’d still submit claims to Delta and refund the difference to us later, but what he was asking us to do wasn’t in our budget.<\/p>\n

Delta is, or was, the dental insurance of choice for military retirees and their families, so the letter came as a shock. I called his office and asked the lady who handles insurance and billing to recommend a plan they were willing to work with (I’m pretty sure those were my exact words). She said to go with a PPO (whatever the hell that is), and specifically recommended United Concordia.<\/p>\n

As a military retiree, I can only change dental insurance during a four-week window running from mid-November to mid-December. The day the window opened I switched from Delta to United Concordia PPO, meanwhile delaying scheduled cleanings for both of us to January 2023, when the new insurance would be in effect.<\/p>\n

Well. Turns out United Concordia does networks (Delta didn\u2019t, so it didn\u2019t \u00a0matter before). Our dentist, to our total surprise, is not in United Concordia’s network. And here’s how that works: I broke off part of a molar and unexpectedly had to have a crown installed in January, a $1,300 procedure, for which United Concordia covered only $250. Had my dentist been in network, UC would’ve paid more like $750. Why the lady in the office didn’t think to mention this to me when I called last year is a mystery.<\/p>\n

I now understand what the dentist really meant with that September 2022 letter. He was trying to shuck his military and fixed-income retiree patients to make room for a wealthier clientele.<\/p>\n

Mission fucking accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poor Anthony … all he wants to do is roll around on the floor with his pals!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,40,14,2,21],"tags":[4222,4053,4224,4225,4221,4223],"class_list":["post-33075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-critters","category-military","category-personal","category-words","tag-bewarethemodders","tag-bigseikolittledick-2","tag-missionaccomplished","tag-ourgreedydentist","tag-thesociallivesofdogs","tag-thewomengodblessthem"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33075"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33150,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33075\/revisions\/33150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}