quickies

[cellio]

Is my health-insurance provider the Wall-Mart of the medical world, or are conventional rates really that wacky? I got a statement from them today (from a recent doctor visit) that said things like "[some test], provider's fee $92.50, our allowance $17.47, you owe $0". While that line-item was the most extreme, for most items the "fee" was about three times the "allowance". Does this mean that the insurance company is gouging doctors so much that they end up stiffing the uninsured, because it's fiscally fatal to not accept insurance, or what?

Even though I park in a garage at home and under a bridge at work, the trees have been having mad tree-sex and dumping the output all over my car. (Thanks amergina for that imagry.) How do they do that? I don't find myself covered in pollen just from walking down the street, so I don't think there's enough "just in the air" to do this.

The person I was supposed to go to services with tomorrow (at Chabad) called to say she has a cold and is going to stay home. Lunch is still on, but services will have to wait for another time. Oh well.

Earlier in the day we talked about logistics. Their services start at 10; ours end at about 11, so I proposed walking down the street and joining them in progress. (We have a new torah reader tomorrow and I want to be there for him.) This is perfectly normal in the Orthodox world, by the way -- not like Reform, and not like churches. Orthodox morning services, in my limited experience, are over 3 hours, so this seemed logical to me -- I figured I'd get there about the time they hit barchu, or at worst the beginning of the amidah. She said if I got there by about 11:15, I'd catch the start of the torah reading. !! She said they're usually done around 12:15 or 12:30.

The congregational meeting was last night. My name was mentioned several more times than I expected it to, and people commented on it. These mentions included one from my rabbi, who ackowledged about a dozen people individually starting with me. Wow! (Oddly, I heard three different pronunciations of my name; obviously not everyone speaking actually knows me well. :-) )

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I sympathize re: the pollen. It gets really bad in Atlanta in the spring, to the point where there are actually miniature drifts of yellow dust blowing all over the sidewalk. All I can say is thank G-d for Claritin!

On another front, my experience with Chabad services (and with many other Orthodox minyanim) is that the shaliach tzibbur will go through the preliminary stuff & psukei d'zimrah at a very zippy pace, so it doesn't surprise me to hear that they would get all the way to the Torah reading in just over an hour. My husband and I occasionally go to a minyan that starts at 9:30, and it usually finishes in just about 2 hours.

[cellio]

Pollen: thanks. My spring allergies are actually mild compared to the summer allergies, but spring produces that uniform layer of greenish-yellowish cruft on everything that makes it noteworthy. I try to hold off on taking the allergy drugs until I really need them, but I did pop an Allegra yesterday. (I'm limited in which allergy drugs I can take to begin with, and I've had others turn ineffective on me after long-term regular use, so I try to be careful.)

My husband and I occasionally go to a minyan that starts at 9:30, and it usually finishes in just about 2 hours.

Wow. The orthodox services I've been to (four congregations, so not a large sample) have all run closer to 3 hours. So that was my baseline expectation. I guess I need to get out more. :-)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm lucky -- I'm fine with Claritin, Allegra and Zyrtec all. My only limitation seems to be that I can't take the -D versions of these drugs for more than a few in a row -- after 3-4 days of Claritin-D, I begin to feel slightly unhinged. Gotta love that pseudoephedrine. :P

I wish I didn't have to take allergy drugs, but I'm much better off if I do. My spring allergies tend to take the form not of sneezing and such, but rather of feeling feverish and ill, and I do prefer to avoid that.