Further medical adjacent adventures

 Nowadays it seems a good idea to have home medical stuff working.  I so rarely use my thermometer that when I saw this screen, saying L, I thought, oh, low battery, better do something about that.

 This entailed an enormous search for the tiny Phillips head screwdriver you need to get the microscopic screw out of the housing to see what sort of battery you may need to replace.  Success finally ensued, in the course of looking for something else.

So I took it all apart, and squinted at the battery to see what it was.  Noted. Trip to pharmacy to replace battery.  They didn't have it.  And Aaron, a lovely kid I always like to see, is a store clerk, not an electronics person, so he didn't realize they probably do have a modern equivalent with a different number.  So we didn't find the battery.

And then I did what I ought to have in the first place, I went online to find out what the L meant, and discovered it's not the battery. It means the ambient temperature. Meaning until you put the thing into use, it shows a low temperature.  Once you have used it, it shows your temp.  Ah.  So I reassembled it, and got this

A little bit high, after a bowl of hot soup, but clearly the thermometer is alive and well. So that was a fail that was also a success in a way.  I guess.

In other gripping adventures, the State health department emailed me to say you can go ahead and schedule a vaccine appointment, yay.  Overjoyed that they remembered I was registered, I quickly went ahead and went through all the hurdles, name, email, date of birth, etc., to get an appointment.

Nothing within five miles, which happens to include the large regional hospital right in my tiny town.  Whose website crashed on Wednesday noon, within two minutes of opening to offer appointments. I wonder if they innocently thought that the minute Biden was sworn in they'd have shipments of vaccine.  And who have taken down the form from the site, now operating again, because they have no further vaccine supplies to schedule.  

Nothing within ten miles.  Reaching out further, I checked the twenty mile radius. And found one location, in a county college, where visitor parking is a country hike from the buildings, three counties away, over some of the most accident prone highways in the state, a three hour round trip.  And they had nothing this month, nor next month, and that's as far as their calendar went.

Then there was a final screen saying, please keep checking, new locations and supplies expected soon...so I guess that's added to my schedule. Wake up, eat breakfast, check website, etc.  But I'm taking the weekend off, since nobody has any vaccine anyway.

NJ is being starved specially, I believe, because Kushner has a deep and abiding hate for us since Christie was NJ federal prosecutor, and caused Kushner senior to be jailed for some financial shenanigans. Before Christie was one of the most disastrous governors ever.  Current Dem governor Murphy still repairing the damage.  What's happening now with the Dem administration in Washington is NJ writ large.  

Kushner is probably the reason Christie was deep sixed by Trump, after hoping for the Veep job.  Not entirely a bad thing, maybe. Anyway, Washington flat out lied about supplies promised to NJ.  A tiny fraction of them ever appeared. We haven't even finished vaccinating first responders and medical personnel yet. Nor seniors in care homes.

Anyway, enough of the politics of health care, and I'm still perfectly well, and will try not to get too anxious about all the things that aren't happening.  I'm not a fan of looking at people who are worse off and feeling better.  That always seems to me to be a small spirited thing to do.  I don't feel better when other people are worse off or sicker or poorer.  I feel responsible for figuring out what I can do about it. But the idea of counting your blessings and comparing them to people who have fewer, no, that's a mean little attitude, to my way of thinking.

And there's always reading and spinning and other things.  

My latest reread was Maisie Dobbs, this one about an artist in the era of World War I and the surrounding politics and mysteries of the time.  As always, Winspear is worth reading.  In fact I reread her.

 Next reread is a couple of novels by Penelope Lively, which I've got on Hoopla, but can't transfer to Kindle, which I really like better for reading, but still, it's available, so that's fine.

It's cold, windy and just the weather for indoor exercise then reading, all wrapped in blankets. I'm getting quite fancy with my scarf flinging.  Now I'm doing figure eights with my arms, and generally thinking I'm all that. I might start naming the moves.  The Infinity!  The Double Silk Jerk and Drop! The Perpetual Motion!  It's really good upper body stuff, vital when you spend time knitting and spinning and doing the sorts of fiber work that tenses up your shoulders and arms without your knowing it.

And last night I dreamed about embroidery and discussing the Robe of Many Colors.  A big step up from dreams of fear and abandonment and being lost in a strange town and it's getting dark.  I'll take it.