Untypical weather - overcast and rainy, looks more like winter than late spring...
The better 7/8ths is recuperating nicely from the total knee surgery. We take the CPM machine - a device that slowly exercises the leg back and forth between -5 degrees up to 90 degrees (or beyond) - back on Thursday and then swing by the hospital to debate an item on the bill that is listed as "Implant - Cardiac" to the tune of over $19K (the whole surgery is over $60K - double of what we expected and was told by the surgeon what it would cost). Now, as far as we know she didn't have an "Implant - Cardiac" of any kind. She had an "Implant - Knee" - the hardware of which only cost about $600 - we got that bill in the mail and made our payment of ~ $83. She called the hospital and they said that if there was any dispute that we could highlight or circle the item(s) in question and fax or email the bill to the billing office in California.
And people wonder why we need health care reform in the country...
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Looks like the Israelies won't have to bomb Iran - the action by the mullahs to steal the election and the resulting unrest might just do the work for them. Of course, now they might just bomb Iran and polarize the Iranians...
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Summer classes start up on Tuesday and there are only a fraction of classes that have any kind of enrollment. The registrars office for the last several semesters haven't bothered to put out a paper catalog at all, instead letting the students do stuff online. While this isn't too bad for the full-time students, the ocassional student who might want to look at a description of the class in question is screwed. The college would be just as happy if it could cancel all summer classes and rent out the classrooms and dorm rooms for conferences - after all, conferences bring in more money than students. Bad enough that there is some talk about all regular students having to buy a meal plan, even those like me who live off campus and don't or won't eat the sh!tty food that the campus serves.
If I'm told that I *have* to buy a meal plan I will drop back to being a special undergrad (spug) - while this would limit me to taking only 6 hrs of classes per semester, I'm at the point where a lot of the classes I now have to take are the general degree requirement classes that have a whole lot of seats available, so there is little chance of me being cut out. Plus, being a spug means that I don't have to pay all the fees associated with classes.
The meal plan enforcement has been floated about as an option to support the food services provider who is losing money. Here's an idea: how about serving food that people will *want* to eat instead of food of questionable quality. Kind of hard to get food poisoning off a baked potato, but I've heard that the food services provider managed to do it...
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Looked up my fall textbooks. Oddly it looks like it will be cheaper for me to buy them from the bookstore than to get them online - and we're talking significantly cheaper. One book, The Ottoman Empire 1326-1699, is selling at the bookstore at around $15 - at Amazon it's $45 - and it's only a 96 page book. WTF? It is available for the Kindle, but like I'm going to buy the Kindle to read the textbook - though that isn't a bad idea if the e-book version is...let me check...the Kindle book is $16.16. The other two books for the one class, however, aren't available on the Kindle.
Just checked Powells - damn book is $71! Go to my old standby of abebooks.com - first entry is for $7.50 from Title Wave Books in...Albuquerque?! Woot! Guess I'll swing by there Thursday and get the book - save shipping cost.
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