Success

Sometimes It’s Hard for Me to Rest

April 12, 2025

Butterfly at the park, which I saw on my walk the other day. A walk, you’ll soon learn, that I should not have been taking. The butterfly was beautiful, though.

Funny how something that is supposed to help you can turn into a sort of tyrant. Like a simple daily goal of walking a certain number of steps

My knee started hurting last week, but I didn’t think much about it. I carried on with my daily goal of trying to log a certain number of steps on my phone’s step counter. The app that I use also lets me see how many steps I have taken so far this month. I try to beat last month’s count if possible, especially if it seemed like a month when I could have done more, if there was rain or snow or lots of traveling.

So I was aiming to beat the number of steps I had in March, and was vowing to get those steps in, and was doing pretty well, until my knee started hurting more. A lot more. To the point that it was painful to walk much at all. I asked AI, my handy pocket doctor, what you should do if your knee starts to hurt more while walking.

Apparently, if it hurts to walk, if the pain is increasing, you are not supposed to push yourself to walk more. AI gave me the tried and true advice that has been recommended by medical professionals, personal trainers and gym teachers for centuries: follow the RICE method, which means rest, ice, utilize some kind of compression, and elevate your sore limb whenever possible. Continue Reading…

Presence

When Autopay Doesn’t

April 5, 2025

Oak trees at the park this week. If you are ever on hold with customer support for an hour, remember to breathe deeply and think about trees in the springtime and the walk you will take when you finally get off the phone.

Fun fact: If you ever find yourself on hold with Anthem Blue Cross customer support, the background music will unexpectedly disappear after 30 minutes. Exactly 30 minutes. Of course, you never want to be on hold with customer support for that long, but if you are, now you know not to be alarmed when the music disappears. I had called the number on the back of my insurance card in hopes of making a policy payment after my monthly autopay didn’t seem to have gone through. So I was puttering around the house, my phone on speaker, trying to get a little work done, because it seemed like this problem was going to take awhile to fix. I was in the middle of shoveling items from the cat’s litter box when the hold music vanished.

“Oh dear!” I actually said out loud, to nobody, as it turns out.

I wondered if I had offended the gods of customer support by propping my phone next to the cat box while I dug for treasure there.

I hoped I hadn’t been disconnected, as it is a hellish process to work your way through the Anthem phone menu to get to the place where you can actually speak to a real person. After you call the main number, they give you nearly infinite options to hang up so you don’t bother them. “Press one and we will send you a link so you can text us,” they say. Or “Download our app and we will help you that way!”

Except I had tried both those in the past, and they were actually not so helpful. Continue Reading…