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My dad is back from Tahiti & back to work.

I'm helping him catch up.

It's the first of the month so I'm busy anyway.

Whew...

Sick Day

Well, I think today might have offically been my first sick day since starting work for my dad almost 3 years ago. I never, ever get sick enough to miss work---I guess there's a first time for everything. Basically I just have a really deep cough and I didn't want it to turn into something serious like bronchitis or something more serious like pneumonia...so I decided to go to the doctor and show up for work late this morning. Well, my normal family doctor is out of town until Monday--no big deal, I'll just establish a new doctor (which I need to do anyway) in my correct insurance network. Well, guess what? Yup, that doctor was leaving the office at noon and had no openings.

So, I head over to the local urgent care walk-in clinic since I felt I had no other choice. What a nightmare?!? First, I didn't see a doctor--just a nurse practitioner, and all she had to say was that I had a virus and we could only treat the symptoms. This is definitely what I expected but all she had to prescribe me was a cough suppressant. The drug she wanted to prescribe me had codeine in it (which I'm very allergic too) so she prescribed a different drug with hydrocodone in it. More on this in a moment. We finish up and I head for the door to pay. Note: Recently (by my choice) I switched to a high deductible health plan with no co-pay & no drug coverage until the deductible is met. It's a great thing if you don't get sick very often---which until today, I don't. So...I have no office visit copay and do you want to guess how much my bill was? $100...nope, $150...nope, $200...nope.....$248.42!!! Are you kidding me? $250 for an office visit were she did nothing but take my blood pressure, listen to my chest & talk to me about my symptoms for 5 minutes?!? Well, it was already done so I paid a portion of it and opted to have the balance sent to my insurance to be repriced. What a ripoff!!!!

Next, I head to Walgreens to fill my prescription. I've still got the thought in my head that my doctor told me I shouldn't react to this drug like I do Codeine. Well, I've got a coupon for 4 free pills (which is 2 days worth) and as my luck would have it...that's all Walgreens has, 4 pills. So, I get those (after waiting 45 minutes) and head home without paying anything since I had the coupon. When I get home, the whole codeine/hydrocodone thing is still bugging me so I Google hydrocodone...and guess what comes up?!? All sorts of results for codeine and the fact that the drugs are very similar and basically everything says don't take anything with hydrocodone if you're allergic to codeine. So...basically I spent 2 hours going to an Urgent Care to spend $250 for an office visit that did nothing to help me but prescribe me a drug that was going to cause me to vomit violently after I've taken it. Wonderful...

By this point, I've given up on goign to work and I call my mom an emotional wreck because I'm ridiculously frustrated & just ready to feel better. So...my mom calls our pharmacist to check on some drugs that she has in her cabinet and then my wonderful dad brings them to me on the way to a business appt. Finally...some cough syrup (yes it tastes nasty, but no I'm not allergic to it, and yes it has finally started to suppress my cough). The rest of my day was spent on the couch watching movies and trying to sleep a little off and on.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day and I'll be able to head to work. I really hate days off when I can't get anything accomplished....Oh, and did I mention that Hubby & I are supposed to be going out of town on Saturday & Sunday for a little Valentine's Day break??? Wonderful timing, yes...but I guess things could always be worse. ;o)

Curse of Computers, Printers, & Fax Machines

Well, today continued on the plague of the computer equipment surrounding me. As you might recall, a few weeks ago I managed to single handedly wipe out our entire companies' mailing list. Last week, the fax machine/copier managed to stop working (not my fault, but an inconvenience nonetheless). And to top it all off, this morning I come in to work...turn on my computer--which was actually already on so in reality I was turning it off--turn on my printer, and I get 2 lovely error messages. #1-Improper shutdown, to avoid permanent damage please use the power button to turn the printer on/off. (Well thank you Captain Obvious, I'm so glad we've clarified what the power button is used for). Error message #2-Ink system failure, printer will not copy, fax, scan, or print. Please turn the printer on/off and try again. Lovely, just lovely. I have a gazillion things to do and the ink system has failed?!? So, after turning the printer on/off about 5 times or so I decide to uninstall and then reinstall the printer. Well, guess what...that doesn't work either. I also try to unplug the printer from everything imaginable and it still will not reset. So...needless to say I am extremely frustrated by this point. My dad comes back to my desk as I am about to literally pull my hair out. We've only had the printer since Oct. 1 so it's getting packaged back in the box and is headed back to Best Buy. Hopefully we'll have some luck and I'll have a new printer tomorrow. Why can simple things not go my way?

Oh well, back to updating the mailing list since I have no printer....;o)

Hard at Work

Well, I hate to admit it but I have been failing miserably at this blogging thing...maybe it's the fact that I've been incredibly busy the past few days, or maybe it's that work has been crazy busy and I haven't had any time to waste while sitting at my office computer, or maybe it's the fact that dear Hubby has to use the computer during the evenings for CPA prep work and thus I am unable to blog even when at home. Regardless of the reason...or maybe excuse, I've kind of fallen off the wagon the past few days. Please know I've been reading all of your blogs as best I can and I love keeping up with all of them, I just don't seem to have time to comment. I realize I'm new at this; however, perfectionist is my middle name. ;o)


Life has been busy, but fairly uneventful in the past few days. I had to sit through 6 hours of continuing education yesterday on the "Best Practices of E & O." Can we all so BOORRRINNNGGG???? Oh well, at least I was out of the office for the day.


We do have a fairly exciting weekend coming up. Hubby's mom is finally going to be in town to see the baby. We are celebrating Big Brother Hunter's 3rd birthday on Friday night and I always enjoy good birthday cake. My mom & dad, my brother & sister-in-law, and me and hubby are headed to STL on Saturday for some shopping and to catch the St. Louis Rams vs. Dallas Cowboys game. My brother is a diehard Cowboys fan, and it kind of spreads over to the rest of us. I'm super excited to hang out with all 6 of us, we haven't all been together in quite some time. Not due to distance, just due to schedules.

Bye Bye Mailing List

Today was going along just swell until around 3:00 pm this afternoon--that's when I discovered that in my attempt to be proactive about losing a large amount of data saved on to a computer I had managed to delete the entire mailing list for our company (about 2,000 customers). YIKES!!! The details of how I managed to do this are too long and confusing...the point is that it happened and our most recent mailing list is GONE! (To be completely honest, I'm still not sure how it happened, I think the flash drive I was using just decided to eat it. ;o) Anyways, after a lot of panic and having to admit to my dad (who's also my boss), and the other ladies in the office what I had done...we decided it was for the better and we would just start from scratch and create a much better, new and improved data base of our clients. I do have a copy of the list from 2006 which is remarkably still fairly current. So, tomorrow that's what we'll start doing. Redoing the mailing list. What fun!

In much more exciting other news, I went to the gym and worked out tonight --probably to work out some frustration--and had a really good time. That sounds so strange to say, but I actually enjoy the idea that I'm doing something good for myself. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up the routine.

Also, one quick praise to God...my father-in-law had some heart issues with some results from his physical and he had an appointment with the cardiologist today. The good news is that open heart surgery is not on the list of remedies at this time...hopefully just a stint or the best option is just medication. We'll know more on Friday. Definitely keep him in your thoughts and prayers--he and my mother-in-law are really just wanting to get down here to see that new baby since they live in Michigan.

Finally, this is simply a technical question for someone new to the blogging world. My dear friend Joelle, gave me an award and I'm not sure how to tag someone new to give the award to. Can someone fill me in on how to do this?

Mind-Numbing Monday

So I sit here at work with practically nothing to do, sure I could go and search something out...but what's the fun in that? Besides it's less than an hour until I get to head home. You would think with it being Monday and our office being shorthanded today that things would be absolutly crazy, oh how wonderful that migth be! Things have been really slow and just dragging on. So, I've taken advantage of the slow afternoon to continue blogging and searching other blogs. Tonight is our next Puppy Obedience School so stay tuned for details. Happy Monday!