Back to Reality

I returned home on Monday after being away for 19 days to discover that my housemate is a slacker! This is nothing new to me. I feel no guilt in not giving her a thank-you gift for not taking care of my cat. Tiger Lily was still alive and kicking and oh-so-happy to see me but obviously had been surviving on mostly dry food and water for the whole time we were gone. My niece, Nora, fed her some wet food and cleaned her litter boxes while she and her dad (Ian, Trevor's brother) were here for a day prior to my nephew, Michael's wedding. But there were a mighty lot of cans left over when I got home. Tiger Lily is such a trooper!

I also learned that my PCP (that's Primary Care Physician in insurance speak) has decided to leave his practice. Not only is he leaving his practice but he's leaving medicine altogether. He's not retiring, just fed up with "modern medicine" and taking some time off. This disappoints me because, while I rarely see my PCP, I've come to really respect him and appreciate his "bed-side manner". I'm not the kind of person who runs to the doctor for every sniffle, ache and pain but the few times that I've been there I've come to really like Dr. Rechtschaffen. I'm bummed out that I have to pick a new PCP and can barely pronounce the names of the PCPs that were referred to me. Yes, it's worse than Rechtschaffen! I had planned to ask my chiropractor when I was there on Thursday for my usual back and neck cracking but her husband, the other Dr. Denny, was there instead. These kinds of decisions always leave me a bit paralyzed.

I'm still jobless and the clocking is ticking on the unemployment. Today when I filed my weekly claim I learned that I had exhausted my unemployment benefits. Oh joy. I'll be filing for extended benefits. In the meantime, I'm plugging away at the job search but nothing even remotely interesting has materialized in a long time.