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11595

Remicade costs a lot more than twice what Imuran does. About $4k per infusion, with infusions at week 0, 2, 6 and every 6 weeks thereafter. It’s insane. My private insurance will cover at least 80% of it, then provincial insurance kicks in after a $2k or so deductible. The drug companies themselves have representatives in the city that help navigate insurance issues, which I find hilarious.

Getting into TMI now: I’m hoping the Remicade works out fairly well. I’ve been on nightly/semi-nightly salofalk enemas for several years now and I’m getting pretty tired of them (resisting pain in the ass jokes). You get used to them and they really aren’t all that bad, but damn it’d be nice to just go to bed and not worry about it. I was hoping the Imuran would finally get me off them, but it hasn’t been effective enough.

11596

I was in the garage the other day when my cell phone rang. That doesn’t happen often, I was busy, and I was slow getting it out of a pocket full of other junk. The caller had hung up, so I checked my call log.

“Incoming call 200-3, 3:54 PM. Outgoing call, 911, 3:53 PM.”

My phone has this “feature” where pressing the cancel button enough times automatically dials 911. Apparently it butt-dialed it this time, and then hung up. I’m guessing that was someone checking if I really had an emergency.

11597

Whoa, you just took me back to an incident I had with the police maybe 8 or 10 years ago. My wife was at my apartment and trying to call someone on the east coast, think it was a 916 area code- started 91(something) anyway. Apparently she misdialed 911, then retried and got through. But 911 caught her hangup, tried to call back, and not reaching anyone dispatched police to my place. So I get a knock at the door, open the door and surprise! There’s a cop with his hand on his sidearm, giving me the serious hairy eyeball. He walks in, his eyes were everywhere and while he did not draw his gun, neither did he take his hand off it, not once. He talked with us and explained the situation, and we did in turn, and he left satisfied with the situation. But it was intense, man. I was at all times aware that I had to justify to this man, in my home, that I was not a threat to him or anyone else, that it was all a big misunderstanding. Just another day at the office for this guy, but I was pretty shaken up, I must admit.

11598

They usually define this as a 911 hangup, which usually prompts a call-back and sometimes a welfare check. Some municipalities actually fine you for this if it turns out to be a “false report”.

— Alan

11599

Figured I’d update this because hey, why not: due date is Thursday the 2nd, doctor suggested (and we agreed) that if the baby doesn’t come on its own beforehand, we’ll check in on Friday and they will induce. I will have another kid in less than a week!

11600

Awesome news, Pogue. I’m sure everything will be terrific!

11601

And I have a daughter. Everything went terrific.

11602

Congratulations!

11603

Fantastic - congrats!

11604

Yay spawning. Congratulations to Mahones large and small.

11605

Congrats, Pogue!!!

11606

Thanks everybody, still in the hospital at the moment but should be getting out by midday. No complications, just a matter of timing.

11607

I scared myself doing electrical work today.

I’ve done lots off little jobs, and they’ve never made me nervous. However, in this case, I needed to replace the transformer for the doorbell. The old one was directly connected to one of the circuits, and mounted right next to the circuit breaker box. The issue was that I don’t seem to have any easy way of shutting power off to the two main power leads. I could throw the main breaker, but that meant the two input wires were still live, and they have metal screws holding them in place to the power bus, which in turn are live.

Now “don’t touch them” seems like an easy enough thing to do, but I was still nervous, and I was having trouble turning some screws because my hands weren’t steady. I’m a bit paranoid, and when I installed the new transformer, the wires from the transformer justified my paranoia. One of the two leads absolutely insisted that it wanted to contact one of the hot leads. It kept curving down toward the bolt head.

Now, in retrospect, nothing bad would have happened if it did come into contact. I wasn’t touching it, and one side of a 120v step-down transformer coming in contact with a 120v lead would have done nothing. No complete circuit, and if it were a complete circuit, the transformer’s designed for that. It still bothered the hell out of me. I’m still trying to unwind some of the tension from doing that.

Both front and rear doorbells work now. However, I have another concern now, which is that the low-voltage side that connects to the doorbells uses cloth wire, and the insulation is falling off one of the wires where it reaches the chime. There’s no fire hazard since it’s only 16 volts on that side, and if it did short circuit, at most the circuit breaker would throw. I don’t feel up to trying to fish new wire, though.

11608

My neighbor across the street was murdered today. Literally the house across the street.

The first thing I thought before I turned onto my street was “That looks like a news truck antenna sticking up over my house.” My heart started beating faster. News trucks aren’t a good sign if you haven’t been notified beforehand. Sure enough, that’s what it was. A bunch of news trucks, cop cars, a forensic van, and all my neighbors standing around in a daze. (In the linked news article photo, my house is out of frame to the left.) My stomach lurched because the first thing I thought was that something had happened at my house. It was a stupid thought because everyone was facing the wrong way for my house to be the center of attention, but that’s how your brain works in a panic. The police made me pull over and told me that my neighbor was dead and that they were still investigating. Would I mind answering a few questions? I’m ashamed to say that a wave of immense relief washed over me before any other concerns hit. Gradually, the horror of the situation trickled through. “Oh, shit. There are kids over there! Are they okay? What happened?” According to the police, the kids are unhurt.

My neighbor is dead. This is a fairly new neighborhood. We moved in one year ago. (Last October, in fact.) Everyone here is new. It’s a nice neighborhood. It’s full of fairly young couples and kids. There was a block party and a 4th of July community BBQ at the park nearby. Fireworks were shared. People lend each other a hand for things like building fences or simple gardening. But now my neighbor is dead.

11609

Ugh, that is absolutely terrifying, Telefrog, and I feel absolutely horrible for the kids.

When I was much, much younger, I was staying at a cousin’s house in a fairly well-to-do section of Guatemala City, napping. I was awakened by my frantic mother, who was desperate to get me out of the house; apparently, she’d been calling (from the store where my aunt worked) for an hour while I slept. I never learned the full details, but a man had seen a carjacking several streets away. The thieves chased him down and gunned him down in my aunt’s driveway and then left. Presumably, if they’d even suspected the house was occupied and they’d been seen, they might have tried to break in and kill any witnesses (according to mom, common; no idea how true that is and how much it’s just her worrying).

Being that close to death was a first for me, and I’m thankful I was too young to really wrap my head around it. There was blood on the pavement, I remember, but the body’d already been taken away by that time. Looking back, I realize it could have been pretty traumatic for me, but I was insulated by my relative innocence (and, to be frank, the language barrier–I didn’t learn much more about it for years).

Point being that not all kids end up getting "Batman"ed by stuff like that; their little brains can be surprisingly durable in the face of some pretty extreme kinds of horror. What those kids potentially witnessed is way beyond what I did, certainly, but if anything, I hope that means it was enough to just sort of wash over them completely.

Damn. . . just damn. Whoever did that is cold as fuck. :(

11610

An update.

We knew my neighbor had a restraining order against her estranged husband. We had been told this during a neighborhood HOA/watch meeting. “If you see a guy creeping around her house, or the same car driving past over and over, call the police.” He had been arrested before on domestic abuse charges.

What we didn’t know were the scary as fuck details.

Reichardt’s husband tracked her obsessively online, repeatedly accused her of cheating and assaulted her with a chair while she was pregnant, according to a declaration Reichardt filed Aug. 15 in Pierce County Superior Court.

The statement was part of a petition for domestic violence protection, originally filed in July. The order, granted by the court, remains active through August 2015.

Reichardt also requested and received a police escort in July to gather items from the couple’s home.

They met in 2005, Reichardt stated. She said her husband is Dutch, and they lived in the Netherlands for a time before coming to the United States in 2012.

Reichardt said she called local police after one incident in the Netherlands, enraging her husband. She described a history of controlling behavior.

“He recorded all of my calls and emails, had cameras in our house, etc.,” the woman wrote.

“He had all of my emails forwarded to his email, placed a ‘keyboard sniffer’ on my computer so he could see every keystroke I made and so that he could remotely access the computer, and he had a recording in the house of all I did and said during the day while he worked.

“… I was scared and overwhelmed, and he manipulated me to think that the kids and I could not survive without him.”

Reichardt’s declaration describes multiple assaults that led to police involvement, as well as an incident that left one of the children with a broken ankle.

The most recent incident led to the petition she filed in July.

She said her husband punched her in the jaw. She tried to defend herself with a baseball bat, but she was holding one of her children in her arms; and her husband took the bat away from her.

Neighbors heard the commotion and called police. The husband fled.

“I am convinced that he planned to kill us all that night,” Reichardt wrote. “I found out that he has taken out life insurance policies on the kids and me. He also stopped paying the bills months ago, despite telling me he was paying. He was stashing the money.”

I should make clear the ex has not been officially declared a suspect at this time, but the police have talked to him, and it was obvious that they weren’t scoping the neighborhood for random killers.

11611

Some lawyers sent me money today.

Remember that whole unintended acceleration thing with Toyotas a while back? Apparently I’m an “eligible class member” in the settlement of that case, despite the fact that my 2010 Yaris was still sitting on the dealer lot when all that was in the news. In fact, all that stuff was one of the reasons I went to Toyota in the first place, figuring with all that bad press they’d be happy to cut me a deal. And while the $18k price tag wasn’t exactly a rock-bottom deal, I did get 5 years @ 0% financing out of it, so that’s basically a free loan for 5 years. And I’ve been very happy with the car; good mileage, handles well even during West Michigan winters, and no problems yet.

So anyway, a check arrived in the mail yesterday. I read all the attached wording very carefully, to make sure I wasn’t doing one of those “cash this check to sign up for some service you don’t need” things, but it all appears legit. And it says “The terms of the settlement apply to you whether or not you cash the enclosed check” so I don’t think I’m getting cheated out of a chance for anything bigger. It’s only $29.86, which would be pretty underwhelming had I actually had some issue from the unintended acceleration issue, but since nothing ever happened to me it feels like free money. Funding my Steam habit, probably.

11612

A tree fell on our house yesterday. Well, not the whole tree but a branch the size of a tree. It fell off a 250 foot tall sycamore from probably 150 feet up. The branch is about 80 feet long and at it’s base it’s so large it would take two people linking hands to circle it. The branch is the size of most trees.

I was home. I heard this loud, muffled explosion. The entire house shook and the power went off. My friend thought it was the neighbor’s house blowing up. I thought maybe it was an attack like in Red Dawn – Wolverines! Ok, I didn’t really think that but I thought it was a bomb. Or a meteor. Or a house blowing up.

The tree came through the family room ceiling in the back of the house. We have the power back on and some of the tree removed and the roof tarped. Today we await the insurance adjuster. I just hope the rebuild can be done in a few days when they get to it. It’s cold and it will be expensive to heat the house with part of the roof off.

The bright side, as my friend said, is we get a new roof and gutters for our $1000 deductible. Possibly a new facia as well if they can’t match the part they need to repair with the rest of the facia. So we’ll get some nice updates out of it all.

11613

Holy crap! That could have really hurt someone. Glad you and yours are ok and it’s just a monetary/convenience hit.

11614

Mark did this tree smash through all the way to the floor? I have a lot of big branches over my house too and always wondered what will really happen when it comes down. Did it land on the roof and then crush it, or did it cut through everything like a sword?

Would love to see some pics, if you have any.