A Good Kind of Intervention and Cars in Everyday Ramblings

I took this a couple of days ago and put it up as my cover shot on Facebook. I like it because of the way the light hits the leaves and the fact that those leaves are not totally sodden. Last year in November we had over 9 inches of rain. This year we have had less than 3 inches. Our average is squarely in between those two extremes.

Tuesday I was fitted for and made all the decisions and ordered my hearing aids. Much to my surprise this made me very happy. She tested the same brand on me and it was like going for the muzzy hazy monaural world to a kind of auditory brightness and expansion, like surround sound.

My auditory specialist is just awesome and she says she can tell already I am going to adapt to the change because of my response and the questions I asked. Because my employer is a medical school and teaching hospital they want their employees to be able to hear well so they offer a $1,100 discount on hearing aids. My insurance only covers $300 of the cost so I am very lucky.

The other cool thing is that I have been saving for well over a year for them and I had a range that I heard they would cost but no exact amount and I had reached a certain savings point where I thought I could cover any additional expense if I needed to.

When she showed me the chart of the various levels of bells and whistles and features I looked at the highest end model with the discount and it was exactly, to the dollar, what I had saved!

And two features I really like is this is the first rechargeable model on the market…yeah, no tiny batteries to change and keep a supply of and if I lose one (they are tiny and I live with Diego) I can replace it for only $300 for three years.

It will take me a whole year of yoga income to replace them when they wear out at some point but my hope is that between 5 and 7 years when I need a new pair they will have come down in price and (I know it is a fantasy) we will be heading toward expanded Medicare that covers, vision, dental and hearing basics, which are not covered here at all now.

I get them in January.

I can listen to podcasts through them too. :) So I can cook and wash the dishes and do chores and listen to things without needing to install speakers or wear my headphones.

It is cool to have a medical intervention that is actually going to improve the quality of my life, not just prolong it. I feel very privileged that I have this one available to me.

For the last six months or so at work there has been this new program to encourage all of us to use all sorts of alternate forms of transportation to commute that does not involve one person and one car (or motorcycle as Saint Joe found out).

This week they rolled out the parameters of a new parking program. We already had a 3 year wait for a parking spot for our main campus for everyone but our highest paid employees.

They are doing away with monthly parking passes altogether. If you want to drive to work by yourself and park you will be required to pay a daily rate that is the equivalent of about $300 a month.

The alternative program is pretty comprehensive; say if you have a sick kid, they will pay for you to take a Lyft home. There are innumerable ride share options and we have always had excellent bus service. Traffic here is abysmal for the U.S.

But people don’t like change imposed upon them. There is much freaking out occurring. I understand how people feel that their cars are their personal spaces, (a place to get away from the demands of family and think uninterrupted and) particularly folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum consider their functional cars as a hard earned necessity.

Speaking of that…we have been noticing this phenomenon here lately of people making deliveries in rental cars and vans. Wow. That is a pretty steep cost for overhead if you are doing delivery on a piece by piece basis.

All this change afoot… very interesting.

Last updated November 30, 2018