Oh wait, the kids are up.

Too late.

Ugh, and they have informed me that we need milk, so I must walk down the street to get some. *sigh*

Well anyway, I guess I still have a few dregs of solitude and thought in my noggin. I’ll try to make a coherent post before playing the milkman… :D

Has anyone else been getting tons of emails from advertising companies, asking them to place text links or purchase articles for their blogs? Usually, the offers are pittance. Some are good though. :D I’ve been getting carbon-copy communications in both my comments section, contact form, and email for the lower-end ads. Weird. It’s happened all at once, for about a month now. Hey, I’m not complaining– any offer is great! It’s just odd that it’s so much all at once.

Spring is coming. February is the time I *usually* order garden seeds, and my Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog came right on schedule. But I haven’t had a spare second to peruse it. I have this feeling that I won’t be getting to THINKING about the garden until April….

Spring is also spring cleaning. Yes, we still do spring cleaning! I remember doing it with my mom as a kid. She always wore a red bandana on her hair, remember when ladies wore those? I think only hip-hop artists keep the bandana companies in business today… well anyway, we used to scrub the house from top to bottom, even the walls.

Something tells me this guy isn't off to do spring cleaning...

Oddly enough, we never cleaned the carpets. Today, of course, there are fancy (expensive) machines and companies like Carpet Cleaning Horseshoe Bay and Carpet Cleaning Hudson Bend who do it for you. They probably don’t wear bandanas. :D One of the reasons I did not install wall-to-wall carpeting in the house after we renovated (besides the cost) is that carpet is so hard to clean. Over the years, it fills with so much gunk that not even the bandana-bedecked Carpet Cleaning Jollyville experts can scrub it out. Or, maybe they can.

I’m nervous about that Obamacare bill. I don’t want federal government health care. And I don’t want to pay extortion to not have it, either. It makes me sick to my stomach to see our country forcing things down our throats all the time. I am a “do it yourself” kind of gal. I like the self-sufficient life and I like to make my own decisions. I had a doctor like that, too, but unfortunately, he’s now retired. He used to lay out all the facts, informing me of my options, and let me make the decision. When I was expecting my second daughter, he thought that she was not growing, according to the sonograms. Since my previous labor had been difficult and the baby large, he recommended that I have this second child early, to avoid complications of a large baby. The sonograms were showing that this one was going to be a whopper, because already she was 7 lbs and I still had four weeks left of pregnancy (babies gain a 1/2 pound every week, which would make the baby 9 lbs at her due date. My husband and I were very hesitant to induce. The doctor didn’t think the baby was in any particular danger, but he was concerned about her growth. But he allowed us to make our OWN decision. He allowed us to wait two weeks on the condition that every other day I had to go to the hospital for a sonogram, to monitor the baby’s growth. Which we did. Two weeks later, we did eventually induce, and the baby was born small (as far as my kids go, 7 lbs)! She was not the 9 lbs that the sonogram was saying she was. And actually, if we had induced two weeks earlier, when the doctor had wanted it, the baby would have been premature and weighed only 5 lbs because we discovered that the due date had been calculated wrong. I loved my doctor for letting us make our own decisions.

Anyway, in a culture where less and less responsibility is expected of the individual and more and more given to distant bureaucrats, I wonder what will become of us.

Enough musing. I must go to get the milk. Thanks for reading. :D

:-p

I refused to buy new glasses from that office ($250 for a pair of glasses?!?!?! Every year?!?!). Not while Zenni is around. If I don’t get my prescription chart cleared up, I may as well spen $50 of my own money and get a new exam from someone else, and then go to Zenni. It would STILL be cheaper than buying new glasses from the optical department. Yow.

Zenni just dropped their prices on some of their stuff– down to $6.95 for frames! Check them out!

I’ve heard so much about Zenni Optical that I think I am finally going to go with them this time (lowest prices are $8 for glasses!!!). My main problem is getting that “PD,” or Pupillary Distance measurement. I can get my vision prescription just fine, but Zenni needs the PD, which is a little trickier to extract from reluctant optometrists (who seem to KNOW that you are going to take your business elsewhere). Some optometrists are charging for the service… and certainly that is their prerogative. But I would think that the PD would be a part of the package for the eye exam. I mean, the optometrist isn’t selling the glasses– the kiosk in his office is (for prices close to extortion, imho). What does he care where I get my glasses? Isn’t it important that I get SOMETHING since I NEED glasses and since he is concerned about my vision??

Well, some optometrists are more concerned about their bottom line (and pride). Zenni points to a forum where some eye doctors are complaining about patients asking for PDs. The doctors are ganging up together to stop this “online eyeglasses plague” that’s cutting in to their bottom line. One doctor told the story of how he dealt with such an “online eyeglasses seeking” patient: the patient came into his office, asking how much an exam was. The doc somehow just KNEW that this was an “online eyeglasses person,” and told the patient that the office doesn’t charge anything for an exam *snicker snicker this will show him*. The doc said he schemed to keep this patient in his office for as long as possible, to teach this guy a “lesson.” After the complete eye test (which lasted over 45 minutes), the patient asked for the prescription, and the doctor refused. He said that the eye exam is free, but the prescription is is not free unless the patient buys eyeglasses from the office. The patient was angry and left, empty-handed as planned, in a huff. Hoh hoh hoh, did that smart doc pull a fast one on that patient, hoh hoh! His colleagues almost “died laughing” when they heard how shrewd this doc was with those “Internet people,” YEAH!

:blink: Um, who cheated who? That patient lost 45 minutes of time for an extended appointment, but the eye doctor lost 45 minutes of his precious professional time AND exam office space. Not to mention that his forum post was riddled with spelling errors (it’s “colleagues” not “collegues,” Dr. Smarty, and it’s “laughing,” not “laughting”) and his story has suspicious errors in it (he called the patient a man at the beginning of the story, but then said that “she” complained that her 45 minutes has been wasted). Hmmm.

Anyway, I don’t care if I have to pay for a PD. $30 isn’t bad, especially in light of $250 for glasses! Sheesh!

I don’t see why this who situation needs to become a war between doctors and patients. SOME patients DON’T HAVE insurance, and SOME patients can’t or won’t pay extorting prices for necessary eyeglasses! Is that so hard to understand?!

I think what I will probably do is go ahead and do the insurance musical chairs– get the prescription from the one doc, go to the local eyeglasses place and get eyeglasses, and then save the prescription and PD measuring information for ordering eyeglasses at Zenni’s. I will then give a full-fledged review of Zenni Optical and the eyeglasses. My vision is a sensitive 20/1000, so I’m obviously VERY fussy about my eyeglasses. I’m going to take a very “hard look” and compare the store-bought with Zenni’s.

Buy a Snickers candy bar for 50 cents. DO NOT SHOW YOUR CHILD WHAT IT IS. Now, when your child is out of the room, place the Snickers bar on a table, about 20 feet or more of where your child will enter the room. Have the child enter. Point to the table and say, “What’s that?” If the child says, “Can I have it?” your child’s vision is JUST FINE.

That worked for me for years.

I recently saw some fancy gadget online for testing kids’ eyes, and it struck me as a little extravagant. Sure, there are times when fancy gadgets are needed. But then again, there are time when they are definitely not needed. Why spend more than you have to?

My daughter has incredible vision– 20/15, actually. Then this year and last year, she was given 20/20 vision by the eye doctor. And he recommended GLASSES! For all my kids, whether they needed them or not, the eye doctors always recommended glasses. They’d even try to wheedle my kids into getting prescription sunglasses, just as long as they have SOME kind of prescription to them! Holy cow, if the kid’s vision is fine, why fool with it? Glasses can make your eyes lazy. Plus, the eye glasses is where the money is made, not with the exams. :-p I never liked doctors and some of them sure don’t inspire me much, either.

P.S. Hm, I think eye doctors should be required by the FTC to inform me of when their recommendations come as “sponsored posts”! How about you?!