Life Stories: January 2007 Archives

Jessica had to go to the emergency room last night because every doctor we saw over the past few days, starting with an ER doc in Los Angeles, said she probably had appendicitis. So we spent seven hours waiting to see a doctor after hours, waited a couple more hours for a CT scan, and then found out it's not appendicitis but "just" an infection. So, that's good I suppose.

What's really frustrating is that Jessica saw our primary care physician yesterday morning and was told to just wait to see if it gets better but to go to "urgent care" that night if it kept hurting. That's completely insane, but it sounded ok to us at the time. Our doctor should have ordered the CT scan herself during normal business hours. Then we could have found out there was no appendicitis without wasting 10 hours in hospitals last night. Our PCP also should have kept Jessica on the antibiotics that the first ER doctor prescribed on Sunday night, since it turned out to be an infection rather than appendicitis after all. Finally, our PCP shouldn't have told us to go to urgent care! All they did was make us wait two hours, push on Jessica's stomach, and then send us to the ER where we had to wait five more hours. We should have gone straight to the ER if appendicitis was suspected, since there's nothing an urgent care facility can do in that circumstance.

Overall I'm very disappointed with the decisions of our primary care physician. If Jessica had gotten the CT scan yesterday afternoon we could have discovered the infection and spent a normal evening at home.

The wife and I just returned from a weekend trip to Los Angeles. It was quite a bit of fun; we got to visit family and friends (that's all I could find at the moment, weak), our old church, our old neighborhood, and even do a little celebrity-sighting at LAX. The only bad part of the trip was when Jessica came down with food poisoning / stomach flu right before Jay Leno came on stage at the Comedy and Magic Club. We rushed her to the emergency room because it was pretty serious, but she's feeling much better now, thankfully. Our flights on Southwest were late going in both directions, but were otherwise uneventful.

All in all it was a very relaxing, rejuvenating trip. You never appreciate your family as much as when you live too far away to see them every day. Going back was very nostalgic and somewhat melancholy, because we had a lot of good times in Los Angeles and there are so many people we care about there. I'm sure we'll be visiting again really soon.

Get ready for a flurry of short posts as I put up a few things that have been on my mind over the past few days.

According to Ameren's website our power is still off for an unknown reason and no service team has been assigned to check into it. There are still more than 100,000 people without power, so I hope we don't have to "wait our turn" to get another attempt by Ameren. Nornally I rail against the Ameren executives for these outages, but it would have been really nice if the linemen had actually checked to see whether or not their attempted repair worked before declaring our power restored.

This hideous outage is all the more humiliating for Ameren because the three-phase ice storm that was predicted only turned out to have a single phase. Instead of a one-two-three wallop of ice, sleet, and more ice, we only got about half an inch of ice on Friday night and then the temps climbed above freezing. By yesterday afternoon all the ice was gone and there was a nothing more than a light drizzle covering the city. And yet hudreds of thousands of people are without power for the third time in six months. Ridiculous.

I stayed home from work today to take care of the house. Temps are dropping again now and we'll have to let the faucets drip if our power is going to be out for an extended period of time. Very frustrating. Someone needs to do a better job. I hope now that heads will roll at the Ameren UE monopoly.

Continuing the incompetence, the recent ice storm has left more than 150,000 Ameren UE customers in the dark for days on end for the third time in six months.  Look, I know the weather here isn't like in Southern California, but there are people at our church who have lived in Minnesota where the winters are far worse and they have never had to endure such long outages.  The system needs to be changed so that we don't lose electricity for days at a time.

Compounding my frustration, Ameren's customer service is sorely lacking.  The first time we called and managed to get through to a live person, she was very rude.  After telling us that there was "a crew working in your area" she asked for our phone number and then hung up.  Why did she want our number?  So that when we called back their phone system could identify us and dump our call onto a "there's nothing we can do for you" line with no options to do anything whatsoever.

Ameren's motto is "365.  And then some."  I'm not sure what the "365" stands for.  Some possibilities:

• 365,000 people with no power, and then some.
• 365 dollars a month, and then some.
• 365 hours with no electricity, and then some.
• 365 minutes on hold, and then we hang up on you and blacklist you.

In any event, their website now says that it hopes that the power outage hasn't "inconvenienced" us and that we should be back on by 3:45am tomorrow morning.  Barring a light drizzle, anyway.

Update:

And then Ameren's website will tell you that your power is back on, but when you go home everything is still dark.  Thanks Ameren!

I'm back to work and going hard at it. Lots to do.

The spam problem is getting unmanageable again, even with MT-Blacklist. I'm trying to nag my admin into upgrading our Movable Type installation because the new version supposedly has a new system that resolves a lot of the spam issues. Until then, my motivation is low because it takes hours to delete the spam.