Overall I had a good day. Right up until I had to wipe a few items off my to-do list. Now I’m feeling grrrrr….
Things that got on my nerves today:
- Having to get on the phone with both my health insurer and the health insurance exchange in my THIRD attempt to get my address updated. Total time spent on this endeavor in the last 90 days: Close to two hours.
- Having to show up in person to quit the YMCA. I LOVE the YMCA as an organization. But the Y in my new town has been a huge disappointment. My monthly membership went way up and we experienced a huge loss in available facilities.
Here’s a list of things my old Y had that we loved and used that my new Y does not have:
3 outdoor pools (with two water slides!), open all summer
indoor track
indoor racquetball courts
lots of open gyms to play basketball in (or at least our version of basketball)
fitness center with Wi-Fi enabled cardio equipment
Basically, it just turned out to be a really expensive gym membership. They told me I could freeze the membership for a few months. I said OK, figuring maybe once winter came I’d scale down and do a single-person membership. But then they dinged my credit card $15 for the courtesy of keeping my membership open but not allowing me to use anything. No thanks. And then they made me come in to the facility to cancel and wouldn’t refund the $15 that they never told me about. Bummed about the whole thing. - Too many passwords for ONE store. A store that I shop at wants me to have a special login and password for my credit card. Sure. No problem. Then I need separate login and email to buy stuff online. OK. THEN I need a separate login and password for my rewards card (which, of course, the app will not accept so I can’t link the accounts). Sigh.
- Arguing over gun control with people I like. I’ll stay off my soapbox for now because I don’t feel like getting into it. But I thought this article from Vox.com was really interesting, three items in particular:
1. A video showing simulations in which people repeatedly failed to disarm a shooter before being shot themselves. The best defense? Running away, according to this video.
2. Data shows a pretty hard-to-deny correlation that more guns equal more shootings.
3. This quote: “Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America’s unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it’s true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence: substance abuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.”
All for now … have a great night.
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