Basement
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It's been almost a week since I'd last posted.
Kind of a busy week. Wednesday through Friday were spent traveling and attending my niece's wedding. It was a nice time. My youngest sister managed to bring Mom along from Clifton Park, near Albany, to Williamsville, near Buffalo. It was a bit of an ordeal for Mom, given her mobility issues, but I think she enjoyed being there and spending time with her children and grandchildren.
Work on the house is progressing. We hired a new timber frame company for the deck and the porch. Getting fired by the previous company was a blessing, since we're getting a larger deck, in white oak, and a better design for a lot less money. Go figure.
White oak was an extra-cost option with the first company, so we were going to use Douglas fir. The problem with Douglas fir is that it's a haven for carpenter bees. White oak has a much denser grain and is less attractive to carpenter bees.
We met the company owner and he's a remarkable guy. Restores classic cars as a hobby. Easy to work with, we walked through his house, which is all timber frame construction, to see his deck and got a clear idea about what to expect. We're very excited.
I wanted to use my DJI mini 3 to take shots of the new house. It worked fine last week, but I guess Beta 2 of iOS 27 may have introduced some sort of incompatibility. I couldn't get either the mini 3 or the mini 2 to connect with their respective controllers. Very frustrating.
I think we're going to have some challenges with the elevation of the first floor, based on how high the basement rises out of the ground. Our goal was to have only one step from the porch to the ground, and it's not clear to me that that will be achievable absent a great deal of grading. We'll figure something out.
I got my eyes examined on Tuesday and a new prescription. My astigmatism has gotten worse somehow. I'll be correctable to 20/40 in the left eye and 20/80 in the right. The optometrist said I was a good candidate for cataract surgery now, and that would resolve nearly all my vision issues, apart from near-field. I'm going to look into setting it up soon. My brother had his done a few years ago and he only uses glasses for reading now. He can see clearly mid-field to distance, so no need for glasses driving.
There's a new Medicare program that allows qualified Medicare patients to be prescribed GLP-1 medications for $50 a month for about the next 18 months. The program ends in December 2027. I'm pretty sure I qualify because of my BMI and Stage 3a kidney disease. The process to actually receive the medication is very convoluted and counterintuitive. You have to be denied twice and then have your doctor write some magic words in "all caps" (literally) in order to ultimately receive the meds.
It looks to me as though Medicare is undertaking a kind of large-scale study to see if GLP-1 interventions can reduce healthcare spending by treating obesity. I don't really care, I'd just like to get to a healthy weight to preserve my kidney function. I weighed myself this morning and I weigh more than I ever have before. I thought I'd been maintaining, but I guess there was a subconscious reason why I hadn't been weighing myself lately.
Le sigh.
Anyway, hopefully I get my eyes fixed and my weight down and life will be grand.
The beat goes on...
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