Hooray for Woot.com!

My husband just said these words to me:

"I can't wait to vacuum!"



Seriously, this is the best day ever. He bought a Dyson vacuum on woot.com, and he is so excited. You can understand why it's my new favorite website.

Granted, he did treat the vacuum as though it was a lightsaber when he first took it from the box, so perhaps there is a bit more going on here than just an instinct for cleanliness.



It works super well! Woot for the new vacuum!

Baby's Got Back Injury

Since the end of May, I've been struggling with a back injury, which has had me staying away from the gym, hiking, and… well, sitting. My chiropractor called it early on, saying it was a disc injury.

My primary care, on the other hand, decided it was a muscle and told me to call if it got worse. Well, it got worse and I called two weeks later to schedule a follow up, and to get an MRI referral to find out the extent of the damage.

The administration in the office is far beyond what I would call disorganized. I've been mad at them for over a month. They continue call my defunct home phone to make appointments, despite me giving them my cell phone number on four separate occasions. (Finally, I had one of the admins remove my home phone number from the database entirely.) And, they keep scheduling me on days when I say I absolutely cannot make it.

Is this opposite day?!

I finally got in to see the doc, who said it's a disc injury. Something I’ve known since May 30. Late to the party, but at least she showed up. She wrote me three referrals.

1) MRI
2) Physical Therapy
3) Spine Orthopedist

I felt relieved, and went home to make all of my appointments. Well, today, the spine doc still does't have the referral from my primary care that was supposedly faxed last Wednesday to her office. Even better, I received a letter from my insurance that says they won't cover an MRI unless it's ordered by an orthopedist.

And here's the funny part that makes me want to pull out my hair and wander the street babbling to myself... the orthopedist won't see me without an MRI.

It's like a Mobius strip straight out of hell.

What's really annoying is I'm not even sure to whom I should direct my increasing ire. Private insurance for being yet another failing American invention? Or, the primary care clinic for being so lame in the first place?

Meanwhile, my left foot keeps tingling. That can't be good.

Farmers' Market

Bryan and I have been frequenting the local farmers' market for the past month or so.

The progression to where we are now in our grocery buying adventure has been a gradual one. We began with the standard trip to Safeway, a large, west coast grocery chain. Then, somehow, we learned of the evils of high fructose corn syrup, and began looking for it in the ingredients of all of our food. It seems, nearly every food carried by regular grocery chains contains this sinister ingredient. From yogurt to bread, check it out.

Enter large chain organic grocery store, WholeFoods. Having previously avoided this behemoth due to its often exorbitant pricing, we did some cost comparisons. Most of the Safeways have an organic section, which sells many of the same foods found at WholeFoods. However, when we crunched the numbers, we realized that Safeway was gouging people who wanted to to eat healthy foods with whole grains and no poison in them. This seemed wrong... and expensive. So, we changed our regular grocery store to WholeFoods. During this time, Bryan was reading "An Omnivore's Dilemma", as well. So we began looking for organic animal products, including organic milk, free range chicken and eggs, and grass-fed beef.

We definitely pay more for the humane and organic versions of these products, but we feel good because we're not only helping the individual animals, but also the environment, by reducing the antibiotics and other unnatural things that are often added to these foods.

We were pretty happy with our weekly trips to WholeFoods and occasional trips to the city's co-op market to buy our organic goods. However, while the staples at WholeFoods are more reasonably priced than their counterparts at Safeway, we found that buying organic produce was putting us in the poor house. Grapes from Chile, peaches from Alabama, apples from New Zealand... That much travel costs a lot for a small piece of fruit, both in dollars and in pollution. Hmm.




We began to consider the farmers' market as a possible alternative. Hallelujah! We found that we could buy a pound of peaches for $1.50 per pound. Contrast that with the $2.99 per pound we paid at WholeFoods. And the produce at the farmers' market is local. None of it travels from other countries, or even other states. As an added bonus, much of it is labeled organic, even by rigid California standards.

So, Bryan and I are enjoying the lower cost and, quite frankly, better taste of local foods produced by small farms. And, in a world of growing pollution and environmental problems, our consciences are pretty clear, with an occasional splurge on bananas from afar.