This Week in My Life: Week 4 of 2016

The view from here:

fruit in a pretty antique bowl

a pretty sunset out my front window

this time of year in the tundra, the sky is a bleak white-ish grey pretty much ALL OF THE TIME
so any amount of blue always makes me happy, even though it never lasts.

this is the normal color of the sky. it's depressing.

icicles can be pretty

What I read this week:

I finished Think Like a Freak. I certainly enjoyed it, but it's not as good as the others in the Freakanomics trilogy.

Started A Fireproof Home for the Bride, a work of historical fiction that takes place in a town I lived in for several years and in the overall region I still live in. Though set in the 50s, there are lots of landmarks and things I recognize and know well, which is kind of fun.

the perfect complement to a good book is a cup of Twinings Lemon Ginger tea
in my very favorite tea mug (a gift from a former student)

An update on the evil insurance company situation:

The PA still hasn't been approved. I spent my last 115 bucks (until I'm paid in a few days) to buy 4 days worth of the med. Four days worth! Ridiculous. That $115 will not be reimbursed even when the PA is ultimately approved. (I've decided to say when and not if, since that latter is unthinkable.) If it's not approved when I run out, I'll have to buy more which will likely mean having to decide which bills to not pay this month! I'm also going to try to live on 2 pills a day instead of 3 for a bit, to help me stretch things out. That should be enough to keep me from going into hardcore withdrawal, but will also mean my pain will skyrocket. Fun times. But at least I know that my insurance company "knows my medicine is important to me." End rant, for now.

TBT/FBF:

Winter Storm Jonas got me thinking about the time I got stranded in NYC with my college orchestra after our performance at Avery Fisher Hall - Lincoln Center. Jonas takes 2nd place on the all time list of top 10 biggest blizzards in NYC, while my 2003 blizzard makes the list in 8th place with 19.8 inches. We were a bunch of kids from the MN/ND tundra for whom a little snow and wind and cold was not a big deal (we sometimes have several blizzards a month), so we had a blast being "stuck" in the city for a few extra days. We got super cheap tickets to some Broadway shows, and just generally had a good time exploring the far-less-crowded-than-usual city. Times Square with no traffic was pretty sweet. I just dug out some pictures to scan from this snowy good time, since this was before the digital camera entered my life.

this is near Lincoln Center, a bad picture of someone cross-country skiing right down the middle of the road

I LOVE this picture

right in the heart of Times Square, with a snowplow the only vehicle in sight
and far fewer pedestrians than usual. it was awesome.