Happy Friday the 13th. 👹
Spent the night in the Springville supercenter parking lot last night, Which used to be one of my staple locations back in the days when Walmart was 24 hours.
Darn you, Walmart. Why won’t you go back to 24 hours?
Woke up. Ate breakfast. Took my last ibuprofen before I do my MRIs. I don’t want to screw up my MRIs by having medication artificially lowering the inflammation prior to the test, so no more drugs for me to Even try and put a dent in the pain and inflammation until the MRIs.
From Springville, I headed north to Provo Canyon (surprise surprise 🙃), parking at Canyon view Park , the first Park on the left as you go up the canyon. I spent the next several hours there working on to-do list items.
I disposed of our honey bucket goods In the park dumpster, finding as I removed the bag from the bucket, that the single garbage bag did not hold the contents, so it leaked inside the bucket and onto my van floor as I carried it out before I realized the issue. 😅
I spent some time organizing the van a bit, cleaning things up, and arranging things to be a little more spacious and organized. There’s not a lot different, but little things here and there.
Got The August tax stuff submitted to the state of Arkansas, and I got the withholding info for the month of August sent over to my accountant.
I trimmed my beard, the hair on my neck, and the hair around my ears.
I cleaned up some trash that was in the parking lot and around the grassy area.
Did some dishes.
Ate some more food.
Got triggered a bit with my self-image, looking at my face in the mirror And all my sun damaged skin and wrinkles. Since I’m not dating, I’m not as self-conscious about it, but if I were dating, I’d be A good bit more self-conscious, I think.
I spent a good while going through all of the health records that I brought with me, cleaning some out that I didn’t need to keep, old bills from years ago and what not, and better organizing some of the things like my lab work reports and what not.
Mostly, though, I was looking for the radiologist reports of the MRIs on my cervical and thoracic spine. I found a disc with x-rays on it of those areas of my spine, but I couldn’t find any record or report of the MRIs.
I could have sworn that I had MRIs of my entire spine, but when I called the imaging place that was listed on the order for MRIs, they said that I canceled the MRIs.
Part of me still thinks I did them, but just at a different location.
🤷
But there’s no record of them, so there’s not much I can do except maybe call around at some additional imaging places that I had been to before to see if they have records of my thoracic and cervical areas.
The reason I was going through everything was that My super sensitive conscience wanted to make sure that I felt good about submitting the MRI expenses to my insurance company. I wanted to make sure that I felt like everything was medically necessary or medically… What’s the word I’m looking for… appropriate? advisable? Not the right words, but… whatever.
Anyway, so I spent a good long time going through all my physical records, and then I spent an even longer time, I think, writing out all of my symptoms and history and tests and results and all that jazz.
When all was said and done, I sent a message to A doctor asking if based on my history and everything if the MRIs were medically advisable.
Later in the day, the reply came back in the affirmative, so that was good. I fired off one more question and I’m still waiting for the reply on that one, but looks like we’re good to go at least for the most part. I want to feel like I’m doing right by my insurance company and only submitting medically advisable claims.
So that was one of the other things that I did was schedule the MRIs for next Thursday afternoon at the Murray location.
It was pretty sobering going back through the old MRI reports, all the scary things listed… And that was even way back in my late twenties and early 30s.
😬
I’m both looking forward to and a bit afraid of what the next radiological reports will say.
Spent some time burning some of my Old financial records as well that were in the same bin with my medical stuff.
Then more van organizing and cleaning up, a little more trash clean up around the parking lot area, and then trying to help a little bit with a Honda Civic that wouldn’t start.
I saw them at the other end of the parking lot, one person trying to jump start the Honda Civic. When they couldn’t get it jump started, I figured I would let them know that it was almost certainly the starter. I tried to flag them down as they were leaving the parking lot, but they didn’t see me and just drove away leaving the Civic there.
So I grabbed the shop towel and a pen and wrote them a message explaining what was most likely and what they could do to verify that it was indeed the starter that was the issue.
I talked the little message underneath their windshield wiper and headed into town to the AutoZone in North Orem.
That AutoZone supposedly had both the belt and the water pump that I wanted to buy as insurance for the rest of our trip, but when I got there, they didn’t actually have the belt, even though their system said they did. So they ordered the water pump for me, and then they found the belt available from one of the stores in salt lake, so I had them do a buy there pickup in salt lake.
Before having the purchase go through, though, I asked the nice gentleman running the commercial desk to have the salt lake store actually put their hands on the belt so that it was for sure that they had it.
That… Took a while. I think it was somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes that we waited on hold for someone to finally answer and go check the shelf for the belt. I don’t know if it was because I had to wait so long or just because we had a great little conversation while we waited, but the gentleman knocked the price of the water pump down from I think 57.99 to $40.
Thanks, my man! 🙂
Once I finally got that taken care of, new water pump in hand, and belt ordered for pickup in salt lake, I headed over to the little park at the base of American Fork Canyon to meet One of my brothers and hang out for a bit.
We sat and chatted about all sorts of things, munching on some snacks, and then heading out to look at a piece of property that he had been interested in That wasn’t too far away from where we were.
It was indeed a beautiful little piece of property, close to town But still with space to breathe And absolutely gorgeous views of the mountains.
From there, we headed over to his school, where I helped him, a tiny bit load up some stuff for A school program that is going to happen tomorrow.
He also mentioned that his headlight bulb was out, so I worked on that a little bit in the parking lot, only to find that o’reilly’s sold him the wrong bulb, so he followed me over to the O’Reilly’s sans an entire headlight assembly, and then we spent the next 30 minutes or so fighting with the assembly to get it all back together.
There was one fastener that was broken and was making things impossible to get back together properly. In the end, we gave up and just may do as it was. It’s still fastened down just fine, but I have no idea exactly what would be necessary to have it be as it was from the factory.
Quite the complicated little project just to change a little bulb. 😅
It was great spending time with him. It’s nice to have wonderful siblings.
After leaving O’Reilly’s, I popped on over to Discovery Park just briefly, for memory’s sake, before heading for my overnight destination, a different place than last night.
It’s been a good and productive day. I’m going to veg out a little bit and then crash.
G’night, all.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 