The Weather and Medicare

 Monday was the WIND EVENT.  It was fairly impressive.  There were gusts to 65 at the airport.  On the west side of the Cascades ferries were shut down, trains were derailed, I5 was closed for awhile due to mud and rocks on the road.  It was bad.  Here there were many people without power.  Our area did not lose power and we were very happy about that.  Parts of Canada are just inundated with water as is the Seattle area.

Tuesday we met with an insurance agent.  We've had a Cadillac Medigap policy through our former employer since we retired.  It was great insurance, they paid for everything, there were no extraordinary hoops for the doctors to jump through to get MRIs and the like.  Drugs were included in the cost of the supplement.  However, it costs too dang much.  Much of what we were paying for was convenience, they debited our accounts and paid for everything.  However, with Medicare going up this year, and us being poor pensioners on a fixed income, we're making the break.  What was so interesting about Plan D (drug plan for you non-US citizens) was the number of drugs that are not covered and the prices of many of them that are.  Our out of pocket on drugs will double.  One of mine is not covered, it's a generic, and they want to charge me $500 a month for it.  I'll be using GoodRX for that one ($20 a month).  If you're not familiar with GoodRX, become so.  Quite often they're less money than insurance co-pays.  We will move closer to the donut hole (that period of the year when there is a Congress engineered lapse in coverage) than before, due high retail drug prices.  We've never seen retail prices before, I am shocked and appalled at how bad they are.  Too bad our elected officials are working for big pharma rather than their constituents.

After that beyond tedious appointment with the insurance person, we did the city of Spokane an enormous favor and bought a propane two burner camping stove so in the event of a power outage we can feed ourselves.  They're meant for outside use only, but with a window open we should be fine.  It's not much different than RVers using a Mr Buddy in their rigs.  Coming back from our time out of the house we noticed the sky was looking like the end of days.  We finally decided there were snow clouds out there, but figured it was too warm.  We were wrong!  It's graupel, also known as soft hail or snow pellets.  You could hear it hitting the ground.  So, we're officially in to snow season.

On the way back, we saw this.  It's a milk store.  When I was a kid in Virginia, these were everywhere.  It's odd to see one still in business.  Spokane has several old neighborhoods that still exist as small retail areas, like Hillyard, with their own personality.  It's nice to see not everything has been bulldozed and paved over with housing.  This one is called Garland.

Later there was a partially visible sunset.

This morning there was frost.  It was fairly chilly today.  This will be our first cold winter since 2007.  It should be interesting. 

From the department of amazing stories, we have this. The semi was following too closely, he drove up on to the car and folded it in half.  He received a ticker for $189.  The driver survived with minor injuries.  How about that?

That's it!  Throw another log on the fire.