Cap Metro–how disappointing yet unsurprising

Media Dis&Dat reports on how CapMetro, the bus agency in my city, is justifying its slashing of services to people with disabilities:

“We, I suspect, have historically let people in (to MetroAccess) who should not be eligible,” board member John Langmore said. “So it is ironic that we are having to change our eligibility process to correct our own failings in the past.”

So blatantly untrue. Cap Metro’s traditional process for approving people with disabilities for service is to to first ignore their requests for the paperwork; second, lose the paperwork; third, pretend to be getting new paperwork out; and fourth, approving the request if has made it past the paperwork delay hurdles to appear on the appropriate desk some time between 4:20 and 4:45 on a Tuesday afternoon that falls on a date that, when the digits are added, is a prime number in a month with an R.

Perhaps Mr. Langmore suspects that anyone who has managed to persevere and gain services must obviously be de facto disqualified by reason of being able to jump through hoops.

Me, me, me

Yes, I am actually going to talk about me! So exciting. I know you are all a-tingle.

And what can I say? Life has been going along pretty well. Way back last December, I got new orthotics, and they continue to make my everyday almost normal. Seriously, if I ever meet the doctor who designed them, I will kiss him for re-aligning my legs so nicely. I still have pain flare-ups where I wake up to every single joint on fire and spend the day trying not to touch things, which is really, really unworkable, no matter how much I don’t want to touch anything. Stupid material world needing to be interacted with in a material way. But the daily sick pain in my legs is gone and I’ve even begun to rebuild muscle. So sweet! I am grateful for this.

I moved back in June, and thus needed to get a new doctor. The new one is OK. He isn’t much into ongoing management of conditions, though, so next time I see him, I need to arrange to get an allergist and a pain management doctor. Maybe a rheumatologist, also. The bright side is, new doctor is completely uninterested in ordering tests for complaints I don’t have. The last doctor I had was all about the tests, and this was a sticking point since I strongly feel that, if it isn’t bothering me, don’t worry about it and let’s worry instead about what is bothering me.

What else? I feel like I am stuck without progress in learning Japanese, though I did manage, with a lot of internet help, to translate a short passage recently. I need to do that more often so that I don’t forget the meanings I learn. Still, even if I learn new words, I have very bad grammar so that makes it hard to pull the sense out of a passage.

I’m currently teaching a class in addition to my regular job, with the hope that maybe I can pay on my stupid student loan. But since that is semester by semester, there’s no assuredness there. The law on student loans really needs to change. Right now, it is pure usury with those earning the least ending up paying exorbitant amounts for the crime of not having been able to find a decent job fast enough.

Adios, blogger; hello, wordpress

After two months of not being able to log into my blogger account or comment on friends’ blogspots, and this not even being the first time I’ve had that trouble, I have had it. Maybe WordPress will be less user unfriendly. It would have to really try hard to be worse.

I’ve migrated most of Yet Another Never Updated Blog over here, and changed the name just because I felt like it. Perhaps the updates will be less unreliable now that I have switched.