Money Saving Coupons From the 99

In the Six Great States, it seems you can’t swing a dead Y***** fan without hitting a 99 Restaurant.  They also have locations beyond New England, as well.

Anyhoo, if you like to eat there…as we do from time to time, you should join their email club to get coupons and stuff.  But if you haven’t done so yet, fear not, as I have a couple of coupons for you.  Click here to get them.

Remember, don’t be cheap and stiff your server.  Tippage should be based on the full value of the meal BEFORE the coupon is applied.

Enjoy!

Can we repeal the Malden trash bag tax?

Last October, the city of Malden, MA, without bothering to ask any of its residents, instituted a trash bag tax.  In order to have our trash picked up, we must buy either trash bags that hold up to 35 pounds, for $20 for a bag of ten, or 15 pound capacity bags for $10 for ten bags.  We can only use those bags, if we use any others, we get ticketed and fined.

Well, one man, Bob Miller, didn’t sit back and take it.  He formed a group called Malden Taxpayers For Accountability.  They created a petition against this unfair tax, which Mike and I both signed last November.

Now they officially have enough signatures in order to force this to be placed on the ballot this November.  And so it will be.

But the battle to eliminate this ridiculous tax is far from over.  The problem?  This election year is kind of a boring one, especially after last year.  No big elections, no Senators, Congressman, governor, etc are running for any office.  And as such, too many people decide not to bother to hit the polls.  I confess that I’ve been guilty of this myself.

Not this year, though.  Not only will Mike and I be at the polls on November 3, to vote in favor of the repeal of PAYT (Pay As You Throw), but we will also be voting against every single incumbent city councilor we can who voted in favor of this nonsense in the first place.  Is the mayor running for re-election this year?  I hope so, so we can vote against him, too.

So that’s the task that MTFA has ahead of them this summer.  If you live in Malden, please do what you can to help spread the word, to get people to come out and vote on November 3.

Maybe I will design some flyers to post and hand out…do I have enough computer memory left for that? Probably, but I could afford more if I didn’t have to keep buying ridiculously expensive garbage bags every week!

This issue has even made the Boston Globe – article here!

C’mon, Maldonians…let’s all help fight the good fight!

Are you tired of MBTA fare evaders?

And lazy bus drivers and commuter rail conductors who don’t collect the proper fares?  Yet, as I said in this post, the MBTA is broke, and it is not much of a mystery as to why.  Yet they want to raise fares this fall…AGAIN.  When will it ever end?

Well, probably thanks to that post, I was found on Twitter by RideFare.org.  Their Twitter page is located at http://twitter.com/ridefare.  They are also on Facebook.

Thanks to RideFare, you now have a forum to fight back.  If you see fare evaders and the like, you can Tweet what you saw to @RideFare.  This will show up on Twitter for the whole world to see.  You can also use the form on their website to report any fare evasions and such that you observe.  This is good when it’s more than 140 characters, or your cell phone loses its signal in the subway tunnels, as mine often does.

I hope that if enough people complain ahbout what they see being done wrong, the T will listen, crack down on fare collections, and avoid the upcoming fare increase.

Good to see people out there fighting the good fight!

Massachusetts lawmaker wants to expand smoking ban…

…to 25 feet away from doors and windows of any public building.  Story here.

While I, as a non-smoker married to someone who is severely allergic to cigarette smoke, like the idea, I think that 25 feet might be a bit too much.  I’d be happy if the smokers just didn’t hang out right IN the doorway, or right outside of it, maybe just ten feet away would be enough.  Just as long as there was a reasonably smoke-free way to pass by and get in and out of the building without having people blowing smoke right in our faces (as has happened often), I’m willing to not force them to go 25 feet.

I wish people would realize what a disgusting habit smoking is, how it can kill, even those who never smoked, but have had to breathe in second-hand smoke.  Mike has had assorted respiratory problems all his life, and most of them have been blamed on the fact that when he was a kid, both his parents smoked like chimneys.  Mike remembers about how, when he was little, his parents would sit in the living room and puff away.  Sometimes they invited friends over, who also smoked.  There’d be this big cloud of smoke, and the only place where there was no smoke was on the floor (since the smoke all rises to the ceiling).  So he used to spend a lot of time laying on the floor, so he could try to breathe.

He tried to smoke a cigarette once, when he was about 15.  As it usually is with teenage boys, it was on a dare.  So he lit up the cigarette, took a puff, and almost immediately, his face started puffing up and he had trouble breathing.  It was very scary, he said.  He never tried to smoke again, and can’t be near people who are smoking.

Anyway, we know that smoking is dangerous and causes lung cancer, emphysema and other diseases…just like it became known that asbestos was dangerous and caused mesothelioma. Asbestos has since been banned in many places.  So what’s wrong with banning smoking in places where non-smokers have to breathe?  It’s not as if we can just stay home!

WARNING: Arlington, MA Visting Nurse and Community Health HARASSES patients and families!

I STILL can’t frakkin’ believe that such a so-called *professional* organization is allowed to get away with this.

As you may know, Mike was recently in the hospital, at the Lahey Clinic.  It’s a good hospital, except for the fact that they use the Arlington VNCH company.  he was released on Saturday.  He was asked, prior to release, if he would require any visiting nurse service.  He said no.  He’s feeling quite well, actually, he is in better shape than I am right now.  He has Type 2 diabetes, but learned how to inject his own insulin and test his blood sugar ages ago.  he does need to get blood drawn for tests this week, but he is perfectly capable of getting to the doctor’s office or hospital lab for this.

So, he was sprung on Saturday.  He was thrilled, because he was stuck there for a week and a half, and was more than ready to get back out into the world.  We happened to have tickets for a New Hampshire Fisher Cats game for Sunday, which was part of the season mini-plan that we’d bought many months ago.  he was anxious to go, felt perfectly well enough to do so, so we went.

We were sitting there, having a great time, until my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.  I didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, but like a dope, I answered it anyway.  It was a nurse from the VNCH, who was going ballistic because she was trying to call us at home, and no one was picking up.  Well, no DUH, I said, we can’t answer the phone when we are not there.  She was a very rude person who also did not have much command of the English language.  But I understood enough of what she was saying to know that she was NOT going to leave me alone until I put Mike on the phone.  So I handed him the phone and told him to talk to the bitch, jut to shut her up already.  Before I did, I gave her shit for trying to call someone else on MY personal cell phone.

He took the phone, only to have this nasty shrew yell at him for all sorts of misdeeds, such as not being at home and bedridden.  Oh, and he needed a nurse to come and give him his insulin.  And to take blood for bloodwork.  It went on and on until he got sick of being yelled at, and hung up on the bitch.

Mike handed me back my phone and I put it back into my pocket.  I was pissed not only at them for being so rude, but for calling MY personal cell phone about this.  I gave the number to the hospital, yes, but I did NOT authorize them to hand it out to other agencies, as it it were candy on Halloween.  They should have just called the landline at home ONCE, left a message, and waited to be called back, like civilized human beings.

A few minutes later, the phone buzzed again.  I looked at the caller ID, and it said *restricted*.  I get it, the bitch decided to override caller ID to try to trick me into answering.  Well, anyone who knows me, knows that you’d better allow your number to show in my caller ID, or else I don’t pick up.

I hit the IGNORE button to make it stop, put the phone back in my pocket.  It buzed again seconds later, same *restricted* thing in the caller ID.  Once again, I hit IGNORE.

The phone buzzed yet again.  This time, I didn’t hit IGNORE, and let it go to voice mail, in the hope of shutting the bitch up, so we could enjoy the rest of the game in peace.  I had to get up anyway to pee and get another beer, and I listened to the voice message while I was on the toilet.  It was the same nasty bitch, yelling at me because Mike hung up on her, and going on and on about how he HAD to have a visting nurse NOW or else.  I deleted it, finished my business, got another beer, and went back to my seat.  Fortunately, she did not call back again on my cell.

When we got home, there were FIVE messages from the same nasty bitch on our answering machine.  That came to NINE calls within the span of one hour…our home machine has timestamps, and they were right around the time they were calling my cell at the ballpark.

I did a reverse Google search and found the website for this company, and I sent them the following email:

I am writing on behalf of my husband, Michael Murphy. He was released from the Lahey Clinic on Saturday, and NEVER asked for visiting nurse services.
Yet, your company not only left five messages on our home answering machine today, but they also called MY personal cell phone four times. I handed my cell to Mike once to let him talk to the nurse, because she said she was going to keep calling my phone until she talked to him.

He did hang up on her, because she was very rude, and got upset that he dared to leave the house. Mike’s doctors never said that he was to be bedridden, it was okay to live a normal life. I didn’t get her name, but she didn’t speak English very well.

She called three more times on my cell, and I might add that she hid the caller ID info from me in order to try to trick me into answering the phone.   I finally let it go to voice mail, only to get yet another very rude message.

I want you to cease and desist these phone calls, on both my personal cell and our landline. Mike will deal with his own doctors for any bloodwork that needs to be done, we do not wish to deal with your very rude and obnoxious nurses at all. We can get to the doctor on our own.

If you do not understand what we want here, perhaps our attorney can explain this to you in a way that you can understand. NINE phone calls in one day is too much, as are any nasty messages at all. You try being stuck in the
hospital for a week and a half, and dying for some fresh air and sunshine.  I wasn’t aware that fresh air and sunshine was unhealthy for anyone.

We want nothing further to do with your company. Please respect that.
Thank you.

Michael & Christine Murphy

I never heard back via email.  But, later in the day, they called again, on the landline.  This time, it was someone who actually spoke proper English.  Mike was not at home, as he went out to pick up mail at the P.O. box, and to stop by the hospital to let them draw blood for the needed bloodwork.  The bloodwork that the VNCH seemed to think he was too helpless to do on his own.  Oh, and before he went out, he also tested his blood sugar and injected his insulin, took all of his AM pills, etc.  All of that stuff he supposedly can’t do on his own.

He returned a little later, and I begged him to call them back in an effort to shut them up once and for all.  Maybe if he explained to them that he was fine, never asked for the service, didn’t need it, they’d back off.

He did make the call, and was told that someone had *ordered* the service, and that they *had* to come tomorrow and draw blood, check his blood sugar, etc.  he told them no, they didn’t, he is fine, and as a matter of fact, he just returned from the hospital where he had blood drawn.  The woman on the phone finally said that she would *remove him from their list*.

We don’t know who the hell at Lahey *ordered* this.  The doctors who have been taking care of him have all said that he was okay to go home and function normally.  In fact, they didn’t even order a wheelchair for him to leave in, when I got there with the car, he just got dressed and walked out on his own steam.  He even drove home, because I couldn’t.  It was a miracle that I got me and the car there all in one piece, I was so tired from this whole hospital ordeal.

But we will be filing a complaint, that’s for sure.  In the meantime, if you live in the area, avoid this nurse service like the plague.  When I think about it now, no way would I want any of these nasty busybodies in my home, they’d probably pick apart everything from the decor to the beer in my fridge to the fact that we have cats.  Who needs that crap?  Especially when Mike doesn’t need such a service, never said he did, never asked for nor agreed to it.

If you need home nursing care, see if your insurance will pay for a private nurse, before hiring a company like this.