Alter eggs elegante
(tastes better than it looks)
Three
longtime friends and I have a custom of celebrating birthdays with a restaurant
dinner—a custom we sorely missed during quarantine. The birthday girl gets to
choose the restaurant, and we treat her to dinner and bring small gifts. Tonight
we were to have belatedly celebrated one (only almost a month late—they have
busier schedules than I do), but one of them came home from a trip with covid
and is not quite over it. So we rescheduled—another whole month. At this rate
the celebrant will be another year older before she gets that dinner.
The
Burtons are at a birthday party at a distillery—Jordan was vague about the location,
but I am anxious to hear details. At any rate, I was on my own for dinner.
Frequently, when I’m alone I just scramble a couple of eggs. Tonight I went all
out and fixed what I decided to call Alter Eggs Elegante. If you go to Carshon’s
deli in Fort Worth for breakfast your choices will include eggs and salami or
eggs and lox. When I took daughter-in-law Lisa once, she ordered eggs with salami,
expecting sliced salami as a side, and was astounded when the salami was
chopped and scrambled into the eggs. And that’s how their eggs with lox are
served—sometimes with onion.
Several
years ago I decided to fancy them up. I added chopped green onion and chopped
tomatoes. Taking a cue from my mom, I added a dollop of cottage cheese, which
gives the eggs a lot of body (it does leave a liquid residue which you just have
to pour off). So that’s what I ate tonight, with a green salad and a blue cheese/buttermilk
dressing. Good eating!
But my
friend’s covid plus a visit with my doctor spurred me to investigate getting
the new booster. My doctor told us this week that since we have had all Moderna
vaccines, we should stick with that. His office only had Pfizer. As I explored
today, I found lots of places with Pfizer, not many with the new Moderna booster.
The best bet seemed to be a Walgreen’s not too far from the house. But when I
tried to pull up the website, I got the dreaded access denied message. This continued
all day.
So this
evening, I called the pharmacist directly. He told me to call Walgreen’s 1-800
number which I did—and got an automated woman who insisted on scheduling me for
a Pfizer shot. No! Tried the website and behold! It was back up. I have an
appointment for Tuesday morning.
The
run-around with Walgreen’s—honest, it probably ate an hour and a half of my day—reminded
me that I want to caution friends against Cigna dental insurance. I paid for
insurance for six months, and each month they returned my check to the bank. Each
month I called and was given a variety of suggested fixes, including that I had
the wrong code and, finally, ridiculously, that I hadn’t put P.O. before the
word Box on the envelope. In desperation, week before last, I asked my bank to
call. They got the same run-around (all this from representatives who did not
seem to have English at their first language). It occurred to me to ask my
dentist’s office to check my insurance since I had an appointment the next
week. They reported my insurance had been cancelled. And a few days later I
received a letter—late September remember—telling me my insurance was cancelled
July 31 for non-payment. I am left wondering if they ever looked at the record
of my phone calls. It seems inexcusable to me that I was left two months without
insurance but ignorant of that fact.
My
resolve: business with small agencies and mom-and-pop businesses as much as
possible. It’s hard, though. There’s a small, privately owned pharmacy down the
street from my house where I send prescriptions as much as possible. Today they
told me it would be at least a month before they got boosters, and I gathered they
couldn’t assure me it would be Moderna.
My new
word for the day: stoush. It means to fight with someone. So I have had a
stoush with corporate America.
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