Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

My Ocrevus infusion went smoothly. I got to the hospital half an hour early, partly because I woke up a bit earlier than the already early time I had set my alarm. So, I also left the house a little earlier than planned, then made very good transit connections.

This time, I asked the nurse to use my right arm for the IV, but she had trouble finding a good vein, and asked a more experienced person to set up the IV. When my right right forearm didn't work either, I told her to use the left arm, which did. She suggested trying my right hand, but there are just too many nerves there.

Since I've had these infusions several times before without problems, she ran the IV drip faster than usual. I was done with the infusion at about noon, meaning I got to leave at 1:00. I brought lunch, leftover vegetable frittata, which I ate while sitting around for them to low-key monitor me (meaning there was nobody in the room with me, but plenty of staff nearby where they would have head me if I'd called for help.

When I was done at the hospital, I took the bus a few stops, then bought a cup of tea from Flour, and drank it sitting on an Adirondack chair in Harvard Square. The chair has a plaque saying it was paid for jointly by the city of Cambridge and a group of Harvard Square businesses.

Once caffeinated, I took a bus to Penzey's in Arlington and restocked our spices. I'm a little low on whole green cardamom pods, but those are expensive enough that I'm going to wait and see if Bill Penzey decides to offer a discount on those specifically. The cashier doesn't think they've had a sale on cardamon specifically, but they have had sales on things like everything Mexican, because Trump was slandering Mexicans; a Russian seasoning blend to make the point that the problem is the Russian government, not ordinary Russians; and everything starting with F or N (because of right-wing hate speech using specific nasty slurs; so maybe Bill Penzey will decide to discount everything starting with C. More likely, I'll put cardamom on the list when I'm down to a couple of weeks' supply -- I don't use it that fast, but it was worth looking at the current price as long as I was there.

I placed a spice order with Penzey's yesterday morning. I got an email acknowledgement, which said that it would probably ship in 3-5 days, and click here if you want to change or cancel the order.

Later that day, I remembered that we wanted to order mustard (powdered), so I emailed and asked if I could do that. The response was that my order had already been packed for shipping, and they can create another order and waive the shipping, if I liked.

I said yes, and gave the gift card number and PIN again. I bought a $50 gift card for $35 a couple of months ago, and this order cost more than $35, so I'm into the effectively free spices. The company was encouraging people to buy gift cards for themselves. Yes, it's a short-term loan to them, but since I was confident I'd use it, it's effectively a very good interest rate, unlike the money I have on transit fare cards (including an ORCA, from when we lived in Seattle, which I will probably never use) and a Starbucks card.