Happy Updates

Food: We went back to the Napa Rose on Wednesday night. It was a two-part celebration: one part being accepted by our chosen adoption agency (for both of us), one part "welcome back to civilization, you don't have to eat dehydrated food anymore" (for me). The food was excellent, and this time the service was excellent to match. So now we can highly recommend a trip to the Napa Rose, as long as you don't go there near a major holiday. (Our first trip was for our anniversary, which falls near — or on — Thanksgiving; the food was great, but our waiter was clearly having to cover a much wider area than he was accustomed to.)

Corkage is normally seventeen dollars, but our waiter waived the charge; did he do it because we had a sufficiently interesting special occasion, because we ordered both the cheese plate and individual desserts, or because we were able to talk convincingly and at length about the wine we'd brought (a 2004 Nalle Pinot Noir)? The Napa Rose has a decidedly mixed crowd — dressed-up folks like us rubbing shoulders with T-shirt and pin-lanyard wearing folks who'd just finished their day at Disneyland — I wonder how many people come in with a Yellow Tail or a Two-Buck Chuck and pass it over to the waiter as their "special wine"?

Medical-Billing Hell (see last installment here): Ended! Wednesday afternoon I got a call from a rep for our insurance company, letting me know that she'd finally heard back from the cardiologist's billing office . . . after a call she'd placed four weeks ago. The billing office person informed her that they had closed our account and were writing off any remaining charges.

So that's that, I hope — with an extra "screw you!" to the billing office (there's nothing to "write off", because we didn't actually owe you anything more, you bastards) and the cardiologist herself; I can only dream that someday she'll end up in a strange emergency room, and walk out with a mishandled bill that requires that she deal with people who only keep their "customer service" line open from 11 to 2 (while taking an hour for lunch!), and who consider a month to be an acceptable waiting period before returning phone messages.

And you can bet that I'll be watching our credit reports to make sure that these people don't try to slip something on there ...