Two Surgeries

Two Surgeries was Originally Posted on November 8, 2010 by lavarock

I took Koa into town today to have his stitches taken out from his surgery ten days ago. It turned out to be cheaper to drive him across the island to Hilo to be neutered than to take him up into Kailua-Kona.

The Vet we use for non-emergency items is a mobile Vet who enjoys not having to keep an office. He drives around and is quite reasonable with charges. I tried to pay him for his visit today, but would not accept a payment. He did agree to take me up on an offer to make a web page for his business though. It is the least I can do as he saves us considerable money over the local Vet charges.

After the Vet visit, Koa ran with the other dogs and swam in the pool. When we returned home, O`lena, Koa and I took a much needed nap. At about 8pm I awoke to find it pouring down rain outside. Since I still need to replace the irrigation pump impellers, this is a welcome event for the fruit trees and coffee.

On Thursday my Landlord (the school system) will come by to inspect the property to verify that I am in compliance with the lease agreement. “Buying” a leasehold property is a somewhat different process than acquiring a fee-simple home on the mainland, however it can be a way to have a great deal in Hawaii.

In my case, the farm I bought was not in compliance and the owner at the time was neglecting it. I purchased the property, made improvements and now have a nice location to live. I certainly won’t need to buy coffee or fruit as long as I live here!

My Mom has been living with my younger Sister in Florida until yesterday. Mom loved Florida, but I think after 4 years on the last stint, they just were not getting along as well as they could. So Mom is at my older Sisters’ house in Virginia where she stayed for part of the summer recovering from hip surgery from a fall. She will have great care and there is always someone in the house since my Sisters’ kids and Grandkids are always in and out.

I am hoping there is not surgery in the future for me, yet I too have a problem with my hip. It started hurting a year ago when I was working on the irrigation trench. None of the medicine I have taken has helped much and my next step is to get an X-ray. It will help tell what is up and perhaps if I do need a better pain medicine, I can discuss that with the Doctor.

I am with the HMO Kaiser and have a chance to switch to a local health care group this month. It is a bit cheaper, but they don’t cover 100% of the things Kaiser does. So I would save a bit of money on the monthly premiums but pay more if I needed surgery. Besides, it appears that it is difficult to find a doctor taking new patients with the new health care organization when with Kaiser it is not. The difference is about $100 a month. Lately I have had no reason to visit the doctor except for the hip pain and to get my blood pressure prescription. I am sure that if I changed providers all of a sudden I would need to have services and end up paying the extra out of pocket. I think I’ll leave well enough alone.

It is now 10opm and by the way, we don’t reset our clocks for daylight savings time here in Hawaii. I’m hungry and will probably heat a frozen dinner. The KTA supermarket and Safeway both have turkeys in stock fro the upcoming holidays. KTA at the moment is the cheapest for them. The 15-pound turkeys are $4.00, which turns out to be 25 cents a pound (limit 2 per day). My friends will be going into town daily to buy turkeys because we feed them to the dogs. Sandra actually bought a chest freezer Saturday specifically for turkeys because she determined that her break-even point was something like three weeks of feeding the dogs to pay off the freezer. Naturally we don’t feed just turkey and the days will be spread out over the coming season. These turkey sales will be on and off from now through the end of the year. It is more of a hassle to cut up turkeys then to get chicken leg quarters, but the leg quarters are 99 cents a pound on sale and four times the cost of the turkey.

Buying a freezer just for turkeys might sound crazy, yet when you do the cost analysis it makes sense. Here many people have propane grills for the same reason. Our electric costs can be high and you can cook a lot on a grill for next to nothing. They also keep us from having to dig an imu in the back yard!