Today, I learned that dough hooks are not interchangeable. We made pretzels again, and this time, I happened to notice that there was a little diagram above each hole on the mixer showing which hook went into which hole. I followed the diagram, and the dough behaved far better than it had on my last two attempts – it stayed in the bowl instead of climbing the hooks onto the mixer body!

I did have to add a bit more water than the recipe called for to get all of the flour incorporated into the dough, and the dough was very sticky, but other than that, it was a smooth process.

Tonight, there was a special Kabbalat Shabbat service at Shir Hadash. It was billed as “an early Shabbat gathering of prayers and ‘new songs’ of peace, holding each other virtually and bringing to a close this challenging week” and it really boosted my mood, although I nearly cried when we sang Gesher Tz’ar Me’od at the end – the country and all of us are all together on a very narrow bridge and the next 12 days are going to be tense.

Shabbat Shalom!

I only spent half the day looking at Twitter, Facebook, and TV today, a great improvement over yesterday. And so I was able to actually accomplish one task on my to-do list – set up new accounts for Diane and me with our Medicare Part D (prescription drug) insurer, WellCare.

We’d become WellCare customers at the beginning of 2020 as part of the Aetna/CVS merger; I didn’t have any complaints about their plan or benefits last year, so we decided to stay with them this year. But, given our current prescription usage, we discovered that switching to “WellCare Value Script” from “WellCare Medicare Rx Select” would save us a few bucks a month – over the course of a year, it’d add up to a nice meal in a restaurant (remember those?). Making the switch during Open Enrollment was easy, too.

A few days later, we got payment coupon books in the mail, which would require mailing in checks every month – clearly unacceptable, especially since we had been able to set up recurring automatic payments for 2020. The instructions said we could set up recurring automatic payments for the new plans after January 1; I tried that day and found that our logins got us to our old accounts, with no way to make a change.

I thought that, perhaps, their systems hadn’t completely cycled yet, so I waited until today and got the same result. Their website offered “chat with an agent” – and I discovered that we had to set up brand new accounts with brand new usernames because we’d changed plans. At least they didn’t make us come up with new email addresses!