I've read all the Oz books, but it's been so long that I probably wouldn't have remembered Ozma off the top of my head. Great idea for a costume, though!

So the nurse was running a million years (aka an hour) late, so I called her. She had entirely forgotten, it seems. I "should have called earlier" (no) and "should call her the day before" (I will, but I shouldn't--this isn't my responsibility). I have no idea how she organises even slightly successfully as many appointments as she seems to have if she doesn't, ah, write them down? Work off some sort of a schedule?

::sigh:: She's the woman who gives me the meds my doctor orders, and that's heavily in her favour, but it could be more straightforward...

Pix and I are the same in that. I read at least four of the books as a kid, but don't remember them that well.

She had entirely forgotten, it seems. I "should have called earlier" (no) and "should call her the day before" (I will, but I shouldn't--this isn't my responsibility).

Ay yai yai.

Yeah, "forgetting" is not optimal.

Ay yi yi! I guess it's a good thing you're a project manager -- you'll just have to manage her.

I just reread Glinda of Oz for the first time in decades, reading it to Matilda for the first time, and damn but that is one fine book. Crazy, but fine. Baum is totally one of those writers who just never had a single oddball idea flit through his mind and then filed it away as Too Weird To Work With. Glinda contains the Flatheads, a tribe of purple-eyed persons who carry cans of powdered brains in their pockets and are ruled by a Supreme Dictator who who stole three cans of brains from his rivals and so is now four times as smart as any other Flathead (his wife turned herself into a powerful sorceress by stealing five cans of brains, but then got turned into a pig by a rival sorceress who kept her brains safely and unstealably in her ordinary round head), the Skeezers and their submersible island, the three transfigured Adepts at Magic, the Valley of the Mist Maidens, (that's Princess Polychrome being borne up by the MMs - I think she's mostly a Sky Island character, but she does show up in a couple of Oz books as well) and the spectacularly beautiful, snarky and cheerfully misanthropic Reera the Red, who hates people in general although she seems to like the individuals she meets just fine, and who cools herself off on hot days by transfiguring herself into an orangutan because that way she can sit around mostly naked but still has hands and can keep up with her sewing. Reera is not exactly a Buffista, but I think she'd get along with a lot of us, as long as we never expected her to show up to any F2Fs.

In short, everyone should read Glinda of Oz posthaste. It'll only take an hour or so - it's a galloping quick read for grown-ups.

I feel I set a really low bar for coping--I never fail to be startled when other people fail to clear it.

Ah, well. Weekly reminder will be set.

I check in with the UCLA nurse who's managed setting up this process once a week, and I mentioned to her that my insurance hadn't been billed for this yet, so I had no idea how much this was going to cost me. She said she'd check, and I have a message from the IV meds pharmacy saying I won't be paying them. That just leaves the nursing company, but I have no idea why I'm not paying for the meds--I'll have to read my insurance agreement again--I thought everything was a fixed amount or a fixed percentage. It's not good enough insurance for anything to be free. Unless it is--I certainly won't push at anyone exceeding my expectations.

"should call her the day before" (I will, but I shouldn't--this isn't my responsibility). I

WTF. Um, lady, this is your JOB. It's not a favor you're doing for a friend or something. OMG.

I'd be curious to hear from Kate and Beth to see if that kind of bias is still entrenched. It's rare to find a children's library today that has more than The Wizard of Oz.

Huh! I don't think that bias persists -- I've never heard a librarian say anything disdainful of the Oz books. But as you note, they're not really a staple of many libraries, and that certainly could be traced in part to the disdain of an earlier era. They never really made it into the canon. And I'd guess that even if a librarian did want to stock up on Oz books, the length of the series and the variations in quality make it difficult to know which ones are worth purchasing.

That said, I'm pretty sure my local library had a bunch of the books when I was a kid; I remember reading several of them, and I know we didn't have them at home. I don't remember a whole lot about them, except that they were very different from the movie, but now I kind of want to find a few and see what I would make of them as an adult.

...Just looked up Glinda of Oz in the Nashville Public Library's catalog, and there are five copies available at various branches. Requested!