On May 5, I’ll be sporting a back-drafty hospital gown with black dress socks while watching “Judge Judy” in a waiting room. On top of that, I'll be double-fisting barium sulfate smoothies that make my insides glow for MRI machines.

Not coincidentally, May 5 will mark the two-year anniversary of the discovery and panicked removal of a golf-ball-sized tumor in my pelvis.

I got off ridiculously easy: no chemotherapy, no radiation. Just snip-snip and sew-it-up. Tonsillitis would have been scarier. Today, I’m as healthy as a horse who does vinyasa-flow yoga.

The only bummer: regular MRIs to spot renegade cancer cells trying to make trouble.
The bright side: hobnobbing with an honest-to-goodness legend of modern medicine - celebrity oncologist Dr. Lawrence Einhorn.

You’ve seen him. He’s Lance Armstrong’s doctor, and mine. He virtually invented the treatment regimen for testicular cancer. You could argue that he’s saved more than 200,000 lives, and counting.

But you wouldn’t know it by looking on Angie’s List. No reports. No grades. Just another name.

Look, people. We’re serious at Angie’s List about rating physicians and other medical professionals. But we can’t do it alone. We need you to click on your doctors and submit reports.

I bet your internist, dermatologist, dentist, psychiatrist and oncologist are all on there. Get on Angie's List and write about them. If they're not, be the first person to submit a report on them.

There are thousands of doctors as talented and essential as Dr. Einhorn. Please tell your fellow Angie's List members about them.

Not everyone will be as lucky with their diagnosis and recovery as I was, but you can help people find the best care possible. Barium smoothies are better than the alternative.

I used to think that our clothing dryer housed the entrance to another dimension because after nearly every load, at least one lone sock would come out missing its pair.

This phenomenon had been occurring for quite some time, but I recently had a break in the puzzle. Last week, I was awoken by the horrible noise of our puppy, Gus, throwing up. I jumped out of bed and flicked on the light just in time to see a sock swimming in stomach bile.

I was extremely worried about Gus’ new culinary preferences so I watched him closely over the next few days. He was eating and using the bathroom normally, but I still pet-proofed the house in an effort to cut off any access he had to my socks. He had his fun, but he had to be stopped.

Two days after the first sock, I was rudely stirred by the all-too-familiar sound of retching. This time there were three socks: a dress-sock, an ankle-sock and a tube-sock. His tastes must have expanded. After all, variety is the spice of life…even in the world of pica.

To prevent this from being an even longer tale, let me just cut to the chase and say that in the end, Gus barfed up six socks in total. I’m so happy that I have a dog with an ironclad stomach, but more importantly a great veterinarian who talked me through it.

While I don't need to hire an appliance repair technician to check the dryer, perhaps I should look for an animal psychiatrist on Angie's List.

I work with an extremely talented group of people and it would seem others agree with me.

My colleagues who produce our newsletter, Quality + Design, just received an American Inhouse Design Award for the cover of the November 2008 edition. This is a competition that draws entries from leading in-house design, marketing and communications departments.

Doesn’t it look great? Our staff photographer, Brandon Smith, says he thinks photography is about “showing ordinary things in extraordinary ways,” which prompted him to take this unusual angle when approaching the pool table.

Smith's expert eye combined with the design talents of our graphic artist, Brooke McKinney, created a winning look.

And while I’m handing out commendations, I’d like to congratulate the entire publication department for receiving six awards from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists for our 2008 work. The awards were on both the design side and editorial side of the magazine, which just means we all rock. Two of our awards were for “Best Consumer Reporting” – which is what Angie's List is all about!

Congrats go out to all. If you can, pat yourself on your back. Or, shoot me an email and I’ll come pat your back for you. Or, uh, maybe I’ll hire a massage therapist from Angie's List to do the dirty work for me. Yeah, that sounds like a much better idea.

As Tax Day approached last week, I was reminded of a few things. Like how I promise myself that I’ll keep better track of my receipts and hire a tax consultant the next time around.

Despite these good intentions, April 14 arrives each year with the same result: Suddenly it’s 10 p.m., I’ve located all my “Important tax documents,” but time has run out. What I need is an all-night tax preparer.

Not even Angie’s List can help in this situation, despite the dozens of highly rated businesses in the accountant/tax consultant category. Tax preparers aren’t like waitresses or gas station attendants who work all-night shifts. They keep regular business hours – at least when they meet with clients for the first time.

That got me thinking. I wondered how many service providers on Angie's List work into the wee hours or are on-call for customers round-the-clock. Taxis are an obvious choice, but alarm companies and locksmiths also come to mind.

Maybe I can talk the folks here into creating a sub-category for Night Owl services. It would help a procrastinator like me. But maybe others would find it useful, too. Who wouldn’t want to know the location of an all-night dry cleaners, a car wash or tattoo parlor?

As for my taxes, I filed for an extension this year. That should give me plenty of time to hire an expert. I’ll know in about six months.

Part of my job as an associate editor with Angie’s List Magazine involves sifting through thousands of reports each week. With more than 300 different categories of services to rate, there’s never a shortage of great information. But I must admit, I have an obsession.

I love finding unique, uncategorized companies.

As a member, I beam with pride when I submit a report on a company that doesn’t yet have a defined category on Angie’s List. For instance, I recently wanted to recycle a broken external hard drive, but I was concerned that the information might find its way into an identity thief’s hands if I took it to a community e-cycling drop-off.

The solution? I found a company that ensures complete destruction and sustainable recycling of your electronics for a low price (it was just $1 to turn my old hard drive into e-mulch).

But when I went to submit a report, I found the List doesn’t have a category for “electronics recycling.” This made me happy for two reasons:

1. I could be the first person ever to fill out a report on that type of company (and if they’re successful, I’ll claim partial credit).
2. Sooner or later, the category will be added to Angie’s List.

What this all boils down to is that by hiring and using service categories nobody’s ever heard of, I’m helping the List grow and, in turn, helping more members with their hiring decisions. It’s nice to have an impact.

Next time you’re on AngiesList.com, check out ‘uncategorized services.’

When I was younger, I hated going to the dentist because of a few bad experiences. There was the time a new dentist had to drill out and redo a filling he had incorrectly put in, and another time when I gagged while getting impressions taken of my teeth. Needless to say, for much of my childhood an upcoming visit to the dentist — and later to the orthodontist — produced lots of panic and anxiety.

I’m happy to say that’s not the case anymore. Sure, I outgrew it once I got older, but I still have the occasional bad experience (I really don’t like the X-rays!).

When it was time to find a dentist here in Indy, I turned to one of my first go-to resources — Angie’s List — to find someone who could keep my anxiety from resurfacing while taking good care of my teeth. At the time, we’d just started accepting medical reports and I found several pages of Indianapolis dentists (which, by the way, is currently our most popular medical category).

It didn’t take me long to find an A-rated practice near my house. Better yet, there wasn’t one mention of drills or nausea. In one quick phone call, I found out they were in my insurance network and accepting new patients, and I had my first appointment set up.

That was two visits ago and I couldn’t be happier. The dentist is knowledgeable, the staff is friendly and professional, and they actually make office visits a pleasant experience. In fact, I wrote a positive report on them earlier this week. Now if only they didn’t have to do those X-rays …

Funny how the act of cleaning can make things appear to be much more messy than they actually are.

I’ve never been much of a cleaner; I’m more of a “stacker.” I usually figure that if my two-year-old son’s books are neatly stacked atop each other and all the toy race cars are in a bag, that counts as clean enough for me.

But not for my wife, and at the moment, not for me, either. We’ve been pulling everything out, going through it in great detail, and putting it back in a reasonably organized order – not to mention throwing out junk as it comes along.

We’re doing it solo this year with some help from Angie’s tips. Next time around, we’ll probably call upon the services of a professional organizer from The List. My closet alone could use an efficiency upgrade.

In the meantime, since I have some unpleasant allergies that flare up around this time of year, we’re taking extra care to scrub the house of allergens and keep it clean for at least a few months of clean breathing.

Angie has plenty of thoughts on that right here. She’s still my first source for information about this sort of thing. I’m not only an employee of Angie’s List; I’m also a member!

Moving stresses the mind, body and soul. I know because I’ve done it nine times in 16 years. My family’s recent move from North Carolina to Indiana was by far the most challenging. 

We had to downsize from a big house to a smaller townhouse, hold a huge yard sale in cold weather, sell or rent that house in a terrible economy and relocate to a different region. 

We had to do all this with a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old who didn't fully understand what was going on, and did I mention the move took place between Christmas and New Year’s Day?

Despite all the challenges, this move had a certain peace of mind that others did not.  This was my first relocation as a member of Angie's List. 

We needed to quickly get our house on the market, so we leaned on the List to search for service providers to fix a sticky garage door, repair a frozen ice maker, clean carpets traumatized by kids and paint walls that were used as a coloring book. Angie's List also helped us find a reliable mover to haul our stuff 600 miles to our new home.

Was the move easy? Of course not. Don’t ever move between the holidays. Seriously. Resist the temptation. 

However, Angie's List equipped us to make sane decisions amid the insanity and also helped us save money.  A little sanity would have been nice in our previous moves, where our favorite, but risky, method of choosing a company involved opening that big book, closing our eyes and hoping our fingers walked in the right direction.

I’m not really an environmentalist. But after doing research for a podcast on organic lawn care, I’m ready to make the switch myself.

In the past, I’ve been your traditional weed-n-feed guy. In the spring and fall, I push my spreader full of salt-based chemicals that are designed to attach to the grass blades and make them greener.

What I didn’t know was that in spreading those chemicals on my lawn, I was damaging the soil beneath. Important stuff like worms, fungi and micro-organisms that promote healthy plant life were being killed off.

I had heard of organic lawn care before, but didn’t realize that its approach focuses on creating a healthier soil. That, in turn, creates healthier grass and plant life.

Even knowing this, I was unconvinced. I didn’t want to pay the premium for organic materials, and I didn’t want to wait a year or more for it to take effect. Well, after a few member interviews, I discovered neither of those assumptions are necessarily true.

All three of the Angie’s List members I spoke to said they saw results within the first year. They also said that their organic lawn services were comparable in price, if not cheaper, than traditional lawn services.

If you’ve read my past posts, you’ll know that I hate to spend money on something I can do myself But, in this case, I’ve already checked Angie’s List and found someone to take a look at my lawn.

If you want to learn more, listen to “How to switch to organic lawn care” when it posts on April 13 at angieslistpodcasts.com.

I’m one of the reporters for Angie’s List Magazine who worked on our story about medical gag orders — contracts in which doctors ask patients not to report on their care online. Strangely, I found a plastic surgeon in Denver who both uses these contracts AND posts reviews of physicians as an Angie’s List member. Suffice to say, he didn’t see the contracts as a black-and-white, free-speech issue. And he asked if I — as a relatively new Angie’s List employee — had ever posted a report on a doctor. Under my breath, I confessed that I hadn’t.

So, I decided it was high time to get some corporate religion and contribute to our growing pile of medical reports. And, to be honest, I was surprised to find that we used the same rating criteria and asked the same questions that we would for any other contractor report. You could argue that urologists and plumbers do similar kinds of work, but a question like, “How did the final cost compare to the original estimate?” seems incongruous for a prostate removal.

It turns out that our head honchos thought the same thing. By the end of this month, members who file reports on their physicians should receive a new set of questions that apply specifically to medical practices and the doctor-patient relationship. Anyone can appreciate the relevance of questions like, “Was the billing process easy to understand?” and “Did the physician offer a clear diagnosis and treatment options.” It’s a great improvement, and one that should make our reports even more meaningful to members.

Maybe, in this spirit of greater specificity, some of these new criteria will bleed into our reports for other contractors. Of course, I’m in no rush to learn about my plumber’s bedside manner.