It is time for us to all take off our hats and bow our heads in respect for the death of Summer. This Summer has been an unusually cool and there have been times in which we were all comfortable wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. Very strange. Time to say goodbye to the orlando vacations, swimming pools, pool parties, ability to take your dog to the dog park, and to the leaves on the trees. In a couple short weeks the leaves will begin to turn and fall to the ground. Halloween will soon be upon us, and little munchkins in costumes ranging from Disney princesses to Spiderman and back will be tromping the streets with their parents, begging for candy at every door that has a porch light turned on above it.
Yes my friends, Summer's end is upon us. Soon we shall be turned the clocks back, gaining an hour of sleep, and the kids will truly realize that it will be May or June again before they are free to run around as they please.
We had a better place to put the TV. See, where it is right now, we have to look up at it. Gives you a crick in the neck every time. I usually end up crocheting and listening to programs instead of watching them, because we don't have a decent tv stand and I end up getting headaches from trying to watch the TV. It's a real pain in the neck.
Then again, there are a lot of things we could use around here that we don't have because none of us have the money. Being out of work stinks royally and let me tell you, freelancing isn't going all that great either. People don't want to pay freelancers a decent wage - and one guy even restored to telling me that my website examples were not professional-looking enough to get me to drop my bid price on a freelance project I bid on. He wanted me to do the job, but wouldn't pay me what I asked, and wouldn't tell me what his price range was. I declined to take the job - because frankly, I don't find it very professional of him to state that my example sites "scared" him (his words were "your examples scared me. I don't know if you designed them, but they aren't very professional.) First off, two of them are personal sites, so they're not going to look all that professional. One of them, the client I made it for thinks it is VERY professional. So there. Plus, the guy wouldn't give me the URLs to the sites he wanted me to incorporate WordPress blogs into so I could view them and see what needed to be done first.
But I'm still plugging on and going through options for freelance jobs and hoping I can find a decent freelancing job at some point.
It seems to me that there are a lot of elderly people in this neighborhood. My old neighborhood had a lot of elderly people as well, but it seems to me there are more in this neighborhood than there were in the old one. Now I have no problem with elderly people, it's just that it seems to me that in neighborhoods with a high number of elderly folks, there is a great need for emergency medical assistance. We hear sirens regularly and as our neighbors are good family friends and they are also elderly, we worry every time we hear them on our street. Fortunately, it hasn't been for our neighbors, but there is a couple up the street who are very sweet - the husband isn't in good health, and so we worry that it might be him the ambulance is coming after.
Believe me, I've been on the other side of that - I've been the house that the ambulance is headed for. When my mom was alive, we had ambulances at our house as a regular occurrence as the doctor had ordered that I never take her to the ER in the car - because the ER tended to treat her as not as severely ill as she was if she came in by car. It's not a fun feeling to know that the neighbors are coming out to stare at your house to see what is going on. :(
If you hear sirens on your street, do you go check it out, or do you stay in the house and say a silent prayer for whoever the ambulance is headed to pick up?
No, not me. I don't even have a boyfriend, and frankly, I am quite happy being single at this point in time. Until I can get back on my feet and have a job and a new place to live, I don't need the "hassle" of having a boyfriend. ;) But I do have a couple of friends online who are considering getting married. Now they do have reservations about getting married, especially with the divorce rate being so high, but they're still looking at wedding invitations anyways. I guess they feel that the odds of staying married outweigh the odds of getting divorced. And with as crazy about each other as these friends are, I can see why. I don't see them getting divorced - ever.
But I also have a friend who is doing the "happily unmarried" thing with her boyfriend. They've been together for 12 years, have 2 kids, and have lived together since just before their first child was born. So I guess it just depends on the people as to whether or not they feel it necessary to get married.
And so does this recession. I don't have a job anymore, I'm having a heck of time finding a job. I've had one interview and received an email a week later stating they were sorry but they couldn't hire me at this time. So I'm still jobless. I'm still without an apartment of my own. I'm still living with my friends, who can ill afford to have me here without a job, but are still allowing me here because frankly, after being best friends for 20 years, they just won't turn me out on the street.
I'm not whining because I can't buy all the latest car accessories, because I don't have a car. I'm whining because I can barely afford the storage unit for my stuff. I can barely afford to help with the cat food bill, the cat litter bill, and the dog food for my dog. I'm ticked off because I'm seeing news stories about how people in another country are suffering because their family here can't send them money, but they don't do news stories about how people right here in OUR country are suffering because they don't have jobs anymore.
It seems to me like the news media like to pretend that everything here is all right, but that other countries are just getting screwed over. It's OUR economy that's turned to crap and it's OUR fault these people in other countries don't have the money they need. Wow. Great. It's OUR fault this is happening, but guess what, it apparently isn't happening to people here. *sigh* Unfortunately it is, I just wish our news media would actually act like it does instead of trying to elicit sympathy from myself and others for people in another country when we need to be working on fixing our country and getting our own people back to work.
Saturday afternoon has got to be the worst time on the planet to go shopping. For anything. The only store we hit that wasn't crowded to the gills was Dollar Tree. Walmart was so packed, it was pathetic and Hy-Vee wasn't much better. Of course at Hy-Vee we had to put up with people literally stopping in other people's way to ask store clerks where things like mustard are. Um yeah, lady, you have that much stuff in your cart, but you couldn't find the mustard? It's always in the same aisle as the ketchup and you were standing right in front of a sign that told you what aisle the ketchup was in. *sigh*
I'm just glad we weren't out looking for anything resembling cattle supplies! Who knows when we'd have gotten home then! As it was we ended up not getting home until it was almost dark, and then we had to unload everything and get it in the house. We still don't have everything put away because we have to actually clean out the shelves so we can put the stuff away. Gotta love grocery shopping. :/
So I get the bill for my EGD from the doctor and I owe him $540. Then I get the insurance paperwork from the insurance company regarding the hospital portion and I owe a little less than $1500 to the hospital. Why? Because my crappy insurance from my previous employer didn't cover anything for either and only gave a "network provider discount." They say I'd already gone over my coverage limit for the year. Nice, real nice. So now I have to sit here and pay darn near what I'd have paid if I hadn't had insurance in the first place. Thanks a lot.
This was insurance that was supposed to help cover the costs if you found the best diet pill for you. They'd help you get that pill. They're supposed to cover the costs of going to the doctor. Well, they do, but only for about 10 visits then they're done. They had a $100 COPAY for the ER and the ER was supposed to collect it at the time of service. And believe me, the ER people bugged you for it. Being a non-profit hospital, they couldn't refuse to see you if you didn't have it, but they weren't happy about it at all. In a way I'm glad that I don't work at that place anymore so I don't have to have their crappy insurance.
What's sad? The fact that state-run insurance through the welfare department is better than the stuff most companies provide their employees. I applaud Obama for wanting to fine companies for not offering employees insurance, but let's get real here. Unless there is a standard for the industry in what is to be covered industry wide and what is not covered industry wide (meaning ALL insurance companies either cover something or they don't), we're not going to get what we need. Some of us have really crappy insurance or no insurance, and some of us have great insurance. But there shouldn't be any difference. Everyone should have the same and everyone should have to pay the same amount for their insurance. Period.
