Good Thing Friday (88)
October 23, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,905.47; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Saturday’s plan: organize the Smol Acrobat’s two dresser drawers to ensure we have age appropriate clothing on hand through six months and put everything else in storage. What really happened?
1. I worked on our ballots (almost done!) with 13 measures and school board people to vote for. Why do we always have SO MANY MEASURES?? It makes voting a real chore. I will check my choices against those of a much politically savvier friend.
2 I tackled the research for open enrollment. This year has a new twist which has eaten my brain. An HMO that acts more like a PPO with a deductible and comes with the option of an HSA and limited FSA (for vision and dental only). I’m very much not a fan of the PPO-like HMO, we’ll have to pay for services in full up to $2800 a year before coverage kicks in for anything that’s not preventative. My x-rays alone last year when my back was an issue was billed out at $1900. I didn’t pay a nickel for that, last year.
I’ve never had an HSA option before and I was excited. Then I learned that we lose our general FSA and HSA contributions and gains are taxable in CA so we’d be looking at a significant jump in our state taxable income. We double our federal pre-tax deduction but it might be a wash compared to the increased taxable state income. I’ve asked our tax person to run some numbers for us on that front, meanwhile, I need PiC to get a hold of the negotiated rates for the HSA-HMO.
Most years of my life I haven’t had health insurance but in my adult married life I’ve had great insurance. We always opted for the HMO for ease of use and to avoid this out of pocket maximum dance. I’m not looking forward to that being part of our lives.
3. Ordered Seamus’s medication refills and also called the vet to get a written prescription to submit.
4. Worked for 90 minutes to clear up some mess ahead of Monday. Monday me better be grateful. (Spoiler: Monday me failed to be grateful because Monday was crammed full of personal and professional issues.)
5. Another two hours organizing and paring down the family photo albums meant I was in shouting distance of finishing. That’s 8 hours I’ve spent on this project across several days. I must have started with nearly 2000 photos because I’d winnowed it down a massive amount and hundreds are left. I was initially feeling guilty discarding a batch of photos of my estranged sibling but today’s work revealed that even keeping only the photos with him and someone else in them leaves with me with over 100 of them. Guilt gone!
I never touched Smol Acrobat’s clothes!
6. Sunday had to be desk reclamation day. I’d left my piles and piles of photos all over my desk. If I didn’t get that squared away, I couldn’t work on Monday. And I couldn’t deal mentally with the chaos. Four more hours of sorting, discarding, and transferring resulted in a final photo album, with many photo slots doubled up or more. Looks like an accordion and I don’t care! The photos are consolidated in an album which went with the contents of my medium box into one large box and I can wash my hands of the mess! One day I may even sit down to sort and discard duplicates of the school era photos. The album spanned 1978-1990, my photos span 1994-2008.
7. I tackled packaging up Halloween pouches for the zoom Halloween scavenger hunt we will do with JB’s friends, then I organized SA’s dresser. I’m sure there were other things I wanted to do but I’m D-O-N-E.
Pumpkin banana bread will have to wait another day.
Challenges this week: my sciatic nerve pain is an all day every day thing now and it’s the pits. The news is a mess and depressing as all get out.
We attempted to satisfy a craving I had with take out and were appalled to see so many people are dining indoors and outsiders in such crowded setups – lines going out the door and wrapping around the sidewalk and the block – that they may as well not be masked or distanced. Since the restaurants were set up on the sidewalks, there was no safe way to walk past diners without being right on top of them. We didn’t even try to park. It was a disappointment, three different places were the same way. After many hours on this “adventure”, and a few tears from JB who was homesick because when you’re 5 and haven’t been on a 9 hour road trip in ten months you forget what an hour feels like, we managed to scavenge some dinner and managed to feed ourselves by 9 pm. Sheesh.
I asked Joybird for an update on our sofa. Their updates have been non-existent up to now and I don’t think we’re going to be getting it anything like on time. I could live with that if they were proactively telling us what’s going on and not leaving me in the dark so I wonder if they’re just scamming us. After three days of trying to get an answer, we found out they have been six weeks behind schedule and hadn’t even started making it until this week. But somehow they still think we should trust them to deliver. I cancelled the order. We won’t be shopping from Joybird again.
8. We got a small refund from the rental property escrow! It’s nice to put money in when we’re contemplating a lot of money going out soon.
9. I finally put in my first order at Penzey’s which was exciting! I also happened to wait long enough that they had a promotion: buy 5 spices and the cheapest six spice is free. In writing this I realize that I forgot to get one more spice mix I wanted. Darnit.
:: How was your week?
FYI in non pandemic times you can shop Penzeys at their retail store in Menlo Park