Today may be Tuesday but......

Today may be Tuesday but this week I'd like to play a different game. More on this later.

I am coming up on the 2 year anniversary of my blog! Funny that when I started this blog I really thought I would never run out of things to say. Quite the opposite of many beginners who say they worried they would not have enough to say! It's not that I am low on material, I do think though that maybe less interesting things happen daily and instead we have some big and bizarre things going on. Regardless I still thoroughly enjoy this little blog of mine!

When I wrote my first entry I was leaving my job of 8 years to stay at home with my children. Because I wanted to? No. Staying at home to "Mom" my children was the last thing I would ever have wanted to do. Yes I know that makes me evil and a horrible person and someone should have clipped my ovaries long ago. They didn't and it's too late now. I can say for certain that the job has gotten easier and I definitely am more comfortable with it. I am more organized and have more of a routine going. I hate it less.

I left my job due mostly to our health insurance situation. Premiums that year were raised 18%. Because I went down in hours our pay- in went from roughly $400 a month to roughly $850 a month. With a $5000 deductible and $25.00 to $50.00 co-pays for everything from office visits to medicines it went beyond ridiculous and into obscene. So in a year we paid $10,200 straight up. Then, we had to run up bills in excess of $5000 for the insurance to kick in except for the occasional thing they paid out with no logic I could determine. Let's say 3 office visits per year per person, that's $300 in co-pays, plus medications of 1 per person per month, lets estimate $1800 a year for those co-pays. For a grand total of.......$17,300 in yearly health insurance costs. No dental. No vision. When I quit my job we then had only one working person in the family and his status is self- employed. Thanks to the wonderful governor in this state we were able to qualify for the state program for people like farmers and such who are self employed in order to get health insurance. We would have had nothing otherwise. 

FYI, I used a calculator to do the above math.

So here we are, careening down to the fall- when Teena starts regular school hours- the time when I had decided I would start looking for a job again. Two years ago when I made the decision to leave my job, there were plenty of jobs available. Now? Not so much. The "Employment" section of our newspaper used to be it's own section. It is now one half of one page and is in the combined homes for sale and cars for sale sections. I have always been very lucky that I have been able to find a job doing something I enjoy. My jobs  may not have paid well but they paid enough to eek by on and I never had to do anything dreadful for any length of time. I temped doing customer service for a holiday catalog and for a few different health insurance companies and I thought I would blow up my own head. WOW that sucked! So, no potential jobs I would want, no potential jobs that would suck but pay bills. I guess we'll see what happens in the next 5 months! Oh yeah, I did use my time wisely trying to become a world famous blogger which, right, I have readers all around the world. Next I need to make this pay the bills! And my other endeavor, becoming an audience member on Oprah, well I still have hope for that.

Anyway, on my other anniversary I opened up the floor to questions. Then I hoped really really hard that someone would ask one! So, in honor of my second blog-aversary I would like to welcome any crazy assed question you might have, and boring ones too. If you don't want to know anything because you cannot imagine what might be left unsaid at this point,  just leave a note saying HI so I know you are out there!

Okay, but seriously, ask a question. Please!