Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree!

OH how I love thee!  I absolutely freaking love Christmas.  It is the best time of year and my favorite holiday.  I just love the whole idea of it; making a big to-do about spending time with your family that bugs the shit out of you, getting gifts for them that you know will make them squeal like a pig, and eating so much you actually look like said squealing pig.

Holiday Party

Christmas Past

I also love the traditions that Christmas brings.  Hubs and I have made our own over the last few years and they really are just simple things that make me light up like a lightening bug.  Sometimes I think he could care less about some of the things, but he knows it makes me happy so he shut's up about it keeps his head down.  Happy Wife, Happy Life, am I right?  We spend every Christmas Eve at his Grandma's house even though it is about two hours away.  Totes worth it.  The man is 31 years old and never missed a Christmas Eve there.  I'll be damned if I'm going to be the one who ruins his "favorite" status.  We get one new ornament every year that symbolizes something major that happened for us.  This year, my Grandmother gave us a "new home" ornament, and we bought a "new dog" ornament.  Christmas dinner ALWAYS consists of prime rib and green beans cooked in bacon grease (OM NOM NOM!!).  Christmas night we load up with hot chocolate and drive around looking at Christmas lights.  My mother also informed me she still has "The Night Before Christmas" book from the 1980's that she read to us as children.  It's earmarked for me when we have our first little bambino!  Don't think for one second I won't be bawling my eyes out as soon as I get my grubby hands on it.

Too. Much. Christmas.

My husband is soooo better than yours.

This year we had Ruxin and I totally went all out for him.  I know he is only a dog, but he's my dog dammit!  He ended up with two stockings full of toys and rawhides, plus home-baked dog cookies.  Love the little bastard!

I do love Christmas so much we've already talked about Christmas next year and how it's pretty much going to suck donkey balls.  I mean, it's on a Tuesday for crying out loud!  Who has Christmas on a Tuesday?  Christmas Eve on Monday? Pssssha.... I don't know about this.  There is definitely going to have to be some trickery in the time-off from work department.  

This was also our first Christmas in our new house.  And I must say, that fricken rocked!  We procured ourselves a 9-foot beaut of a tree and I've started my Christmas decor collection.  Watch out 20 years from now- you won't know what hit ya!  

Hope everyone out there had a very Merry Christmas!   

I Hate To Admit It, But I Forgot About You

I just read my last post from god-know-how-long-ago... and I actually sounded kinda cool!  At least I think so anyway.  It had been so long since I was on here that I didn't even remember what I had written.  I didn't recognize myself.  I don't know how I feel about that, other than it makes me a little sad.  I kinda wish I didn't give up and go on some stupid ass hiatus.  IDK...it is what it is I guess!

Lots of stuff has happened in the last 5 months.  Let me enlighten you...

Now you are all caught up!  Maybe I'll get back to writing...  maybe I won't... wouldn't you like to know?  LOL you probably couldn't care less.  And you know what?  That is fine by me!

We Meet Again...

...My long lost friend!  Shh.  Don't speak.  (I'm holding up my finger to your lips... play along here.)  I know I haven't been around lately, and I know I haven't been treating you like you deserve.  Or even like I said I would thousands and thousands of times before.  I'm sorry.  I know I've been distant... not wanting to be around you. I'm sorry.  Sometimes I get these thoughts and feelings that I don't know what to do with them and it's just easier to pull into myself and hold it all in.  Are you mad?  Can you forgive me?

Ok, now that the groveling is out of the way!  Apparently, I am fantastic about setting goals (weekly blogging ring a bell anyone?) and breaking them all to shit.  Sure feels good to find out what you are good at in life!  Am I right??

I find that as much as I love this blog and want to write like every day, and like, share like all my thoughts and feelings.... that is the same reason that I don't.  I feel a little like this blog has tuned me in to myself and I've finally register the amount of crazy that is me... and I don't know if that is a level of crazy I'm willing to accept. Or flaunt.  I'm so worried about what people are going to think about me, or say about me, or judge me, that I end up just not writing anything at all, when in reality I have loads of stuff to write about.  I just choose not to.  Somewhere, the professional bloggers and hipsters are sitting with their laptops and $5 coffees with a thought bubble saying "why in the hell did you even start a blog?".  BECAUSE, you snotty hipsters, I like writing.  I like words.  I like stories.  I. Like. Writing.  

I think I might just have my head too far up my own ass to really let go, but I'm not willing to give it up.  I still want to write and say what I want and have that be that.  So much has gone on this last month; I kinda sorta wish I had wrote about some of it.  We are still waiting on the house (that has been just a freakin' blast dont-cha-know!).  Short sales still blow... but hopefully this week or next we'll finally get our offer from the bank and being able to go into closing.  Now I feel like the waiting on the house is putting my life on hold. (OMG was that a feeling?  That I just wrote about? I think i might vomit...).  And we all just know how MUCH I love thinking and feeling that something other than myself is controlling or dictating my life.  Eff that ish.  I'm just ready to get this damn show on the road.  Like a traveling circus.  Or not.  Whatever.  I don't care.  I have come to realize though, in this last month, I am the most impatient bitche you will ever meet.  EVAH.  

I'd say I promise to write again soon, but that will work about as well as shoving a square peg through a round hole.  

Short Sale-Shmort Sale!

I swear, every day feels like an eternity when waiting on someone else to say if you can buy the house of your dreams or not.  It has been two and a half weeks since we put the offer in on our new house.  It was accepted immediately (literally about 19-20 hours later we get the accepted response!) by the sellers, but because it is a short sale we still have to wait for the bank accept our offer as well.  Yes, I do realize that two and a half weeks is like chump-change in the world of short sales, but for me it's just ridiculous.  How hard is it/how long does it honestly take, to look at our financials, our pre-approval, and tell us we can have the damn house???  

It's strange, as much as we are in charge of our futures and are making the decisions that we want to make, we have absolutely no control over this it.  And it freaking blows!  We've done all that we can in regards to getting our selves prepared financially, determining the area we want to live in, scouring the listings, knowing our budget... and even with all of that the whole shebang is in someone else's hands.  We love that house!  We refer to is as "our" house, I've been telling the cats they are going to go to our new house... hell we even drove by it this last weekend just to look at it.

We did get good news though late last week.  The sellers agent talked to our agent, who emailed us and said that the bank had already ordered and received the appraisal for the house.  This is huge because that appraisal determines what the house is worth now (and not what the sellers bought it for eons ago and not what the remaining amount due on their loan says) and essentially tells the bank how much they might potentially lose out on due to the short sale and current economic state, and what they can reasonably expect to sell the house for now.  We hadn't heard anything in the two week period after the sellers accepted our offer so it was a BIG relief knowing that the bank was working on us and at least doing something!  Short sales can take months to go through and be finalized, and I don't want to be shoved to the bottom of some stack of papers that are just collecting dust.  By the by, why in the hell does it have to take months and months for short sales to go through?  It's as easy as a pre-approved buyer, a seller accepted offer, and an appraisal on the house.  End. Of. Story.  Seriously, I could do short sales here people!

Annnnnywho, things around here have been the norm for us!  Work is getting better for me and I'm starting to feel like I fit in there-slash-they accept me more now.  Valentines day was pretty freakin' awesome to boot!  The hubs took me up to a beautiful ski resort where we went ice skating!  I honestly haven't been ice skating for 15-18 years (holy hell I feel a decrepit old bag!!) and it was just so much fun.  We were like little kids up there racing each other and trying every we could to not fall on our asses.  I am proud to say that neither of us actually fell! For sure I thought I would come home bruised and looking like a rotting corpse from all the discoloration.  It was beautiful up there, I'll post pictures soon!

To Insure Or Not To Insure?

Reason number 86 why losing your job totally blows?  Losing your insurance.  And when I say this blows, I really mean it!  I'm not a sickly person, but I do feel much better knowing I have coverage in case something does happen.  Car wrecks, freak accidents, terminal diagnosis happen every single day.  Those are just the huge issues.  It is flu season, food poisoning happens, trip and break your ankle... all likely possibilities that could require a trip to the doctor or urgent care or better yet the ER.  

About two years ago I was diagnosed with Hypothyroidism.  (If you google this you'll see how non-serious it is and how common it is).  It was March of 2009 that I started going to the doctor, and I literally went every month  after that through October for follow ups and blood work to have my medication adjusted until the right dose was found.  EVERY month it was adjusted up, or down.  Also in March/April of 2009 my doctor told me "you have a lump" where my thyroid gland is (on your throat) and that I needed to have an ultrasound done to see what was going on.  Not only did I completely lose my shit when he told me, but I had to go and have a procedure done.  Turns out it was just an enlarged thyroid gland and no freakin' lump as he I had said.  Side note, can't we PLEASE make it illegal or something for doctors to use the word "lump"?  That was really not OK.  January of 2010 I went back to the doctors for a follow up, and my medication wasn't right again.  So I started going back to the doctor on a monthly basis with blood work being taken every month and my medication being adjusted all over the place.  Finally in June of 2010 I went to see a specialist (I felt like my doctor just couldn't get it under control, he miss-read my results at my last appointment which in turn had him adjust my medication incorrectly, and told me that if we didn't get my thyroid under control it would be very hard to get pregnant as the thyroid was a regulator of your body) and she worked more with me on what made me feel better vs. just what my numbers said.  I really liked her and felt like she listened to me.  She ever so kindly reassured me that my thyroid levels were so close to normal that I shouldn't have any side effects/complications in trying to conceive-whenever that may be.  

Hypothyroidism really isn't a huge deal.  It just means that my thyroid doesn't produce enough "stuff" to function properly.  Without the medication the biggest side effect is being sleepy all the time.  I used to take a 2-3 hour nap almost every day after work and then usually a 2-3 hour nap on either Saturday or Sunday.  I was always sleeping.  My grandma has it, and so do millions of other people.  I'll most likely be on some sort of daily medication for the rest of my life, and I'm OK with that.

So, as you can see, I was very fortunate to have insurance during that time.  For almost a year straight I had monthly doctors appointments and monthly blood work done at the lab.  Not having insurance now just makes me nervous.  Before starting at the job I got laid off from, I didn't care if I had insurance or not.  It never really mattered.  Now it's just a necessity like gas for the car.  The issue I'm running into now is just how expensive insurance is.  My last job paid a set amount towards your coverage and you got to pick from like 15 different plans.  If your plan cost less then what the company paid then you didn't have any paycheck deductions.  If the plan you chose cost more, you paid the difference.  I was paying about $36 per check  for my health insurance AND vision and dental.  Apparently that was a really sweet set up.  To be added on to my husbands insurance is $400 per month.  Did I mention I ended up taking a $4/hour pay cut in accepting this new job?  I could get insurance through my job now but it's only a temporary position so in about six months, if they don't offer me a permanent position, I'll lose that insurance too.  I could have done COBRA and extended my insurance from my last job, but that was close to $360 a month.

I've been looking getting private insurance, so no matter what my job situation looks like I'll still have coverage.  I don't know if my little thyroid-fun-times is considered "pre-existing" or not, so getting something and getting established as soon as possible is a good thing because you never know what will happen.  I've found some pretty reasonable prices on private insurance, as low as $100 per month.  Granted, it's not as fabulous as the insurance I had, but it's better than nothing.  The downside though is that no one wants to cover maternity through private insurance.  I've contacted a handful of companies that administer private insurance here and they all have given me the same info: basically no.  Knowing how expensive my husbands insurance is to put me on it, the best thing for us is for me to get private insurance and get myself established and past any sort of waiting periods there may be.  There are two private insurance plans that will cover maternity, however they aren't an option either.  One is $400 per month and the other is $450, and BOTH have a twelve-month waiting period.  A-can't afford either one (if I/we could afford the $400 per month then I'd just be on my husbands insurance) and B-you can shove your damn twelve month waiting period.  Granted, that's not forever from now but I'm always worried about the what-if's.  What-if we got a surprise before the twelve-months were up?  Then what?  Also, I don't want some company telling me when I can or cannot choose to do things in my own life.

A gal at my new work, who is a temp like me, happens to be pregnant and told me about this program called Access to Healthcare Network, or AHN.  Its not insurance, but a discount program.  No co-pays,  no invoices or bills, nothing like that.  You have to meet income requirements (hey lookey here, I totally meet those now!) and pay a membership fee ($288 for one year) for how long you want to be in the program.  Essentially you have a membership-type card instead of insurance cards, and you pay at the time of your visit/exam/procedure and greatly discounted prices.  There's no waiting period, no restrictions, nothing that isn't covered.  I've been looking into and think that it might be a good option for now.  My thyroid is under control right now and I don't have any other issues that I know of LOL, so at least if I had to go to the doctor I know I wouldn't be turned away for not having insurance and I know that I wouldn't get some crazy-ass bill in the mail.  The gal at work is using it for her current pregnancy (this is her second kid and she used AHN with her first because her husbands insurance is too expensive for her and her first-born), and she hasn't had any issues or been denied any sort of care.  

We'll see.  I sent the link and info to my husband to look over so we can make a decision on what we should do.  I really hate being up in the air with this and feeling like almost every option there is isn't a viable one for one reason or another.  I'm always convinced that the worst thing is going to happen in every situation, so of course I think that during the time I don't have insurance something,  ANYTHING is going to happen to me that is totally going to screw us over.  All we need right now is to get some couple-thousand dollar hospital bill.