Klowns in my Koffee

The world has moved on without me and I was left with merely a glorious Spring day, unnaturally warm for this time of year. I wanted to prune the apple trees, to lop off the unruly extra branches, to impose form and structure, to make them over into my concept of what they should be. I looked at the blue sky and saw the stirring of the branches. Today was not the day.

The house was quiet all day. There are barn swallows building a nest in the siding again and I heard them tussling in the wall cavity above my desk. It reminds me that I want to use this time to repair the outside of the house and paint it as soon as the warm weather is here for good. This will mean taking off a section of siding and clearing out the nest. Every year they get in there in the Spring before I can cover the hole and then I listen to them and curse them all season because I can't bring myself to destroy their home and hatchlings. Today, I appreciate their company. The cats sleep all day and can't even be bothered to rouse themselves to investigate the birdy noises in the wall.

Armed with a blank sheet and a blank day, I did what I was trained to do. I made a spreadsheet. The Porkus joke is that it should have been a flowchart. At Porkus, they draw flowcharts with the drawing tools in Microsoft Word; if they want the lines to attach to the shapes, they use the borders in Excel. Yep, proud of my employee ownership in a high-tech firm.

My spreadsheet had two categories: Must Do and Should Do. The latter encompassed the known world so it appears that scope creep may be a problem.

Must Do numero uno was to request an unemployment payment. You go to the website and it tells you that you must make a request this week. Then it asks you about last week. Since I worked last week, then I'm not eligible but it's very important to them that I file. They said so. They said so on the website. They said so on the phone automated attendant when I called to verify that I was supposed to be making a request that was going to be turned down this week and next week for the 'in lieu of notice' and the following week that is the 'waiting week.' The auto attendant collected my social security number, looked me up and told me that I was allowed to call at any time as long as it was Wednesday between eight and one. Have a nice day. (Mature Language Warning) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF2RYhNhBdw

Since I was basically having a nice day already, I filled out the form and submitted it and they can do whatever they do with it.

As my husband has had pneumonia for the last few weeks and the kids need physicals and dental exams and I haven't been to a doctor in five years and think that any twinge is something metastasizing, the prospect of no medical insurance is terrifying. Porkus has miserably low caps on coverage as befits a company bringing the third world sweatshop experience to middle America. I researched what was left in the kitty with the idea of dragging the family to doctors for the next three days in hopes of slapping enough health on them to last. Fortunately, it appears that the President just signed an extension to the COBRA premium reduction program to allow us to buy insurance for 35% of the normal COBRA price. What I don't know is 35% of what total but it's still got to be better than the alternatives ... band-aids, self-administered stitches, joining a religion that does a lot of prayer-based healing, etc.

Oh, yeah, and I looked at want ads and website and did a lot of that kind of thing, too. Needs a plan. Needs a spreadsheet!

Tomorrow: Job Support Workshop (Just like Santa's Workshop only the elves are unemployed)