What's a Gardener to do When it's 10 Below 0?

MIL left today now that I am feeling better and it isn't snowing and/or raining. Today was the best day to drive in several days even though it's cold outside. Liking our house to look clean when company comes over, Cheesehead stashed a bunch of papers and things away in the closet before Christmas.

Since MIL helped with all of the dusting, vacuuming, laundry, and floors I needed to find something else to do instead. It has been a while again since I've made the rounds to everyone's blogs, but all of the sitting around (and forced recovery) from the last few days made me decide against doing that right away. I needed to get up and "do" something. But what? As I wandered around the house searching for something to occupy myself with, I happened to open a closet. AHA! Organizing.

I don't know about you, but I like to keep my things organized. Maybe a little bit too much sometimes.... If you want me to find a receipt from 2004 I could find the envelope within a minute though it may take me a while to sort through them all to find the right receipt. I keep them because I always have this plan to make an insurance inventory of items in our house, but somehow I have just never managed to make the time. I just keep stock piling receipts.

So, here I am looking at a closet piled with boxes and bags of things that seemed unsightly to Cheesehead. I like to keep bills that are due at the same time in the same place. I can't find any of January's bills because of that either. I had them sitting in a shoe box somewhere, now I just needed to find it. Off to search I went through the piles of papers in the closet. (Well, maybe it wasn't as bad as all that, but it still was something I should do.)

I sorted through all of the papers and placed them into piles on the guest bed. There were papers that had served their purpose that could now be shredded, bills that had already been paid but awaited filing in my filing cabinet, old pay stubs, things I still need to take action on, and so on. I put them all in seperate piles and took action as needed. It only took about an hour or so, but it made me feel good to get so much done.

You may be curious of why I keep old pay stubs. I like to verify that the amounts paid in taxes on our paystubs matched the w-2 forms that we get from our employer. I mean, we're all human after all and prone to making an occassional mistake, right? I seem to hold onto them a little longer than I really need to though and I found I still had some of Cheesehead's pay stubs from 2006.

Being a naturally curious person, I looked to see how much we used to pay per week for our family insurance. In 2006, we paid $95.83 per week for insurance. It went up to $130.19 per week in 2007. Remembering that fact just got me angry about it all over again.

Our insurance is WORSE now than it was then. We have stayed at the top level of insurance available from my husband's employer since he started working there in 1998. I have paystubs of his dating back to 2002. We've stayed at an 80/20 insurance level from the start, having the insurance pay 100% after the deductible was paid. Now? It ONLY pays 80/20 AFTER we've paid the ENTIRE deductible AND out of pocket expenses. WHAT?

I sure wish I had known that when we had open enrollment and could ditch this horrible insurance! Now I have no choice but to keep the same insurance for a whole year unless I find a job that offers insurance and we decide to go with that. I wonder why we pay $505.68 per month for insurance when they refuse to cover anything. It seems like such a waste of money. I'm sure it's probably lining someone's pockets while we toil away and pay more and more money for less services. I hate to see how much we're going to owe for the last two trips to the ER!

Is anyone else as frustrated about the insurance and health care industries as I am?

Thank you for stopping by. Please leave me a message. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy