Tuesday, July 28, 2009

the fun and the not so fun



Whoa boy. Did I tell you the Air conditioner did die? I forget you see because I tend to update on facebook more lately. It seems to fit my attention span better. Well anyway remember that post about our dying air conditioner and my plan to never use it. Well texas weather killed that plan and we used the air conditioner until one night it just quit.

Turned out the previous owners owned a german shephard and considered A/C filters optional and the unit was full of hair - so besides the broken cooling coil our entire unit was only functioning at about 20% - hence the $350 electric bill last month even though the A/C was never set below 80!

This has plunged me in a depression - that I am fighting. I am fighting it in a somewhat cooler home but to pay for the A/C unit we are still doing our best to not use it. So frustrating to pay for something that you work hard to not use.

A silver lining is that Kyle's company starting this month will pay 100% of our health insurance premium. So we are doing what we have needed to do for a long time and we are shopping for Life insurance that is not connected to a job. Yuck, yuck, and more yuck - new air conditioner and shopping for life insurance....

Now for the fun part:

My mom got me this book:
It has really motivated me and I have tried more ideas than I even thought I would.
I got this book that CJane recommended. And so far its a little too wordy but I am looking forward to the second half of the book - yes I sneaked and read ahead a little.
And my mom saw the swordplay game on the Wii Resort on the morning news and thought the kids would enjoy it so much she pre-ordered it on Amazon in the midst of her vacation. Amazon is so cool, it was ordered on Saturday and was here before lunch yesterday. We were all up until 10 playing it last night - its very, very cool. We personally LOVE the Ping-Pong and Archery.

And if you were wondering, even though you probably weren't - I am loving my google calender - its SO organized and Kyle is still updating it from work - its like we are on the same page. LOVE IT

3 comments:

Amanda said...

sorry about the a/c:( But can I say IF Steve's work paid all our Health ins. premiums I's be RICH! Geeezzz that would more than make up for the a/c for me! I would save hundreds of dollars EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH. Can you tell I am so jealous about that? And now Obama's lovely plan is threatening to take away our FSA account.....that was the only health insurance perk of this job!

Janie said...

don't be too jealous - its a super high deductible plan - 3000 out of pocket before they starting paying 80% - and the prescription coverage is not great either.

But I kind of like that - Since I am paying out of pocket I haggle with each and every doctors office and I have had very good luck getting everything reduced.

We don't go to the doctor very often.

We priced out the FSA and we pay so little taxes (none actually) with 4 kids the FSA doesn't save us any money and it just adds paperwork to my life. So we don't use it anymore.

I wish there was no such thing as health insurance except for catastrophic events - If everyone paid out of pocket the market would correct itself naturally

My name is Andrea said...

I got that food storage book and another one and I love them both...I am going to try some of it!!!