Hey, Look! The Kid Has Blog!

The Kid has a blog, called Lizard Lord Liveblogs, in which she will (more or less) recap the liveblogging reads she does.

Here you may read one of her first posts, in which she reads/tweets/liveblogs that 1979 favorite, Flowers in the Attic.

Enjoy!

Morning in the delagar House; or, The Perils of Letting Them Be Educated

Scene: This morning, in the delagar house. Just past six a.m.  Very dark and silent.  I am stumbling about the half-lit kitchen, assembling breakfast.

From the kid's bedroom, suddenly: A TERRIBLE HALF HOWL, HALF YOWL SHRIEKING YELP.

Me: (Nearly dropping the eggs): Good Shit!  What was that!  What happened!

Kid: (Mildly, from her bedroom): That was my barbaric yawp, Mom.

Missing the Point

Here is Rod Dreher, being clueless as usual.

I swear, he is utterly incapable of seeing what he is writing, or what he is reading.  (Here's the original article, the point of which Dreher has utterly missed.)

Instead of grasping the point, Dreher retreats (once more!) into banging his favorite drum.  Those black people! Their terrible culture!

He uses as his example the story of a young man, Jadereous Davis, who is the subject of the Washington Post story.  Jadereous is from Mississippi, growing up in a town where the poverty rate is triple the national average; where the schools are awful; where there are no jobs and no prospects of jobs.

Dag Nabit

So just over two months ago, I finally paid off all my credit card debt.

Which -- you know -- that had taken me, even with filing bankruptcy, something on the order of twenty-five years.  But it was gone at last, y'all.

Now, this month, a crown (my share, just over five hundred dollars), and this "procedure," as we're calling it, for my ulcer (my share, just over eight hundred dollars) and the car blew a tire, thanks to the charming Fuck Smith roads (that's barely a hit, in the scheme of things, but still, close to a hundred bucks, since we got the oil changed as well).

Much of this I hope to shit I will eventually get back from the fucking HSA account, once the fucking insurance company stops being asshats.

Meanwhile, yeah, I now have credit card debt again.

Fuckit.

What's This Good News WUT?

Just back from the Endodonist, who tells me he is fairly sure I do not need a root canal after all.

"Let's put a temporary crown on it for four to six weeks," he says.

"Keep an eye on it," he says.

"But I think it's going to be fine.  Then we'll put on the permanent crown," he says. "Eighty percent chance everything will be straight from there.  How's that sound?"

"Wut?" I said. "Yes!" I said.

"You look like you just got a reprieve from the Governor," he said.

American Medicine: Best In the World

So I have to get this root canal, right?

Luckily I have dental insurance. Right?

Except in July my kid had her wisdom teeth taken out.  Which I paid for with my Health Savings Account.

Ai.

American health insurance being what it is, when you use it, you're fucked.  (Apparently you're supposed to have it, not use it.)  I used the benefit card that came with my HSA, which triggered this audit function, and froze the card.  Since July, y'all, I've been fighting with the HSA company about the $625.00 co-pay which was our share of having the kid's wisdom teeth removed.

The HSA benefit card is still frozen.  Oh, and our deductible is still not yet met.  (Yes, even after paying $625 in July.) So Tuesday I have to go in for this root canal and pay $258.00 (my share of the root canal) out of pocket.  I have it in the HSA, but I can't access it, because the benefits card is still frozen.

(Why is it still frozen?  Because the insurance company -- yes, the same insurance company that controls the benefits card -- had not, until about a week ago, issued the EOB on the wisdom tooth question.  Now it has, but it will take four to six weeks to unfreeze the benefits card.  Explain to me one time why socialized medicine is worse than this?)

Then next week, I will have to pay out $421 dollars for my ulcer procedure.

Did I mention we owe almost $2000 in back taxes?

MURICA!

What If We All Read The Same Book?

My university, like many universities, has a program wherein all the Comp II students (in theory, at least) read the same book.

There's a committee that gets together every year.  The English professors can submit suggestions to this committee about what the book ought to be.  The committee looks at the suggestions, and then chooses a single book for all the Comp II students to read.

In Which I Am Cursed

Dr. Skull and I have an in-joke for when life suddenly goes awry like this -- when out of nowhere, everything starts going wrong at once:

• I break a tooth 
• the washing machine breaks down 
• the kid gets sick not once but twice (so far this month) 
• I get put on the Committee From Hell (the committee members are lovely; the work load is the problem)
• I find out I need a root canal -- see broken tooth, above -- for which my dental insurance will cover only some of the cost
• the dog gets fleas and gives them to the cats 
• the state sends us a letter saying we owe (I kid you not) nearly two thousand dollars in back taxes
• and now, this morning, we go out in the garage to find the car has yet another flat tire. (We ran over a screw.  ANOTHER SCREW. The AAA guy says the city is doing a lot of construction; he's seeing a lot of flat tires as a result.  He says this is better than the other tires he had to change this morning, two of them, a result of a woman whose ex-boyfriend came around during the night to slash two of the tires on her truck. Count your blessings, I guess.)

"Uh-oh," we say. "We're in an astrological cold spot."

To be clear, neither of us believe in astrology.  Or magical thinking of any kind. Or fate. Or even bad luck.

I don't even believe the universe is actually fucking with us.

But jeez, universe,  Let up a little.  I give.