Tales from the Shark Tank

For as long as I have been employed by the state, I have taken advantage of flexible spending accounts for day care. Basically, what it allows me to do is to have pretax income withheld from my paycheck for child care, and then get reimbursed out of the withheld money after I pay the babysitter. It’s a reasonable system on paper. In practice, it has been an aggravation from the word go.

My last reimbursement claims were no exception. They lost them. I noticed one, called, and got it found and processed. I figured I was done. While I had lost a bit of money due to miscalculation of how much I would spend, I had still saved far more in taxes than I lost to overwithholding. Well, it seems when they went searching for the claim I called about, they found another and processed them both. End result? I have a bit more money than I had expected, and they didn’t get to keep a penny.

We have a different company taking care of those accounts this year. I was not the only person to be annoyed by the service, or lack thereof, of the prior provider. It remains to be seen if the new one is any better. But I am much amused that I ended up with money I had written off because the company handling it for 2003 goofed up one last time.

I’m sitting in my office, which is blessed by a large window and a lovely view. It’s snowing again, and so cold the flakes are staying tiny and separate instead of clumping. It looks for all the world as though some giant is shaking a sifter full of powdered sugar across the landscape. It’s not quite time for me to leave, everyone else has gone, and the quiet is a lovely respite from an utterly crazy day. I knew I was in trouble this morning, when I heard myself tell my son “Passive resistance is useless. You’re going to get dressed.” Mind you, he loves school once he gets there – it’s the clothes themselves he objects to. His method of conveying his displeasure is to become as limp as a noodle when presented with his clothing. On the one hand, it’s maddening. On the other, it’s a great improvement over using my arms for dental exercise.

Nor were expectations disappointed. I got in to be told that I needed to prepare “talking points”, which is an outline of why we’re asking for the legislation we’re asking for, in terms not even a lawmaker can misconstrue. They also need to be a short summary of the primary elements of a set of rules that is roughly a thousand pages long. And they needed to be ready before my supervisor left to go to a funeral in Ohio, so time was rather tight. In spite of the best efforts of my keyboard, (I went marching over to IT to demand a new one) it got done on time, and it’s only two pages long. I must admit, when I looked at the finished outline, I found myself wondering how the writers for the Traffic Security Administration managed to use that many words to say that little.

Tomorrow I get to try, yet again, to convince the Powers That Be that the attack on the World Trade Center did not invalidate civil rights or the prohibitions against discrimination based on national origin. I expect to fail, but when the ACLU sues the state on the next grand plan, I want to be able to say “I told you so.” As for tonight? I’m planning to bake brownies with my kidlet. I can’t think of a better thing to do on a snowy night.

For reasons having primarily to do with pure curiousity, I just did a mapquest search for Bunker Hill, Indiana. It appeared in the news, and I wondered where it was.

Turns out there are no less than four towns in Indiana named Bunker Hill. Now I know why ZIP codes are necessary.

It’s done a grand job of snowing today, and I’ve taken shameless advantage of it. It began with the determination that Joseph’s school was closed for the day. Given the number of accidents being reported on the news, I found that to be a great relief. I didn’t particularly relish the idea of putting my kid in a car and wending our way to kindergarten over a surface of ice under snow. I trust my own driving. I’ve slid off the road on ice exactly once, and that was my sophomore year of college. I do not, however, trust the other drivers.

Then I thought about it, and decided I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about risking my own neck to the current road conditions, and that an unplanned quiet day would be a wonderful thing. So I called in to work for the day. Given the weather and school closings, a whole lot of people did that.

It has been lovely. I’ve done a little more cleaning, (one more trash bag worth) and spent a lot of time reading to the small boy whose seat of choice has been Mommy’s lap. I’ve played pretend games with the same small boy, ranging from fighting bad guys the way a mommy cat would (lots of hissing and claw-swipes at the air), complete with kitty-kisses from my baby kitty once the bad guys “ran away” to explaining to trains that they need to be careful because if they run over tar tankers, they will become horribly messy and need a bath and a new coat of paint. Jospeh would say something on behalf of some character, and then look up and ask “then what would (next character) say?” I’m delighting in it both for its own sake (having never outgrown make-believe myself) and because he had to be taught how to play pretend; it did not come naturally.

And I’ll actually get a thing or two done that I wanted to get done. I’ll be writing a nasty lawyer letter for a private client when I finish this entry, unearthing my car from it’s sheathe of ice so I don’t have to do it in the morning when I have to get Joseph to school on time, and working on a simple sofa quilt to keep couch potatoes warm in our family room, which is rather a cold room. I loved snow days when I was a kid. It’s nice to discover that hasn’t changed.

I’m going to war with an insurance company. That’s all there is to it. I have been trying to resolve the issue of the damage caused by an errant school bus with the township’s insurer. I have never heard so many specious arguments in my entire life! The adjuster has tried to tell me that retail value is irrelevant because of the damage. Excuse me? Last time I noticed, the point of insurance was to put a person back where they would have been but for the damage. He has said that because of its damage “it isn’t a Blue Book car”. Same problem. He offered me a ridiculously small amount of money, and when I said my car was worth more than that, advised that if I convinced him it was worth “too much”, he would just pay for the repair and I’d see no cash at all. I drop-kicked that one by pointing out that their paying for the repair was what I wanted, and that if he would agree to that I would not argue another minute. He told me “BMV policy and state statute require this.” I told him what I do for a living. I haven’t heard that argument again either, for some odd reason.

One more such exercise in speciousness and I shall ask for his supervisor. Two and it will be the address of the legal division I request. This is getting ridiculous. I have better things to do with my time than argue with an idiot.

Today has been a cleaning day. I have had enough of the clutter, chaos, and catastrophe that has been creeping over my house, room by room. I got a stern lecture on the subject last night from someone who is a good enough friend to give me a metaphorical kick in the gluteus maximus when I need it. And I needed it; intertia was becoming a force unto itself. I realized how ubiquitous the junk had become when I began to clean and Joseph asked, in genuine puzzlement, why I was doing that. Nothing like the observations of a 6 year old to make you laugh at yourself and puncture any illusions you may have had at the same time.

Since everything must start somewhere, I began with the area in arm’s reach when I’m sitting on my bed. The amount of sheer, unadulterated junk I managed to cram into a 2 cubic foot area is incredible. It is also no longer occupying that space. There is a tunic I cut out and never made that is now by my sewing machine, 2 or 3 sweaters in my closet, another couple of sweaters I’ve put in a bag to give to a friend who is smaller than I am, and a large bag of trash which is quite full. The volume of trash is greater than the combined volume of all the rest of the stuff. It consists of things like outdated flyers and catalogues for companies that have everything they sell available on line. There’s no earthly reason to keep it.

The scary thing is that I’ve barely made a dent. But it’s a start. Everything has to start somewhere.

I got back from lunch hot, sweaty, and out of breath. The body insists it has had a workout, although it is gradually calming down. So what was this grand workout? A walk to the mall and back, a matter of no more than a mile, with a pause in the middle to return a defective item at one of the stores.

I know I was sick for quite a while. I know I hadn’t the breath to exercise during that stretch. I knew I was going to lose some of my wind and endurance to inactivity. But darn it, before Thanksgiving I was walking a bit over 3 miles almost every day without a problem. Now I’m winded by a mile’s walk with a rest in the middle. That’s a thoroughly revolting development.

Monday, as planned, three adult women and Joseph piled ourselves into my little car and headed over to my parent’s house. I had told my mom that we were coming to clean out the accumulated stacks of paper from a room of her choice. She chose the family room. It’s not a large room, but because the door is there, it accumulates everything that walks into the house. The stacks of stuff between the entertainment unit and the chair were taller than my son, and rather scary to my maternal eye.

Now, I knew what furniture was in there, and had told my assistants that there were buried chairs. They spotted one peeking out, next to the visible and usable chair, facing the television. That, they thought, was what I was talking about. One of them set about sorting papers on the table between the chairs and on the mostly-buried chair. The other went after the stuff in front of the fireplace, between the chairs and the television stand.

Little did they know. I excused myself to take care of business in another part of the house briefly, only to hear shrieks followed by laughter. That, of course, got me back into the family room at a run. What I found was the two of them, laughing in sheer shock. See, they’d found the chair I’d been talking about. It was at right angles to the others, in front of the fireplace. It had so much stuff piled on and over it that it was impossible to tell it was there at all, until Sarah found the back of it and realized that a) it was there and b) it wasn’t a small kitchen-type chair. It was an overstuffed article of living room furniture. Mom wasn’t mortified because she wasn’t there. I had asked her to take Joseph for a haircut, which she had done. He was thrilled to go with Gramma. I was delighted to be able to work without having to reassure Mom that no treasures were being thrown away. (They weren’t; I just didn’t want to have to repeat it every five minutes.) And Mom? Well, I saw her again last night. She still doesn’t understand why heaps of paper higher than my son’s head scare me. But we could all sit in the den at once, and that made her very happy indeed. It was one of my better ideas for a birthday present.

The expedition was a success. My parents have visible floor and three usable chairs in that room. We’re going back to finish the next Sunday that everyone has off.

Even better, I’ve learned from my fledglings how to go about such projects. So the next one is my own family room. At least there we know where all the furniture is. It’s an easier place to start.