karma

Jay and I have been complaining a lot lately that our karma has failed us. We used to brag that we had great karma. Since he lost his job, then lost his new job, a lot of other little side events have happened to us. We have just had a lot of stress since this summer.

One of those is that last week our dog, Barry, jumped over our fence and bit our mailman. I know, it sounds kind of funny when you first hear it, like what dog wouldn't want to do that? Unfortunately, it's not really all that funny, because many Bad Things are happening now because of it. One of them is that the post office may or may not sue us. We may have to go to court.

Barry has never bit someone and he is not an aggressive dog. He's never gotten over our fence before, either. But for some reason, he really has it in for the mailman. He just goes crazy when that guy comes. Its like that guy really did something to tick him off. Anybody can walk by and barry might bark, but if the mailman walks by its like he's a pitbull on crack. This is all very traumatizing for us because we are renters and we can't change the fact that the property has a 4' chainlink fence. We have looked at all of our options and have decided that re-homing Barry is the best option. We can't keep him inside 100% of the time. We can't change the fence. Training him would be very, very time consuming and we can't guarantee that it would be 100% effective. Ever since the kids were born, the dogs just haven't gotten the attention and exercise they need. Maybe this will give him a chance to have a better life. Maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better, but I really believe that. I just can't see another way to work it. It is going to be sad and traumatic for our family to do this, but if he had the right set-up, the mailman issue wouldn't be an issue. I don't think he deserves to die because he is aggressive only towards the mailman.

So we were looking at our renter's insurance and realized they would cover it if our dog bit someone. It would also cover a lawyer if we got sued. The amazing thing about this was that we were in the process of canceling our renters insurance because we thought we were moving. We thought it expired. Then we realized it covered us through the end of this month. I wanted to make sure they wouldn't make an issue, so i went in and reinstated it and payed it through March. We came very close to having a lapsed policy through all of this.

This past weekend we all had the stomach flu. jay had it the worst and was in HORRIBLE pain and vomiting really horribly for hours. I called the doctor and they said he needed to go in RIGHT away to the ER. So he went. It was so bad they thought it was his pancreas or something. It was just the flu affecting him really badly, but you can't mess around when you have severe abdominal pain for 5 hours. And this is just FOUR DAYS before our health insurance from my temporary teaching job expires!

Here's another thing that happened: i was randomly flipping through the paper and came across a classified ad that said 'need health insurance?' i thought 'yeah.' so i called it (brilliant, huh?). This guy called me back and we set up an appointment. He's an insurance agent. Normally I would just apply for health insurance myself over the internet and wouldn't use an agent, but for some reason i just thought it was all too overwhelming and decided to do it. Well, though this random encounter a number of really, really good things happened. First of all, he told us that we should not report on our application the prescription drugs we take because they would deny us. He basically told us that insurance companies are evil and you can't tell them that you have ever had any kind of problem or they will just deny you. It never would have occurred to me that this was possible. I would have just put it down and then been shocked when we got denied.

But the REALLY fortuitous thing was we were talking about our life insurance application we put in a few months ago and we mentioned that it was taking forever to process. He was like "huh, that's weird" and then we mentioned some of the things we'd put on THAT application. He was like "WHOA! you told them THAT?!?!" needless to say, there are some things you just should not tell a life insurance company. it is a need-to-know basis, and they do not need to know. But we're so naive. man, we are SOOOOOOOOOOoo naive. It turns out that there is this health database and anything you tell them goes on there...for 7 years. You'll never get life or health insurance or anything if you tell them that you've smoked like 1 cigarette in the past year. So anyway, he tells us to call them and withdraw our application before it goes in this database. man! i'm so glad we were able to do that.

So things i'm thankful for (THANK YOU, UNIVERSE!! KARMA, WE WILL PAY YOU BACK!)
1. That i was able to get a reasonable paying job right after jay got fired (i shudder to think what we would have done if i hadn't gotten my teaching degree yet.)
2. that jay and i both worked for a short time enabling us to get some savings to weather this month where we would have had a deficit
3. that the one and ONLY time that anyone in our family has gone to the ER it was while we still had kick-ass public employee health insurance that we have to pay nothing out of pocket for (4 days under the wire...)
4. that we may have just saved ourselves from being branded uninsurable for 7 years and not being able to get health insurance due to a random encounter with a really cool, really nice insurance agent
5. that our renters insurance is still in effect and covers barry biting the mailman (dammit, barry, why?!? why?!!?)
6. that we are all in good health
7. that we have wonderful families who support us and were even willing to let us move in with them, if it came to that.

so even though our family has been through a LOT of, dare i say, shit, in the past 6 months--way more than our fair share in my opinion--there have been a lot of silver linings, too, that have really saved our butts.