Blog Without A Name

So, it’s been a Day of Parts.

First part — Steve and I decided to go out into the world and Be Among People, so we went across the bridge to the Hathaway Creative Center and had breakfast at the Button Down Cafe.  I had a cheese and tomato omelet with whole wheat bread; Steve had two eggs over easy, red potatoes, bacon, and toast.  He shared his bacon and potatoes, and we both had coffee.

Sated, we drove down to Augusta, and in the fullness of time achieved Bed, Bath, and Beyond, where I learned that a word from my youth — specifically, the word “spread” and/or “bedspread” — is no longer in currency.  The thing that you want to ask for, if you don’t want a quilt, which I assuredly do not when it’s a summery 82 degrees F/28 degrees C  outside, is a coverlet.  Who knew?  The nice man we turned to for help was also a little rocky on the concept of “chenille,” not that I wanted chenille, either, but I thought, if BB&B stocked chenille spreads, it would at least get us to the right corner of the store.

But! In the end, we found a very nice woven blue cotton coverlet on sale, to replace the one that’s at least eight years old and is starting to go all ragged along the edges, but the whole episode was so exhausting, I didn’t even try to buy sheets.

Since we were in Augusta, we stopped at Barnes and Noble and wisely spent the gift card a kind reader was generous enough to give us on books and the new Lindsey Stirling CD, “Shatter Me.”  The books are:  The Night Circus, Memory of Water, and Meatless.

Returning home, we found that we had missed the mailman and the delivery of my socks which, yes, really did need to be signed for by an adult — what’s with that, exactly?  I received an email letting me know that J Peterman had decided to refund the cost of my wonderful coat, rather than repair it or replace it*, which made me sad.

Then, Steve and I sat down with the budget and the adding machine, and other variables, including the fact that we’re about to put our house up for sale, and therefore will need to be buying a house very shortly thereafter, not to mention paying the wergild demanded by banks, assessors, real estate agents, and other suchlike folk, and holding ready a down payment; that we have this year already had extraordinary expenses not accounted for by The Budget, including various dental adventures, Mozart’s on-going medical expenses, replacing my desktop, and! the surprising necessity of replacing my car. . .

We will not, after all, be attending DetCon in July.

We’re very sorry to have to cancel, we were looking forward to seeing y’all in Detroit, but there just isn’t an endless bucket of money to draw from, and. . .something had to give, and the convention had the most flex.

So, indeed, a day of parts, and tomorrow a day of sifting Stuff, and writing.

Hope everyone’s set up for a super weekend.

___________

*I don’t think I mentioned here that my coat did not survive the Portland award ceremony intact; one of the frogs became unraveled.  I thought about gluing it together (which, in hindsight, if I had done, I would still have the coat, dammit), but then I thought perhaps better to write to Peterman and see if they could do a more professional repair.  After some emailing back and forth to customer service, it was determined that they might be able to repair it, or, if not, to replace the coat.  So I wrote a letter, explaining what I wanted, enclosed it with the coat and sent it back to J Peterman, confident that the coat would be repaired and soon be home with me.  Sadly, as reported above, customer service decided, as is always customer service’s prerogative, to simply refund the money and have done.  I am sad; I liked that coat.

The contractor has been, the contractor has wrought, and the contractor has gone away again to that place where contractors go to rest from work well-done, and curses well-said.  All hail, the contractor.

Today, there are chores in the morning, and travel in the afternoon.  We have tickets for Varekai this evening, which I am looking forward to with much excitement — even, perhaps, excitement unseemly in a woman of my years.  I’ve been wanting to see Cirque du Soleil live for YEARS.

Tomorrow, it’s back to writing and sorting.  I think I may take an hour or two every morning for the next hundred years or so to go through shelves and drawers and closets and set aside those things that we don’t need, and simply have because we have them.

For those following our continuing adventures with the ACA, aka “Obamacare” — it transpires that the clearing authority needed not only proof of our IDs, but Proof of 2014’s income (yes, we are still in 2014; I checked several calendars, just in case mine was malfunctioning).  So, I spent an evening when I should have been writing doing a Profit and Loss for the year thus far, and listing such projects as I hope to see payment far, going forward into the year.

Now, one of the more interesting things is to transpire on this front is that the royalty payment we received earlier in the week has put us very close to my estimated income for the entire year of 2014.  So, in my abundant spare time I’m going to have to get with the ACA and figure out a new insurance premium.  Which raises the question of how the ACA accounts income — by quarter or by full year.  I fear it will be annually, and that we’ll find ourselves playing catchup for the subsidies we did not “deserve,” though we needed them, at the beginning of the year.

Well. It’ll be fun.

In other news, we had a ripping thunderstorm come through last night, all the flowers in the meadow next door are flattened right to the ground this morning, and fog is rising out of the trees.

So, the mail.

Of greatest importance was, of course, our Determination from the Health Insurance Marketplace, which was to tell us whether or not we can have the insurance we’ve been enrolled in since January.  We opened this document with trepidation, only to find that they need one more document from us before they can make a determination.  They need. . .wait for it. . .

They need a copy of a document that proves our citizenship and our identity.  Because, yanno, copies of our tax returns just didn’t cut it.

So, I guess I’m glad we renewed our passports earlier this year.

Of second greatest importance — royalty statements!  And!  royalty checks!

If you bought a copy of Necessity’s Child in signed or plain vanilla hardcover, or as an ebook?  That bagpipe band you hear coming around the corner is FOR YOU!

. . .and now, I’m off to town to do errands.  It’s a pretty day, and I’m looking forward to the drive.

Hope everyone is having as pleasant a Monday as it’s possible to have.