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Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Hey, you! You wanna cat?


Yes, another cat has found its way to our house. Since you already know how I feel about cats, you're dismayed that a young vulnerable little kitty is being subjected to me. Ease your conscience and come adopt it. It's a boy.

I'm a bit cranky today, or maybe just sad, I'm not sure which. To many things on my todo list perhaps. I'm glad I finished the lawn yesterday since we've had so much rain. Today I worked on cleaning the house some. I started an attack on Ellie's room.

Insurance



I also did some research into Linda's wheelchair, for which I am still receiving bills. I dug up every EOB I have and totalled all of the values. I figured out which numbers were considered part of the purchase and which were different. Then I called the wheelchair folks to get more details.

The upshot? After all of my digging, I think the insurance company is still underpaying the bill. For a while, I believed that the wheelchair folks didn't have their stuff together (and they don't in some ways), but the numbers just don't seem to add up.

The big insight for me today was the purchase price of the wheelchair. According to Epoch (insurance people) the purchase price was $986 which they met sometime in March after I appealed an October denial. According to Apria (wheelchair people) the actual price of the chair is $1586, exactly $600 more. When I add up all of the payments that Epoch has sent so far, the balance is still about $445 short--there was some wheel rent not applied to the $986 number. Yes, you apparently rent the wheels separately from the chair.

So I sent Epoch a long letter with all of the payments categorized and suggested that they forgot to pay for something. Either someone used the wrong price, or they didn't pay for the wheels, or something. We'll see what happens.

I got all of my conversations on tape of course. I can't recommend enough the practice of taping your phone calls.

Prototype


I finished a prototype sound program today. It seems to work. I can read sound data from the sound card and display it crudely on the screen. It looks like sound waves, so I think I'm ready to proceed to the next part. It's not as satisfying as it should be because although it works, I still don't feel like I understand it.

Still it's a beginning.