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Friday, January 11, 2008

Counting down to work


School at Truman starts Monday. I'm starting to get ready for classes. I like to have a detailed calendar of the semester for each of my classes. Generally speaking, I push my students at the beginning of the semester and end the semester at a nice even pace (in contrast to some who get behind and crush their kids at the end).

It will be nice to be on a schedule again, and not nice at the same time. I get accustomed to being home with Linda when on break, even if we each do our own things quite a bit. She gets used to having me around and probably notices the change even more.

I forget if I mentioned, but one of the brakes on Linda's wheelchair has been broken for 3 weeks. The new brake finally came in yesterday and I put it on last night. I can tell by looking at it that they have changed to a more durable design. I think I'll just go ahead and order the other brake right now; the old brake is definitely "designed to fail" and it is only a matter of time. She's really found it inconvenient that one side of her chair always wanted to slide out from under her whenever she stands up.

Last week I got something unexpected. I got a final redetermination by the insurance company for Linda's physical therapy --- that she did in July 2006. After a year and a half of careful pondering, the insurance company has decided that the account should be recalculated. The new calculation shows the same amount of money in each box (with the very important note that the insurance company owes nothing additional). Wow. I'm so glad they are on the ball about these things. I don't owe anything extra either apparently, and I'm sure the hospital has long since closed that account anyway.

Of course I'm being a bit cynical about it. I could just be something silly, like a computer system that requires some step to resolve the claim, which while taken care of was still technically open. I'm guessing they couldn't get the computer to agree to anything else, so they recalculated with the previous values and so they could finally put the claim to rest. If it had really been pending and really requiring attention, imagine how frustrated I would be at this point, though.