Blessed Beyond Words

This has been a very good week, despite the extreme amount of financial and school stress I/we are under. I’ll keep out of the raw details since family reads this and the last thing we want is for them to worry, but prayer is always a good thing.

With only 2 weeks of school left before my 2 final exams, my last Spanish work carries a little pressure – to use a litote (that’s a form of understatement for the non-English majors reading this). Scratch that. I just plugged in my grades for the class. Not to brag, but give glory where it’s deserved and many thanks to my brother-in-law for tutoring me with my homework and the first two exams A LOT, here is what I just found. If I only got a 70 on my exam last Saturday (a long shot to score that low) and suck at my last two homeworks to receive 18pts less than normal AND bomb my final with a 50% (nearly impossible to do that poorly with the way she writes the exams), I would still receive… (do I hear a drum roll?)… an 81.95% B for the course. Faring better with my normal grades thusfar, I’d receive an 88%, and she said if I was that close, she would bump me to an “A” because I’ve attended every review session and been “a positive influence on her outlook on life” after finding out I have cystic fibrosis and never made any excuses or even let her know when I was on IVs for a break.

Okay, so that pressure is off! Did you like how many parenthetical asides I used, too?

I didn’t do too, too hot on my Biblical Archaeology exam (C+), but I hope my paper will bring that grade up and do better on this exam, though I’m not putting much of an expectation on doing better on the exam. We cover a lot of material and it’s a 5-essay exam (in-class, no notes) on about 400 pages of material.

Financially, it’s been rough. January was down 75% from previous months and February was down about 85%. We had to use savings to pay some bills instead of our plan to pay off this semester’s tuition. March was back to making my paycheck, but April was looking really bad because we owed Uncle Sam $980 plus our CPA fees. Ouch! That’ll teach me to make a profit, eh? Things really came together in the last 10 days, though. My long-time client, Pearson Publishing contacted me with 2 new author sites, billed directly to the authors instead of Pearson. That’s a huge difference because Pearson pays on a Net 30 policy, which would pretty much screw up any chance of making “payroll” this month. I got one site done today, minus some training, so his net payment should be coming tomorrow. The other site is underway as of 1pm and will likely be done tomorrow, though they send checks immediately. With some other small jobs and reminding several clients that they owe me has brought in a nice chunk – so when this second site is done, we will be 4-digits over what we need for the month, but that leads to the next issue: medical.

If any of you have been following my CF site: CF Fatboy, you know I got my pulmonary vest device written off by the company it’s made by. We owed them $1,200 for a co-pay. What we didn’t realize is that once they wrote that off, bills would start flooding in since we no longer had met our out-of-pocket expenses for the year. Now, instead of owing one company $1,200 we owe 2-3 companies about $800 so far. Thankfully, it’s the end of my insurance year. Sadly, we started all over with our out-of-pocket responsibilities.

I am ever so thankful that we have such a good (what the new gov’t regime would call a “Cadillac plan”) insurance in my individual policy Aetna HMO that has treated me so well for over a decade. Last year was the first year I had any OOP limit to meet before 100% coverage. It’s nice to be able to plan on forking out $1,500 in the first couple of months of the new policy year, but January, February, and taxes made that impossible this year. With a continuation of business like it is now, our living on the edge time is over. Time to be blessed and rewarded for being a hard worker and a good and faithful servant.

Graduation announcements have been ordered and should arrive on Friday, but the College of Arts and Sciences has yet to let me and several others know if their applications are approved. Oh well. I’m walking anyway!