Wow, I’ve been so busy I can hardly think straight. In the midst of trying to balance end of semester workload with holiday obligations over Thanksgiving my mom called me the sunday before Thanksgiving to ask if I could come over for an hour and help her sort out some paperwork. She said she was overwhelmed and I knew that sorting out anything with her would take more than an hour, plus it takes an hour to get there, so I needed to make a 4 to 6 hour committment minimum.

This was one of the few times that if I felt I could have I would have told her I just didn’t have time, I’m really under time pressure to get some stuff done for school. BUT I was glad she asked for help instead of just shoving the papers under her chair and forgetting about them, AND the fact that she asked for help worried me because it probably means that she has been putting off looking at them for quite awhile already, so who knows what’s in there.

So I went over on tuesday night, after spending the day on a cub scout outing, i got there around 5:30 and hoped to get home before bedtime. It actually turned out O.K. She had a pretty hefty stack of mail that had been opened and thrown in a box but none of it was current bills, so she’s not like ignoring the electric bill or anything like that. 

 Unfortunately I now have an intense hatred for the whole medicare system and AARP.  They send my parents mail almost every day, most of which is adverstisements for services and products they dont want or need disguised as something important, so they save it, forever and get the truley important things regarding their health insurance and prescription coverage mixed up and confused. So their prescription premium goes up by a couple dollars and her automatic online payment didn’t change, they send her a letter saying you owe us 7.80, then five days later another letter saying you owe us 48.90 with no explanation of what payments they have recieved or what these charges comprise, so she pays what they say she owes and then her auto payment goes through and she’s overpaid, but they don’t send her letters about that. It’s such a poorly administered system, they’ve got like four different coupon books they’re supposed to use. I can’t even explain what a jacked up mess it is, sometimes they get correspondance from AARP, sometimes from Medicare, sometimes from the insurance company and always with little or no explanation, just “here’s how much you owe, (we don’t feel like telling you why)”

Anyway, my mom went to bed at 7:00 and I got to take that time to go over this and some other really confusing life insurance policy issues with my Dad. So now he knows what needs to be done to straighten everything out and he seems to have grasped the fact that my mom cannot handle this on her own, so overall I feel better. And I got my organizing fix too. Then we had a really nice and uneventful Thanksgiving dinner, the first big dinner I ever made where everything turned out really good! Yah!