Huh?

Yesterday I found out that the company that manages my flexible spending account had totally f*cked up and that my flexdirect debit card was going to continue to be unuseable for another 10-14 business days. I went off on the lady who I was on the phone with because I needed her to understand that I have no money with which to pay for any medical care at this time out of pocket, but there is $600+ dollars of my money that her company is holding onto and I am supposed to have access to without having to pay first and then be reimbursed! Basically she told that she was very sorry, but there was nothing she could do, and the problem should be fixed in 10-14 business days. I continued to press the situation a bit, hoping that perhaps since they are the ones who screwed up (not me) and I actually completed all of the things I was supposed to do to get my card out of limboland, that they should be able to re-activate my card in the short term until they got their act together and fixed what they messed up on the account. (To be honest, I wouldn't be freaking out this much except that I have prescriptions to pick up that I just plain don't have the money to pay for - and ended up calling my mother and asking her for the money - does not promote the image that your 26 year old daughter actually has her life together and is responsible, living 4 states away.) I got nowhere with this whole thing except being told that the check that they cut me for claims I submitted last week was dated for yesterday, that I would have that in "10-14 business days" (I hate that damn phrase), and that they would mark my account urgent but that I could not expect it to actually be fixed before the lovely "10-14 business days". When I got off the phone, I was so frustrated I just plain cried. Sitting at work, in the office, everyone having lunch, I'm sobbing.

Anyway, pulled my act together, got through work, got through the community meeting at church that night, dragged myself home, in the door, checked the mail as an afterthought and "what the hell?" The check from ADP was in the mail - all $134.99 of it, dated 11/1/05, no postage stamp (or postmark for that matter) at all.

What the f*ck?

Sticking with the Psalms - Psalm 1

Blessed is the man
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor standings in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so,
But are like the chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment,
Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the Lord know the way of the righteous,
But the way of the ungodly shall perish.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've not decided if I'm going to particularly comment on each verse/scripture I'm interacting with on a daily basis. At this point, I've commented on one, and not on the second. On the one hand, going through the exercise of writing out my interactions with the scripture is a valuable tool to actually learning scripture. On the other hand, this is my journal, where everyone "out there" gets to see what's going on "in here", which affects this project in 2 ways:

1 - I'm very aware that it's likely that some of the people reading this don't give a damn about what I'm writing on this topic, or may possibly even be annoyed. That's fine, you don't even have to read what I write if you don't want to, but I also don't want to be in a place where it is felt that I'm pushing this down anyone's throat. I'm not a "Jesus Freak", I don't feel the need to witness to every person I interact with. However, my faith is a large part of my life, and impacts how I interact with the world. This particular "assignment" I've given myself is one to help me grow in the word, and at this point, it appears that I'm more likely to carry through with it if I include it in another assignment I've given myself - journaling more regularly. Therefore, like it or not, I'm going to talk about Christianity, faith & my beliefs in this journal, but it's also not meant to be the only topic that comes up.

2 - I'm not good at the scripture end of things - I'm rusty at my analysis of literature on a good day, and figuring out what is actually meant by something written in prose about a topic that I'm definitely a student of (as compared to being a teacher of) is one hell of a task. I'm kind of self-conscious of that, and while it's ridiculous, don't want to "get the answer wrong". Moron, I know.

What I think all of this results in is that I'm definitely going to be working through each of the scriptures I put in the journal, trying to learn it, understand it, meditate on it - but whether or not you actually see any part of that process other than the actual scripture in question, will completely depend on what my reaction is. When I entered the first scripture from Isaiah - I felt compelled to explain my interaction with it. I didn't feel the same way about Psalm 91 last night. To make a long story short (to late!): If I want to tell you more, I might. If I don't want to, I won't.

Work observations...

I made an interesting observation today... I only had one new email to open today, all day, at my work email account. Earlier this week, I've been having to check and read emails frequently, at one point with 9 emails arriving in one day. The most common denominator in those 9 emails? My boss. Guess who wasn't at work today.

I think I have an email happy manager. And to make it worse, we only just got work email addresses, so right now, she's convinced that we don't check our email often enough, and therefore sends each email to both our work and home email addresses. On a rough guess, only 1 out of every 5 (and possibly as few as 1 out of every 10) of these emails that she sends out is relevant to me, and information that I didn't already get somewhere else. And, I get it all twice. I'm currently toying with the idea of marking her as "spam" on my hotmail account so that I don't have to get everything twice, however that might actually be being small and petty and she probably will be offended if she figures it out. I'll have to keep thinking about it.