Thursday, October 01, 2009

Cold September rain?


Oh, internetz, I hate to bitch, but this is going to be a long one. It has been a crazy month. MB and I both got potentially scary news at work. Some of it has been settled and is most likely going to be fine, and some of it remains to be decided. I don't feel like it's appropriate to talk about it here (or really at all), but if you could cross your fingers for us, it would be much appreciated. In addition to my regular Tuesday yoga class, I picked up a prenatal yoga class on Monday nights and have been trying to meet up with my sister to swim laps on Wednesday nights. Oh, and I got my old part-time craft store job back, and will probably be working there at least one night a week.

Starting a second job near the end of my second trimester probably sounds crazy, but there was that work news. And before that, there was the fact that the escrow on our house was vastly fucked up at the beginning of this year, to the point where our house payment jumped almost fifty percent. To break that down into its ridiculous parts, let's pretend that our original payment was $1000. All of a sudden, it was $1500, and that extra $500, that was an entire week's paycheck. So you can imagine how awesome that was. We called the bank to demand an explanation, and were told they couldn't really tell us anything until our tax bill was printed. Tax bills came out in May, when I was in the throes of the worst of my first trimester fatigue, when I was probably less capable of dealing with red tape bullshit than ever before in my life. The bank told me to call their "escrow expert" line, and so I did, and was basically blown off by a guy who sounded like a bored call-center drone. He said he couldn't explain what had happened, he didn't know how to fix it, and he had no way of knowing if it would go back to normal at the end of the year or if we'd be eternally fucked over.

Great! Thanks so much! I'm ashamed to admit this, but in my exhaustion, I more or less gave up. I felt that I had tried all the avenues open to me, and that there was nothing else I could do. I came out of my tired fog at the end of June, got pissed off all over again, and called the woman who had set up our mortgage for us. When I told her what had happened with the "expert," she was embarrassed and apologetic, and was able to call up our account, verify that something was very wrong, and request that our escrow be reanalyzed. In July we got our new mortgage payment, and it had dropped down to slightly below what we were originally paying. Thank God. But by then, we'd gone through a lot of the money we'd been saving to help pay for this baby.

And then (because of course there's more), on the 23rd, MB's car went into the shop with a mysterious shifting problem that ended up being a dead on-board computer. Hooray! Expensive shit! AND THEN when he got home from work on Tuesday, his laptop wouldn't power on and was giving him a hardware error message. The good news is that his hard drive isn't damaged. The bad news is that, well, the computer is, irreparably. I'm actually typing this on a loaner laptop, courtesy of BoMB, who is moving the hard drive and RAM from MB's dead laptop into my laptop, which we'll have to share from now on. So...money problems, less free time, and now a shared computer -- it hasn't been the best month for blogging.

Plenty of good stuff has happened, too, but this post is way too long as it is and MB needs to use the computer anyway. So I guess to wrap up, I never meant to be so boring for so long, but life sort of happens sometimes. Hopefully (hopefully) things will get a bit more smooth in the days to come. And maybe we'll win the lottery or inherit some money. Or something. Gah.

2 comments:

  1. Oh, God. I'm sorry you're having such an awful time right now. That sucks so hard.

    I hope things turn around for you soon, and that your work news gets better.

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  2. i hate mortgage companies. especially citibank. i hope you're not dealing with them.

    so sorry to hear your baby fund got eaten into with this whole mess. i hope things get better soon.

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