HSA's... I'm not sure what to think

HSA's - Health Savings Accounts. They're tax deductible savings accounts for use with medical expenses. It sounds like a great idea to me. After all, I rarely get sick and haven't been to the hospital since I was a toddler. Why should I have to pay a high insurance premium each month when I hardly ever have medical expenses?

The best option that exists that I know of is a high deductible insurance policy. That way, monthly premiums are low, but in the event of an emergency I'd have some protection against outrageous medical bills. Still, I'd be paying money to a company a monthly fee that I would never see again even if I never have a severe illness or hospital stay.

Recently, I've been looking into HSA's that allow you to contribute to a special savings account if you qualify. From what I understand if you have a high deductible insurance policy, aren't claimed as a dependent, and meet a few other requirements you're eligible to have an HSA. You can deposit the lesser of two amounts each year (either the amount of your deductible, or some standard amount... like a standard tax deduction, I believe) and can also deduct this amount from your taxes each year. The money in the account can only be used for medical expenses, and will be taxed upon withdrawal as far as I can tell.

The reason I'm looking around for this is because I've been without any kind of health insurance for over a year now because of money issues with blue cross last year. I let my coverage expire and in order to be covered again (after a 6 month lapse in coverage) they expected me to pay them the last 6 months premiums in addition to the upcoming month. I asked them why I'd be expected to pay them for a time when I was healthy and wasn't covered. I doubt that if I had a medical bill in those six months and HAD paid the 6 months previous premiums that they would've reimbursed me, so why should I be expected to do the opposite?

That was about 6 months ago, and since then I've been looking around (slowly:)) at my options. This HSA business seems to be the best option I've found so far. It makes more sense to me than paying a company a large amount of money each month, having my premiums rise every few months (yes, I'm talking about you blue cross!). I hope I don't find any problems with it, but I'll post again if I do in the interest of helping others who may come across this post.

Here's a good site I've been looking through for info. It's a government site, so it has to be trustworthy... I feel dumber having just thought that, but it's true enough to leave I suppose.

Got a lotta posts to make to catch up...

It's been about a week and a half since I posted on the blog, which is amazing considering just before I got the job here in Shreveport, I think I had 64 posts in a month. This month, until this post, I'd only made 11 posts. Well, that's all about to change. I'm gonna try to get some recent history on the record.

I've been too tired and too busy to post about the weekend after Valentine's day (2/18-2/20/05), but I wanted to get down some thoughts about Les Miserables and the weekend spent with Katie.

The highlight of the weekend and the recent past was Les Miserables at the Strand. It was fan-stinking-tastic. I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the performance. The cast was amazing, the songs and production were both great, and the Strand was great as always. The parents, Katie and I all had a great time going to a fancy pants event, which was well worth the money.

Les Mis was my favorite book growing up, and has become my favorite musical now. I guess that covers all I really wanted to say about Les Mis, since I can't really explain why I enjoyed it so much, and don't have enough time to talk about all the details of the play. However, I do want to summarize the story for those who may not know what it's about... so below is a short summary for those who are interested. For those who aren't, you should rent the movie (non-musical), read the book by Victor Hugo or see the musical.

For those of you who haven't seen any form of Les Miserables, it revolves around Jean Valjean, a french convict who was put in prison for 19~20 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. Shortly after being freed he was taken in by a priest who allowed him to stay overnight when noone else would offer him help to get back on his feet. In the middle of the night, he packed up the priest's fine silver and ran away.

He was apprehended later that night, and brought back to the priest's home by the police, who had been told by Valjean that the silver was a gift from the priest. When the officers asked the priest to confirm the story, he said that he had indeed given Valjean the silver and added that Valjean had forgotten to take the silver candle holders along with the silver he'd already taken. After the police leave, the priest tells Valjean that he has bought his soul for good with that silver and that he should sell the silver and dedicate his life to doing good.

So, he tears up his yellow piece of paper that lets people know that he is a convict and leaves to start a new life (which also means he's breaking the terms of his release, a crime). The rest of the story revolves around the battle between Valjean trying to honor his word to do good and to other people and Inspector Javert trying to track and capture Valjean over the next few decades.

Cingular, you're not so bad after all...for now

After dealing with Cingular Customer Service since the 21st of January, I was beginning to lose hope. I was resigned to the fact that their legal maneuvering through our contract and their policy regarding 30 day limits on cancellations, returns and exchanges would get the best of me. However, today I talked to a final customer service rep after my local Cingular store rejected me again.

I called the Customer Service people to find out exactly when I'd called the first time and whether I would still be able to cancel my contract because of the problems I've been having. It turns out that I called for the first time on the 21st, 19 days after signing a two-year contract. So, I tried to explain to the customer service rep, Tom, that if it weren't for customer service constantly telling me that "X, Y or Z steps would fix the problem, so give that a few days and call back", my request to cancel would've been in the allowable time period. His supervisor agreed to send me one last time to Tech Support and if there wasn't a solution to the problem, they would let me out of my contract.

So, I talked to Tech Support earlier tonight and they said they'd submit a ticket and call me back early next week. The same went for Tom (Kwok)?, he's gonna call back the same day, and if the issue hasn't cleared up, I'll be let out of the contract.

I'm really surprised that they agreed to do this after all the hassle I've been through lately with different customer service reps, be it from Dell or Wholesale Marketer. Regardless, I'm glad that they helped me work through the problem. I hope they'll still honor their promise early next week when they call back.

Suck-o-Meter

I just saw this on a comments thread on fark, and it had me rolling.

Kanye West Suck-O-Meter

I don't really think Kanye sucks, but the idea of the suck-o-meter and the incredible graphics won me over.

Valentine's weekend

The old Valentine's weekend turned out to be a good one. I figured that Katie would be disappointed about not being able to see me on Valentine's day (today) and that I'd try to make up for it by spending some time with her this weekend and also by trying to get her a great valentine's present.

So, this past Friday, I went to Ruston and picked up a Pizza from Pieworks on the way in. When I got to the house, Katie had candles lit and had bought me balloons, a teddy bear that had "I love you" sewn on to it's chest, and a bunch of candy (I love me some candy). We ate pizza, got close and watched Blazing Saddles... forgive me St. Valentine. We talked a little bit about what I'd gotten her for Valentines (as I didn't have anything to show for it), tickets to Les Miserables in Shreveport this coming Saturday night. Looking back, I feel kinda bad that I didn't have anything there to give her, but we had a great night nonetheless.

The next day we headed over to Monroe and did a little shopping (looked a bit at a few rings...*gasp*), ate at the Olive Garden and saw Hitch, which was surprisingly good. So, if anyone who reads this is looking for a good date movie to see in the near future, go see Hitch. It's the first movie in a long time that I've actually felt was worth the money and trouble.

Girlfriend at Olive Garden

Sunday, we just relaxed and watched TV, took a trip to the old house, or as I like to call it, my vacation home, and went to wal-mart before I headed back to Shreveport. It kills me every week when one of us has to leave, but after such a great weekend, I couldn't help but be satisfied with how everything worked out.

Work, work, and more work.

Here's a picture of what I see for 8 hours a day. It's not a bad view to be stuck with, considering some of the other offices/cubicles I could've been stuck in at other jobs.

I blurred most of the screen so I don't have to worry about someone stumbling across the blog thinking I'm leaking Intellectual Property, or some such business.

Work hours crawl by.

When I'm at work all I glance at the clock on the computer every once in a while. I can't do anything but calculate the number of hours I've been awake when this happens.

"11:35? I've been awake for 5 hours and 35 minutes now. Good grief."

I'm gonna have to pull a George Costanza and build myself a little nap station under my desk... or learn to sleep with my eyes open.

I wanna go back to college where I can go to Wal-mart at 3 in the morning and then skip class the next day to catch up on my sleep:). At work, I can't skip any days for the next 8 months when I begin accruing sick days.

Ridiculousity... that's all I can say

I ran across an article tonight that says that artists are copyrighting publicly displayed works in city-owned and city-funded parks. In order for any sort of professional photographer to photograph them, they need a permit, and have to pay the city about $300. Ridiculousity. That's the only word I can think of to describe the situation.

Read the newurbanist's post, and be sure to look at his scans of the newspaper coverage of the problem.

The Means' House in DeSoto Parish

Katie's grandmother recently moved down South from Oregon and in lieu of her finding a place to stay (I assume, anyway), a friend of the family is allowing her to stay in an old plantation home that belongs to his family. It turns out that the home is on the national register of historic places (or something similar) and was used as a civil war hospital.

Since she and her husband live out there, Katie goes out there every time she's in town for Sunday lunches, and this weekend I went out also. I took a few pics of the place, and the surrounding area. The house is in a state of disrepair because of the large amount of money that it would take to fix the place up, but inside it's really amazing. I wish there were a way to get some money to fix the place up... but anywho, on to the pics. You can see them in the Gallery.

Mardi Gras - Krewe of Gemini - Shreveport 2005

This past weekend was the second of two weeks of parades for Mardi Gras in Shreveport, Louisiana. This weekend's parade was put on by the Krewe of Gemini, which is supposed to be the bigger of the two parades. So, I figured I'd tag along with Katie and her family and go over to E. Kings and Ockley to watch the parade.

The plan was to get a lot of pictures of all the people acting like fools and of Katie and her family trying to get all the beads and other throws that were being tossed from the floats. However, Energizer and Duracell got in the way of that plan, so I managed to get one picture out of Mardi Gras. Here it is in all it's wonder.

I had no idea that Duracell and Energizer didn't see fit to charge their rechargeable batteries before their sales. I slapped a quartet of new batteries into the new camera right before leaving, without checking to see if they were fully charged. Well, when I got to the parade, I started to take a picture before the parade, got one picture out and the camera shut itself off.

It may be for the best though, because I ended up catching some cups and beads since I wasn't busy snapping pics. I was also able to hold on to the Katie a little better without the cam, which was definitely a plus. The only regret I have is that I didn't get to take a picture of the insanely drunk lady who was bump-n-grinding with the port-o-potty. I would've loved to have a pic of that.

Anywho, the parade was pretty light on the amount of throws that they were giving out. I'm not sure whether they'd already thrown most of their loot before they got to us, but the weekend before that was much better (so I've been told). The floats looked really nice though, and the people were more friendly than in years past. I was actually surprised that I enjoyed myself.

Back from Tangipahoa

Well, I'm back in one piece from my first business trip. The drive down to Tangipahoa took about 5 hours, and probably just under four hours on the way back. Kristina drove most of the way down there, and we went through Jackson, MI and down I-55.

On the way back though, we went over through hammond and over I-12 to 109 to I-49. It saved us about 45 minutes, the other time saved was because I was driving a little faster than Kristina did on the way down there. So, if ya ever have to get down to Tangipahoa, and someone tells you to go through Mississippi and down I-55, just nod and smile, and drive down I-49 and through Baton Rouge.

We stayed in a Comfort Inn down there in the city of Amite (Ah-meet, is the way to pronounce it, I think) at 1117 West Oak Street. It was pretty darn nice considering that there wasn't much else going on in the town. I took a few pics of the hotel room just for the blog, and took a picture of the Impala we rented too.

Thoughts on the Chevrolet Impala:

The Impala was much nicer than I expected. First, let me get out the complaints.

First and foremost the ride was pretty bad. Even the smallest bumps in the road come through to all passengers. Secondly, the ergonomics of the car are all wrong for a larger person... or at least I think so. The seats were comfortable, but the other arm rests and console weren't positioned very comfortable for a person of my size.

Apart from those complaints though, the car was very nice. The motor was powerful, the ride was pretty quiet and I really liked the style of the car. The A/C system in the car had seperate controls for driver and passenger. Volume increased automatically when accelerating to compensate for the increase in road and engine noise (which is a neat feature at first, but when trying to talk to passengers over increasingly loud music... it's best to just turn that feature off). All in all, I liked it and would really consider buying one if the ride and ergonomics were better.

Quick post before I leave... playing piano with balls

My parents got this video in an e-mail. It's really amazing. This guy plays piano with balls. Download the video (2.01MB .wmv). You can stream it by clicking that link and choosing "open", or choose "save link as" or something similar and save it to your hard drive.

I've gotta get some sleep now. On my third day of work, I've gotta go to Tangipahoa parish and do some training on a part of our software package. It's a mere (...right) 5 hours from the office, and I know nothing about it, the training event, or the person I'll be in the car with for 10 hours. Wish me luck. I leave tomorrow at 1 and will get back Friday at around 9, I imagine.

Cox Cable, I hate you... so very much

Yesterday, I called to cancel cox cable and cox high speed internet.

Today, Cox Cable sent me an e-mail saying that they're increasing their high speed internet speeds to 4 Megabits/sec down and 512 Kilobits/sec up. That's 4 times the speed up and down.

Cox was just waiting for me to cancel my account. Cox, I hate you (See my previous post... when I was living in Ruston where I could actually access their services).