The end is near!

No, not The Rapture, where the good people go to heaven and the rest of us are left behind being chased by zombies who are under the control of our Evil Overlord, Simon Cowell.

I’m talking about the end of high school.

Our youngest youngen is about to graduate. How can my baby girl be this old? *sniffle* What makes this a bit odd is that high school goes on for another month. But the seniors only have a few more days, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu.

Back in February there was a school bond issue on the ballot, which included remodeling the high school football field. The football field where graduation was supposed to be held. The bond issue passed, and work began. Then Mother Nature decided that 2008 would be the wettest year in history and the football field became a giant mudhole.

Can’t have commencement in a giant mudhole, must find other venue.

Unfortunately the school auditorium isn’t large enough because the area has experienced expansive growth and has twice as many students as they thought they’d have at this point in time. The graduation committees of all the surrounding districts booked all the good dates at all the available auditoriums years ago. Frantic phone calls and schedule juggling ensued, and thus, Daughter will graduate miles from home, practically before she was born.

Like these last few months of school haven’t been nerve-wracking enough. We’ve had to contend with the hideous weather, like getting her to the ACT College test on an April day when it snowed. The last time I took a child to the ACT test it snowed and I ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. So that made me a little edgy. (I survived unscathed.)

Then there was prom. Daughter has never attended a prom and I nagged her that she should go. Nope, don’t wanna go and you can’t make me. That was the standoff until three days prior to prom, when she suddenly decided it’d be fun. See what nagging gets you? A headache, that’s what it gets you. Plus trips to 50 places for tickets, a dress, shoes, undergarments, transportation, flowers and accessories.

But they went, it was lovely and yes I have pictures

All of this while doing full-time caregiving for grandma. Trips to every -ist on the planet…neurologist, orthopedist, opthamologist, optometrist, urologist, therapist, radiologist and pharmacist.

Visiting the doctors is easy compared to trying to figure out the billing, though. Medicare, Medicare supplemental, Part A, Part B, tie ins, tie-one-ons. The paper billings are months behind so we decided to sign up for Medicare online. God help you if you are a sick old person and try to use the Medicare website. It was designed by Simon Cowell and the zombies.

To sign up you have to get a special username and password. Ok, I’ve done that hundreds of times at hundreds of websites. Ha! You can’t just sign up! You have to figure out the formula. You have to use the first letter of your last name and the last letter of your first name combined with the town you were born in. That’s step one. Then multiply your social security number by itself and subtract that from the distance to the sun. That’s step two of the 487 steps to get a username. The real irony though, is that once you have completed the entire process, the website is filled with confusing and illogical data that helps not at all.

I need a psychiatrist. One who knows a good pharmacist.

:-)

Categories: Family, Humor