This calendar year has been a bit one-thing-after-another and when-it-rains-it-pours, which has led despite my best intentions to quite a bit of kvetching and moaning around our household. I’m happy to report that our various unfortunate developments have all been resolved quite nicely.

Most recently, Carefirst has correctly reprocessed the remainder of my claims and sent me a letter clarifying that there is not and should not have been a waiting period on my account. It required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau: while Carefirst wouldn’t discuss my actual medical coverage with them, filing a claim led to contact with a real live person at Carefirst with the authority to just make things happen correctly. I appreciated that, was (I hope) very polite to her on the phone, while being grateful that she was very polite back to me. That’s all taken care of, without me needing to file a claim with the Maryland Insurance Administration as well, and I’m now established with Kaiser. Let’s hope I never have to return to the BlueCross network again.

Just before that came through, we successfully challenged the charges Speakeasy levied against our credit card for the failed installation of our DSL service. Thanks to my partner’s compulsive saving of webpages via the CutePDF Writer, we had access to the trouble logs after our account and its attendant access to Speakeasy’s website was discontinued. When we formally disputed the charges we could therefore submit some 60 pages documenting our communications with the company (wherein we explicitly decline to accept the service as satisfactorily installed no less than four times over the course of six weeks). Not surprisingly, the credit card company found in our favor there.

And, some months ago now, we did manage to successfully install the EasyCloset system to convert our small hall closet into a pantry of sorts. It still wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend the system for plaster walls unless you have a large closet such that you can’t just get a standard bookshelf and plunk it in there (which is effectively what we ended up doing, with a lot of cutting and remounting to fit the shelves in around the mouldings). The company did, however, exchange the uprights for longer ones that would sit on the floor at no extra cost to us, for which we are very appreciative.

While all that was going on, I arranged to have my grandmother’s dining room furniture shipped internationally, with much help from my aunt and uncle up north. The furniture arrived safely this past week, so that’s one less worry outstanding. For the last few weeks of summer I’ll work on wrapping up my remaining tasks in progress: mailing out marriage announcements, writing thank you cards for the receptions, submitting newspaper notices, and ordering and installing new toilets commodes for all three bathrooms. Good times.