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Good grief! I’m such a bad blogger. It’s been so long since my last post. I hadn’t realized. If anyone is still out there, hello and thank you for hanging in here with me.

Actually I have a confession to make. I’ve never posted my age before because I’m getting to be an old fart and figured people wouldn’t feel any relationship to anything I have to say given all the cheery, mommy blogs out there. But having turned 65 on May 6, I’ve decided to share my age with you.

The other reason, is to let you know what’s down the road for you which actually brings me to the “why” of my blogging absence. The paperwork. OMG. You would not believe it. It’s ten times what I had before.

First, you’re inundated with junk mail from every health insurance company for three months before your birthday and over a month after that, trying to sell you supplemental insurance. Yep, you don’t get rid of insurance companies when you turn 65. They’re still there with their hand out, reaching for your pocket.

The real pain (well one of them) is that there’s no uniform understanding among the providers of what actually happens when you change over from ordinary insurance to medicare. I can’t tell you the amount of misinformation I’ve been given by every single one of these companies. What’s scary, is…if they don’t know, who does? It’s kind of like a big ole’ crap shoot.

The final icing on the cake is that Medicare does not have anything set up for you to pay online or over the phone! I was stunned. You get a bill for three months and have to pay it via snail mail. Yes, one has to write a paper check, put it in an envelope (not provided), plop a stamp on it and put it in a post box. I don’t know about you, but I pay everything online. Simple and clean, plus I have an email receipt which I store online, not in a file cabinet. Minimal paperwork.

When I asked one of the Medicare customer service people why the antiquated system. Her response was that most people over 65 either don’t have a computer or don’t understand them. I almost fell over! Talk about an outdated stereotype.

Well, I’ll stop for now, since recounting this fiasco is exhausting and I have to go through a whole batch of duplicate though incorrect bills submitted to Blue Cross.

On a totally unrelated note, this has been an odd summer weather-wise for us. It’s been fairly gracious about not hitting the 100’s but what’s strange is the high amount of humidity we’ve had almost every day. Normally it’s extremely dry but we’ve been hitting daily rates averaging 50% and above, which isn’t good. Right now, for example, the temp is 86F and the humidity is 54%. Ick, not nice.

As any of you on the East coast, Midwest or South can attest, humidity makes hot weather feel even hotter. Usually we’re so lucky to have humidity in the single digits. Not this summer. Plus, the National Weather service has been issuing flash flood alerts like crazy this summer. Apparently there’s some system hovering over So Cal that is very unstable. I guess that accounts for the high humidity of late.

At about 6:45 a.m. (EDT) we had our second full moon for the month of July also known as a blue moon. News flash: there won’t be any more blue moons till 2018! How weird is that? Three years! Well, that’s it for today, I’ll leave you with this humorous photo. Enjoy!