The Fan Isn't Built for this much Crap Hitting it...

Yes, the continuing saga of horribleness continues. And yeah, I am aware that there are people out there who are suffering real tragedies, and have bigger problems than I can ever fanthom - and I don't like to think of myself as one of those teenagers who blog about how horrible life is treating me because my parents hate me and I hate school - but I figure that this is my blog, and it's okay if I bitch and moan on it.

As some may recall, the Previa, our minivan, decided to croak on us a few months ago. A bunch of smoke and a sputtering engine ended with a non-starting van that sat on the road. Well, we finally came into some money via my Mom's visit back to Singapore (relatives giving gift money), and with my mom's willingness to back any extra costs, we had it towed in to be looked at.

So my wife calls me at work to tell me about the bad news - the monkeys at the shop did a diagnostic and concluded that coolant had leaked all over the engine, the crankshaft, and whatever else makes up the car. Their solution was to replace the engine and all the parts affected. Estimate? $4500.

I'll give you a moment here.

I estimated in the hundreds. Hopefully, I thought, about 500 would be ideal. I would have a hard time with anything more than that. But 4500? That's insane, considering that the van's bluebook value is less than that. Yes, you could find a good condition 1993 Previa for less than 4500 on the street. Obviously, we don't have the money for it and even if we did - you'd figure it'd serve our interests better to get another used vehicle. Right now our only solution is a mechanic friend of ours, we're hinging on whether or not he'll be willing to help us fix in on his free time, or maybe he could give us some advice on whether this mechanic was simply ripping us off. The worst case scenario is to simply sell the van as a non-running heap of scrap. It's depressing because we actually like the van. We've only had a few months in it but we've been camping, I've gone to Seattle with it, and we've shuttled crying babies in it. We really liked the van a lot. On top of that, we'll still owe my father-in-law 4800 bucks, for the purchase of the van and the maintenance to bring it up to date.

Now this one is actually more important of the two sucky news, but I'm just going through it chronologically. To further compound the aggravation of not having our family van, we finally found out what the hell went on with Zoe's insurance. After tons of phone calls made by my wife, I just haggled an explanation out of the phone rep (after the first one put me on hold indefinitely - I hung up after 20 minutes.) about my daughter's insurance.

Now as any parent may attest, if your child qualifies for your insurance, of course you'll put your child on it, right? Furthermore, if the child is a newborn and there are numerous shots and checkups in the first year, it would be just stupid not to. Basically, our insurance is telling us, no, we didn't call within the first 30 days since Zoe was born. Therefore, she will not be covered for insurance until 2005.

The maddening thing is that GroupHealth isn't the culprit. It's Kroger, the parent company of Freddy's. Because it is Kroger's policy that they do not accept late enrollments for HMO patients is complete and that is total bullshit. I'm sorry, but the company that my wife has worked 17 years for and myself, 7 years, is basically telling us that our daughter doesn't deserve to be insured. Why it is policy is beyond me, because by the time they're done with me, I will have taken more of their manhours fighting with me than it would've taken to just sign up a 2 month old baby. We're pretty pissed about the whole thing because we already had to pay for Zoe's medication for her labia infusion thingy, which was 70 bucks we didn't have. There's hundred plus bill we're sitting on because we can't pay it. Right now our only refuge is to seek assistance from DSHS, to get medical coupons to help with the remainder of this year. I'm getting outraged just talking about it now.

Any loyalty to my company is lost now.