for my next trick.

Watch me clean-up my house! The exilhiration! The conflict! The never-ending pile of crap to do! Make yourself feel better by watching me fight my battles! One more exclamation point!

My house is a mess neatly concealed behind cabinets, cupboards, drawers and lots of brown paper bags.

Of greatest priorty to straighten up was the looming stack of mail and papers that I haven’t touched in nearly two months:

Stack o' Mail

I have a problem with money (don’t we all). My problem is that when I know I owe more than I can afford, I ignore the debt as long as possible. And when I say ignore, I mean that I try often to put it from my mind. I do what I can to pay it off on time. … Mostly on time.

I had been intently ignoring this pile for quite some time because I knew this insurance statement from the hospital was among the ranks:

Inpatient Hospital Statement

My camera phone isn’t the greatest. The total charges read over $32,300.00. What concerned me when I first opened this, is that it says the account balance is over $14,000.00. At the time, insurance had only paid $17,000 and change.

What I didn’t realize was that, this was among the ranks too:

Partial Hospitalization Statement

This is the bill for E-Niner’s partial hospitalization. Nothing has been paid on it, which means $6,111.00 is outstanding.

We had already met our sky-high deductible by the time E-Niner was admitted. I was sure that insurance would cover everything. I was keeping fingers and toes crossed that I wouldn’t find the actual bill for $14,000.00 and an additional $6,000.00 in the pile somewhere.

To my great pleasure, I found nothing of the sort. I’m going to continue to ignore this problem hoping that the hospital and insurance company work this out between themselves. I think it’s a safe bet.

All sorted, the stack of mail now looks like this:

Papers to File

Which leads me to another trick…filing.