Leftovers for breakfast

I awoke at dark-thirty with a stuffy head and a crabby cough. First step, after grabbing my glasses: out to the kitchen to nuke a mug of chicken broth, as it was too early to use my inhaler. Reheat the remaining square of cornbread in the microwave, add butter, and zap it for a few seconds to melt said butter. Nuke and polish off yesterday's oatmeal. Grab yesterday's leftover chipotle chicken flatbread pizza to finish the job of wrestling my sinuses into submission.

So now I am more than vaguely full and less than perfectly de-congested, but I am breathing somewhat freely and no longer wobbly from insufficient sleep or low blood sugar.

Yesterday I did a huge restocking of the pantry via Costco, and today I will finish the job via Kroger. I would far rather curl up in bed and aim for another three to five hours of sleep

Just got hit with another wave of the groggies. I'm going to fix some warm milk and go after that nap.

"Foyle's War" and other good distractions

I finished the ninth season last night. Anthony Horowitz is a genius. My sister sent me two of his books several months ago, one of which ("Magpie Murders") finished its TV adaptation on PBS Masterpiece last night. The man is a prolific writer, and I've been so impressed with everything he's touched, that I'm aware of. Michael Kitchen plays Christopher Foyle, a local detective in a small English town beginning in the early years of World War II. Honeysuckle Weeks plays his driver, Sam(antha) Wainwright, nee Stewart. The series gave me a real sense of how ordinary people fared during the war years and immediately thereafter. Answer: not well. Food, petrol, and clothing were rationed. Many people had been bombed out of their houses, and new homes couldn't be built fast enough. Profiteering and the black market were rampant, causing civil and political unrest and a general mistrust of the police and the government.

I spent an hour or two yesterday, unsubscribing to various vendors or newsletters and deleting nearly 300 emails. It's amazing how something so small can boost my mood and lessen my general anxiety.

We've received our updated boosters. The bipolar bears were having some side effects over the weekend. As for myself, I was a bit more tired and a bit more crabby than usual. I spent a lot of yesterday napping.

I also watched a couple of middling movies over the weekend. "Just Like Heaven," with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, two eminently likeable actors, was maybe 3.5 out of 5. "Win A Date with Tad Hamilton" had competent main actors, but three of the sidekicks (one hers, two Tad's) had potty mouths and a generally sleazy attitude. Blergh.

I just put half a dozen small potatoes into the oven to bake. We have just enough sour cream left to grace them nicely. And the dishwasher will be somewhere near the end of its cycle when the timer goes off, so we'll have clean dishes.

So, I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

I knew, going into it, that this month would be hard. It's the first month in which there is no final paycheck to soften the finances. Just my first pension check and Beloved's SS check, which is significantly larger than my own would be, because he worked longer and earned more in his lifetime than I did.

I think I'm feeling mild depression on top of my chronic anxiety. It might be time to ask my doctor to up my dosage. Or maybe I should just grab my Ray Charles CD and boogie until my crabby hip says WHOA!

The bad news is that they took October's and November's Medicare Part B premiums out of my SS check. The good news is that I can set up an automatic reimbursement from the HRA account which is part of my retirement, and that anything leftover in that account rolls over into next year. (This is separate from, and different from, the reimbursement account I had when I was working, in which a set amount was taken from my paychecks to fund future reimbursements, and anything left at the end of the year was lost to me. I never had that problem, between my medical expenses and those of the bipolar bears. I usually exhausted the fund between April and June.)

It's not all doom and gloom. I have a carefully constructed, updated spreadsheet in which the regular expenses are all accounted for. There's very little margin for error, error being groceries and unexpected medical bills. There's also light at the end of the tunnel, in that next year I'll get the generous COLA increase and a decrease in the Part B premium, which will effectively give me a raise of nearly $200 a month.

I'm cooking a lot more, both in frequency and in volume, and I'm grateful for the strength to stand and stir. I'm portioning our servings and saving half in the freezer for a meal the following week, with a reminder on my phone to prevent freezer burn. I'm learning to use the Instant Pot, and I'm doing a lot more cooking from scratch, now that I have the time.

I had tithing settlement yesterday, and I promised the bishop that if it became necessary, I wouldn't be too proud to ask for help.

I don't think it will come to that. Meanwhile I'm going to make a pan of cornbread. Because cornbread plus a mug of milk or buttermilk is a delicious, joy-enhancing meal.

I know that we're in God's hands, and I know that He hasn't dropped me yet.

A month and a bit in.

I'm adjusting. My first pension check arrived last week. I paid as many bills as I sensibly could and will pay the rest when my Social Security check arrives later this week. I'm signed up for Medicare Part B and have received my updated Medicare card. I'm also signed up for a Medicare Advantage plan and am waiting for that card to arrive. I need my card in order to set up a profile with my provider and properly compare Rx prices with those from a couple of GoodRx providers and Mark Cuban's online pharmacy. Every penny I can save there can be applied to the bipolar bears' dental bill payment plans.

If my budgeting is realistic and proceeds forward on schedule, Diana will be paid off by my next birthday and Fourthborn's dental plan by midsummer. Middlest's dental plan should be paid off by the end of next year. And, depending upon how large and how often any additional principal payments are, the mortgage might be paid off in a little over two years from now. All of which are good things, indeed.

Right now I am teetering on the edge of sleep. For a moment, I was standing in the hall of my parents' last house, with one eye looking into their bedroom and the other into the bathroom. This is ordinarily the time I would be lying down for a nap, having stayed up until nearly dawn watching British TV. I'm sure that I'll return to a normal(ish) sleep schedule at some point. And I did go to bed significantly earlier than I have been.

Time to get off the computer and start getting ready for church. Thank goodness for dry shampoo!