{Because I have been given much}

I have had a crappy week with a capitol S. It all started on Saturday when our oven stopped heating. Sure, you can turn it on...but it won't heat up wwwwhich is kind of the point. It has been five days and the issue still isn't resolved in the slightest. Plus side? We have a friend who's husband does repairs just like that for a living. He has offered to come and take a look eventually, we don't know when. He's a busy man and we are just fortunate that he is willing to help out. We just hope that it isn't too expensive.

The second thing that happened was our living room lights started acting up in a major way. When we would flip the on switch they would blink in rhythm. It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen a light do. It was almost like a slow motion strobe light. Hannah thought it was really funny and kept saying "Happy Halloween! Pumpkins! Ghosts!" I was worried that something in our wiring was off.

The third thing was a very VERY long story so I'll make it as brief as possible. All of our bills come out automatically through Bill Pay. We open them each month to just make sure we are still good and then discard them. About 5 months ago our mortgage payment increased by about 80 dollars (it wasn't exactly our mortgage, it was like taxes or something that is tied into our mortgage). Because of that, we had to change what we'd been paying for the last two years and I didn't know how much it was anymore, I just knew the range it should be so I just kept paying as usual. Well, in October our payment increased--again--by 13 dollars. I didn't know this because I was just opening the bill, assuming the amount paid was correct, and letting my bill pay do it's job. I didn't think anything was wrong because we never received any notification. This month makes month 2 of the change and ADAM noticed that we had a late charge. You should all know that I am SUPER hyper about payments. I have NEVER missed a payment in my life of ANYTHING. I've never even been a day LATE on a payment. However, because the payment that I sent (two weeks early I might add) was 13 dollars short they did not accept the payment. At.All. In fact, they credited it towards the principal of the loan instead of the payment. Which means I didn't technically make a payment. So then, when the other payment arrived (again, two weeks early and 13 dollars short) it would have been credited to Novembers payment instead of Decembers payment (because at this point we are two payments behind) but they rejected it, being short and mailed it back. They mailed it back to us on December 2nd but we still haven't seen it.  This means that as of yesterday, we were two payments behind on our home, which means as of December 16th we would receive notice of foreclosure. Over a 26 dollar difference. Yeah. Luckily, since Adam noticed the difference I called and was able to reverse their decision to put the money into principal, I paid the difference of 13 dollars, and then paid the mortgage for December out of our bank account (because who knows how long it might be before the rejected payment check makes its way back home) and everything is hunky dory...aside from the fact that the November payment was reported to collections and our credit (which was previously impeccable, hopefully it wasn't affected TOO much because with our credit, we could have probably purchased ANOTHER home and several more cars without too much hassle (we seriously have the.best.credit.)

All this is magnified by the fact that Clark County School District is trying to change every teacher contract (18,000 teachers) to balance their budget. They threaten that either teachers take a pay cut (in Adam's case it is about 20 percent with a crappy change of benefits) or they will fire 1,000 teachers. The teachers union wants CCSD to balance their budget in other ways and not on the backs of teachers...ESPECIALLY since they hired 1,500 teachers in the past 11 months that were hired on a ONE YEAR FEDERAL GRANT BASIS but they want to keep those teachers without the grant meaning the teachers get a pay cut. In a nut shell, that means that not only Adam would get his 20 percent cut, but he would have to PAY BACK 6 months of his new contract so he wouldn't get a pay check for two months. Fun eh? Let the good times roll. Every penny of the raise of his new contract has gone into savings so if that were to happen--we'd be ok, we'd just have to live off our savings (although I don't know how we would pay for insurance since that comes out of Adam's paycheck). The decision is left up to one lone arbitrator so it's a 50/50 chance right now. We are praying with all our might because I don't know how we are going to be able to survive to be honest, should we take a pay cut and not get a couple months worth of paychecks.

So while I'm pondering these things that have all occurred in the past 5 days (seriously! FIVE DAYS!!!) and I'm bawling my eyes out I decided that I needed to serve someone. I won't go into details of what I did. Lets just say there was a need in the ward, and although I wasn't in a position to do much my "not much" was a lot to this person. I thought of my babies and how they have been able to have everything they need. Not only that but they have always had nice things. We may not have a lot of things but what we do have is all really nice. Serving someone made me feel a lot better about my situations. Also, Adam is a stud. Adam knows that when I get into my little funks he can't do anything about it. They don't last long but I have to work myself out of it and I need space. I told him last night to go to scouts and not come home unless his arms were filled with many pounds of comfort foods, pizza, ice cream, chocolate (he complied).

I'm trying to keep a good perspective but it is difficult to stay positive. I just have to look for more service opportunities.