Feeling Poor

Integrity of Blogger
This was in my comment's yesterday:

Hey Leesa, I think I may have somehow deleted ~deb's comment. She made a comment and I responded to it starting my comment with "~deb:", but then I decided to remove my comment but then after removing my comment I saw that ~deb's was no longer there. If I deleted it I apologize. It was a good comment about Grant.

Now I am not going to call out the hacker who tapped into blogger, deleted a comment maliciously and exited the servers undetected . . . .

I am completely full of crap here. Maybe blogger (Google) is trying to drive us to the beta product; I won't change. I won't!

By the way, the comment that ~Deb had about Grant linked to some naked pictures of Grant when he was in the military. Perhaps that is the reason for the deletion.

Feeling Poor

I often wonder how many people have truly felt poor. I am not here to write about the romanticism of being poor, how money corrupts and the like. I enjoy shoe shopping too much to make any of those claims. But at different times of my life I have felt financially poor. Let me explain.

After college, I started working at a job where I was earning about minimum wage. Really. And when I started, I could not afford heath insurance. Actually, I purchased a very cheap policy – if I needed something major, after paying $3,000 deductible (as I recall), I had health insurance. But because of the high deductible I had no doctor, no preventative care. On the plus side, I was in my early 20s and healthy.

I do remember opting not to seek medical attention once. I had some friends who played intramural sports, and I was practicing with them one night. I turned an ankle, and if I would have had decent insurance, I would have gone to the doctor. Heck, now-a-days, I would have gone to the emergency room, seen a hunky doctor, and gotten good pain medication. But then, I opted to just limp for a couple of weeks. Yes, two weeks.

I was single, without real money. I remember knowing exactly when I got paid, how much I got, and already where most of the money had to go.

A few years ago, hubbie and I did something dumb: we ran out of checks. After the last check, I looked for the next book, and it was not there. Secondly, we had no debit card at the time. And we also had no ATM cards.

So when we ran out of checks, we temporarily ran out of money. Not really, because we had money in the bank, but for the weekend, we had no access to the money. On a Saturday morning. For the entire weekend, we had $4 between us. Hubbie actually had the $4 in his wallet. To go to a store and not be able to buy a soft drink – that's where we were. I know it seems insignificant, but it brought back feelings of being poor. And please don't argue that minimum wage is not poor. I was making $5.30/hour ($5.15 was the minimum wage at the time, and I remember when minimum wage was raised, I got a raise!), which turns out to be about eleven grand per year. Sure, money was worth more then, but eleven grand was not a lot of money back then.

Okay, now hubbie and I are doing okay, thanks mostly to hubbie. I don't really pay attention to pay day anymore. When the last week before pay day has popcorn to fill the tummy, perhaps you are a bit poor. I would do that. When ketchup and water equals soup, you are either a really bad cook or don't have a lot of money.

Would I prefer to have been born with a silver spoon – you bet your sweet ass. But I don't long to be part of the tennis set. We are a sum of our experiences – and I can remember going to sleep hungry when I was young, or without going to the ER because I could not afford it. Not a hard life – just part of a rich life, I suppose.