Chocolate teapot; glass hammer, handbrake on a canoe… all phrases I use to describe government departments, doesn’t matter what side of the Atlantic you’re on, they are always useless. This time comes from the Supplemental Security Income system, initially we were awarded $674 to help with Conner’s therapies for his autism, recently that amount dropped to $348 because they hadn’t been taking our child support into account until March 2011, five months after we initially submitted the child support information. Now we have to pay back nearly $800; so we will be down to about $280 per month because they will be taking almost $70 per month out of that SSI income. It really is a joke, it’s not our fault they overpaid us; we provided them with all the information they requested, it’s hardly our fault that their inept department takes five months to process that information. I recently started to look more intensively for work; the SSI payments are too erratic, we need a steady income to make plans for the future. The problem is that because Conner needs three to four therapy sessions per week and if both Erin and I are working full time, there won’t be time to take Conner to his appointments. Speaking of Conner’s therapy appointments; we should be able to start those again tomorrow as we have been granted assistance so the session cost has dropped from $95 per session which is almost impossible to manage for us to $19 per session; that’s five sessions for the price of one session. But we still have a debt to Heartspring now because for the past two months we thought our medical insurance was covering the cost; where in reality the insurance was covering 0% of the cost of the therapies.
I got the new Iron Maiden album “Final Frontier” yesterday and I have to say that I am massively disappointed. It took me a while to warm to the last album “A Matter of Life and Death” but it’s a reasonably good album after a few listens if different from previous Maiden outings; nowhere near what I have come to expect from Maiden though. This new album is pretty poor with the exception of the final track “When The Wild Wind Blows” which is one of Maiden’s trademark epic songs, redeemed the album a little, but still nowhere near the great epics of the past, I fear that if Maiden keep on churning out albums like this; I can see their normally loyal fan base stop buying their albums, by Maiden standards this album really isn’t good enough after 30 years of top tunes.