Almost Furloughed

Today was several things:

1. My last actual real live day as part of the NYC office. While I've been on leave for a bit, today was the last day of that annual leave. Tomorrow begins the administrative leave I'm entitled to as I'm moving from one office in the agency to another. Thursday is technically my day off, and then Friday is another admin day. Monday will be the first official day in my new office in DC.
2. The opening day for the healthcare insurance marketplace enrollments under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). http://www.healthcare.gov
3. The first day of the government shutdown due to an impasse over whether to fund Obamacare (technically moot--see above).
4. The first day of the fiscal year 2014.

Unlike nearly 800,000 federal employees and contractors, I am not furloughed through this shutdown. Unlike most of the government, my agency makes its own money and will continue operations unless something truly stupid happens. When it comes down to it, America really is a nation of immigrants and we keep the light burning for you, even if the Statue of Liberty is closed.

But that doesn't mean a whole lot, because the main reason for going to work--getting paid--might not happen until the shutdown is over. You see, my agency was rolled into the Department of Homeland Security when it was created in 2003. When that agency was born, the president and administration at the time pitched it with some very narrow costs. Tax cuts and tax rebates and Iraq and Afghanistan and Enron and Worldcom and Tyco all just happened and the government wasn't terribly flush with cash, so the new DHS was put together out of spare parts. One of the parts that was used was the otherwise efficient payroll service instituted by the Department of Agriculture. While the money that pays me comes from the immigration service, it is ultimately handed to me by Dept. of Ag. And DOA is shut down, so I have to wait until they turn the lights back on to get my paychecks. Fucking bastards.

A few other things are going on this week:

1. We're moving! That entails paying double rent for about three weeks, renting a truck, buying boxes and all sorts of related costs. I pretty much spent our funny money on this, so if we don't get paychecks soon, it's going to hurt.
2. Our hospital started sending us medical bills we didn't know we had. When we checked in at the hospital where Wolf was born, I handed the clerk all of my insurance cards and claimed that I wasn't sure which one was the right one because I was a little freaked out at the time. The clerk put our vision care card in as the primary one. Once they finally figured out it was wrong (10 weeks later), they sent us the stuff they'd meant to send us all the time, along with warnings that it is overdue!
3. Carly managed to break her foot! It's just a hairline fracture on one of those long bones in her foot, earned through poor shoe choices and too much walking, exacerbated by a small loss of bone mass post-childbirth (which is normal for breastfeeding mums, and reverses itself after she's done with all that). She'll use this as an excuse to not help loading and unloading the moving truck, I bet.
4. Wolf has grown out of nearly all of the clothes we have for him, sparking an occasional trip to Babies R Us to buy the next size of shirts and onesies that he'll need. Entertainingly, his diapers are still size 1. He also can no longer sleep in the cool napper thing we've had him in, so it's off to crib land as soon as we move!
5. Oh shit, I need to order his crib.
6. It is Carly's last week of gainful employment until she gets another job. This is the second time she will have quit a perfectly good job to follow me on my career path. The good news is that this time, she really does have things lined up for work. They are, however, conditioned on the shutdown ending. So we'll see how that turns out.

Where was I? Yes, lots of things draining on our household this month. Back to packing.