Seriously?!?

Yeah, it's been almost a month. Sorry.

The phone thing turned out fine. The phone technician said it looked like someone accidentally pinched a cable while working on something else in the wiring box.

Anyway, I've been distracted by a plague of fleas. But more about that later.

What has me posting today is my property tax bill. My very first property tax bill. Sent, for reasons unknown, to my last address.

As an aside, I can't figure this out. I bought a house. I specified on pages and pages of documents that I was buying the house as my primary residence. So far the company that provides my homeowner's insurance, the lender that got me my mortgage, the city assessor's office, and now the treasurer's office can't quite put together MY PRIMARY RESIDENCE with the place that I live. This has me troubled. (I even had to write a letter explaining why the city had two addresses for me. I did not live in my house until I owned my house, at which time I started living in it. Is this really so unusual?) It took the junk magazines that fill my mailbox roughly 2 weeks to figure out that I had moved and chase me to my new address. If they--people who want me to give them relatively small sums of money--know where I live, why can't the people who want me to give them large sums of money figure out where I live?

At any rate, after taking its circuitous route through USPS forwarding, my property tax bill arrived. Charmingly, the first payment is just a few dollars more than all the money I have saved in the past 5 months. And 3 months after the first payment, I get to pay that much money again.

Now, I knew that I would have to pay property taxes. I even had a rough (though, as it turns out, slightly low) idea of what my property taxes might be. But I never sat down and thought, "Gosh, paying property taxes is like paying 2 extra mortgage payments a year, except without the making a dent in what I owe."

So as I made a giant pizza this evening (and I sure hope it freezes well, because it's going to take me a month to eat this thing), I would occasionally go to the table, pick up the bill and look at it again. The amount doesn't change. Neither does my incredulity.