We have indeed settled in.  So much so that Anne has already plotted a trip to Brooklyn in a couple of weeks.  Autumn has arrived and the forest is lovely.  We do chores, make weekly trips to York to visit my mother, go to church, and join neighbors and friends in social activities.  Great fun.

The new garage gives me plenty to do.  I put up a bunch of shelves and more arrived yesterday.  I am preparing a pulley system to raise the canoe above the car.  The yard too makes demand in fall.  My yard may be a woodlot, but there are still leaves to pull from the porch and the drive.  Today I brought in green tomatoes.  Anne will make green tomato BLT’s tonight.  Interesting.

There are financial chores too.  With the stock market soundly up, our savings “assets” must be rebalanced.  That is much easier than in the past.  Last week I sat at the computer, sold stock transferring the receipts to a money market account and making an annual withdrawal from an IRA directly to a cash account at another bank.  Wow!  Wonderful and scary.

As an individual not provided health insurance through an employer I have been paying close attention to the new AfCa Act.  I wondered if it could provide any bargains.  While home in September I tried to check out the offerings but none were posted.  That seemed strange because we were supposed to be able to sign up on October 1st.

This month all hell broke loose.  I had found a private Pennsylvania health care marketplace and downloaded information on various policies.  In the end I decided that the policy I had makes sense for me.  Insurance has become much more complicated than in the past.  Then there were deductibles.  Now there are deductibles, co-pays, secondary deductibles (called “co-insurance” by the industry), and  “out of pocket limits.”  This means that one’s deductible is the primary deductible plus co-pays and out of pocket costs to the limit.  In short, if one becomes seriously ill and needs the insurance, the cost much exceed the sum of the primary deductible and the out of pocket limit for your liability to end.  For some policies that can be more than $10,000.  That is a bit steep for this boy.  More troubling, the policies pay all of the cost for various procedures, many of them diagnostic, that should be out of pocket.  This will, of course, drive up the cost of such services enormously.  In any case, I decided to content myself with the policy I had.

Then last week I received two notices from my insurance company.  The cost is going up and then the policy will end.  How nice.  My calls have received squirrelly answers, but reports suggest that the AfCA Act is forcing companies to shut down the old plans and force consumers into new ones.  Consumer reports suggests waiting a few weeks before going into the new “marketplace.”  I probably have a few months, and I don’t need this hassle!  The AfCa Act was supposed to make insurance more affordable.  Instead, it is costing me my insurance. 

Anne has had to deal with this for a couple of years already through Medicare.  I laughed.  I laugh no more.

Hunting season has come to the mountain and with it many visitors.  Some day I may join the exercise, but for now I have too much to do in the garage and yard.  I also tend to find it more rewarding to watch wildlife than to try to shoot it.  Some time in the next couple of weeks the golden eagles will start coursing along our ridges.  Anne and I will spend at least one chilly morning at Waggoner’s Gap watching them.  Life is good.