*rapunzell

I have decided that 2008 is cursed. Almost everyone I know has had weird crap happen this year. Car wrecks, illnesses, pet illnesses, and all kinds of other unexpected bullshit, some worse than others, here's ours...

We finally got everything together and bought a house last August. Nothing crazy, not a McMansion (they have NO yard), just a cozy 3 bedroom in a decent older neighborhood. That made Halloween, 2 birthdays and the rest of the end of year holidays insanely busy with settling in, organizing, decorating (both generically and for the holidays) plus all the normal chaos that sets in that time of year.

February we got a dog (one of many things on our "wait until we have a house with a yard" list). Moose is an adorable rescued American Bulldog mix (best we can tell). He was thrown out of a car in a 7-eleven parking lot at 4 months old with cigarette burns on his paws. Our assumption is that someone was trying to make a fighter out of him, realized it wasn't in his temperament and threw him away. Some people deserve to be shot.

Things started to finally get settled down into a routine, even though work was still crazy busy and I was pulling lots of overtime that I don't get paid for because I'm salary. Then, the night of April 9th/10th I was at work pulling an all-nighter on some crazy project that was due and at 3:30AM I got a phone call from my husband that the 35 foot cottonwood in our backyard was now in our dining room. And our kitchen. And it took out the chimney on the way by, the top several feet of which (and a large chunk of roof) were in the middle of our living room. All people and pets were accounted for an uninjured. Remarkably, since I'd been home to change clothes and see if my VPN connection was working about two hours before and my cat was asleep in the middle of the coffee table that afterward was buried under the chimney top. My husband found her cowering behind the litterbox at the intact end of the kitchen with her eyes looking like saucers. When he called, it was still raining torrentially and tornado sirens were going off so by the time I waited for the storms to finish rolling through and left my office it was dawn when I got home.

Once we had time to take stock, losses include my antique coffee table, the dining set our roommate refinished by hand, the big TV and the PS2 in the living room, my husband's cell phone, and a bunch of random stuff like every consumable in the kitchen that had been opened (flying insulation) or required refrigeration (no power) and towels. A note for anyone else finding themselves in a similar situation: using a closet full of towels to soak up a monsoon in your living room does nothing except ruin the towels. As for the house itself: new roof and trusses for that whole end of the house (kitchen, dining, living, roommate's office, and probably garage), that same area all interior walls stripped down to studs and replaced, floors replaced in that area minus roommate's office and garage plus our bedroom and the kid's room. Complete gutting and rebuild/remodel or the kitchen, replacing the whole chimney/fireplace in the living room and the fence outside (which the tree also landed on), and some other miscellaneous stuff.

Yes, we have insurance. Yes, everything is covered, including "loss of use" which means that while I still have to pay the mortgage, insurance pays for the apartment we're in until it's fixed, the storage building the rest of our shit is in, and any other expense that wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened, like a hotel room until we found an apartment. Another note to anyone interested: 3 adults, an 11 year-old, 2 cats, and a 6-month-old 50lb puppy in a hotel room is not recommended for any length of time, and especially not for a week. A friend of a friend of my husband happened to be the manager of some apartments and we moved there temporarily

It was right around then that my husband's grandfather who had been previously diagnosed with Lou Gherig's and kidney cancer took a drastic turn for the worse and passed away...on my husband's birthday.

Had the apartments we were in not been exceptionally ghetto-tastic, we would probably still be there. However, while I don't give a fuck what anyone else decides to put in their body, I do have a problem with meth-head downstairs neighbors who put furniture together in the middle of the night, have knock-down drag-out screaming fights at 2AM on a Thursday and allow their teenage dropout son to sit outside on OUR stairs and toke up all day, every day. Go the fuck inside and conduct your illegal activities there like a functioning member of society. Our 11 year-old doesn't need your worthless example. It took about a month for the locator to find an apartment that would accept more than 2 pets, allow pets over 50 lbs, and do short term leases, but they finally found one and we moved again.

Looking for a contractor was fun. A couple notes for contractors here:
1) When you show up to give an estimate and are talking to someone who is there packing - even if they are not the person who asked you for the estimate - "Do you even live here?" is never an acceptable question.
2) When someone lets you in to give an estimate and tells you that if you need into a certain room to let them know so they can move their dog who is locked up in that room, "I'll kick that dog's ass" is not an acceptable response.
3) If you've wasted 20 minutes of a woman's time pretending to make idle conversation while quite obviously waiting for the only other man present to get off the phone, when he walks up and you ask him if he's the owner and the woman says "No, I'm the owner," that is a warning shot. It is your one and only chance to backtrack and address her as your equal and as a capable human being. Glancing at her, blinking, and then turning away to discuss the job with the guy who you've just learned is NOT the owner is not an acceptable response.
4) When someone points out to you that laminate flooring has obviously warped due to water damage, don't dismiss them by saying it's just separated glue. Even if it they are mistaken and it is separated glue (not true in our case) the proper response is "We'll talk to the insurance company and see if they will cover replacement," because regardless of the necessity, if insurance will cover it, that's more money in your pocket, and if they won't cover it, that makes them the bad guy, not you.

Any of the above, separately or in combination will prevent you from being hired by the people you are talking to or, most likely, by anyone they know. We finally found a decent contractor a month or so ago, and they finally got all the permits for construction approved yesterday after waiting weeks for the city to get their shit together. We also received a code violation notice from the city last week that we needed to remove the "debris" from our yard and mow. Debris = a 35 ft cottonwood chopped into manageable sections and detached chunks of our roof, eaves, etc. Had they gotten us our permits in a resonable amount of time to begin with we would have the construction dumpsters and the debris wouldn't be there, but try explaining that to a bureaucrat.

All in all we've come out pretty well, the majority of our belongings are fine (if packed away), and the majority of the construction on the house is actually a more drastic version of the remodeling that we had planned for the house when we bought it. If everything moved according to schedule (yeah, right) we should be back in the house just in time for Halloween again.

Rapunzell
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My stock account: Last updated: 03/20/08
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