Well, here’s ONE stressful thing that’s over

A few months ago, we got a notice that the company with which we have our homeowners insurance was randomly dropping about 50% of the homes it has in Florida. Something about hurricanes, which apparently destroy homes, and insurance companies don’t like to pay for? Hello, isn’t that why we have insurance? Fuckity fuckers. Here’s my opinion: if we are *required* to have insurance, it shouldn’t be so GD hard to get.

But whatever; our insurance agent is a peach, and he called us to say that his daughter is taking over the reins of the homeowner line and will find us new victims, er, a new company. We have until December 10th, which is the very last day that we have insurance – but not to worry! This will be taken care of by the beginning of November at the latest!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Just before Thanksgiving, she finally found someone who would take us on, and since our house hasn’t been inspected in this century, we got a home inspection. But let me see… we have dogs; we have a dog that might be a pit breed; we have a roof more than 20 years old; we have a furnace that’s more than 50 years old but it’s not hooked up to anything as the tank has long since been disposed of; we have two kilns that regularly fire to more than 1800 degrees sitting on the back porch; we have some renovations that have never been finished; we have a multitude of pine trees that could jump on top of the house and crush it in the slightest breeze; we allegedly live within 150 feet of a 100-year flood plane; the original electrical wiring in our home was apparently chiseled out of bedrock; and we run a business out of our home. WE WERE TOTALLY NOT WORRIED AT ALL THAT WE WOULD BE DENIED. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Would you believe we got a call within days saying we’d been approved? She would send us the paperwork. Everything was fine.

Except when the paperwork got here it said that if we signed this, we were stating that we didn’t run a business out of our home, and something that I don’t remember now (stress is a great memory blocker) but I think it was about leaving the spaces blank that described our dogs, as there are something like 17 breeds of dogs that insurance companies in Florida won’t approve. FUCK YOU, MICHAEL VICK!

So – and honestly even though this was just a couple of weeks ago, my memory is already fuzzy on this, because Sweet Zombie Jesus, how much can one person take?! – Tim was going to take it down to whats-her-name and talk to her, specifically about the business part. It is now, I think, the first week of December.

Meanwhile, we got a letter from our Mortgage Company stating that it had recently come to their attention that our house was uninsured, which meant that disturbingly non-humorous men wearing black were going to come around and stand threateningly on our porch (but not on a part of the porch too close to any trees, or they might get crushed, and without insurance they wouldn’t be able to sue us) and sort of … I don’t know, look at us over the tops of their glasses until we got insurance? There was a veiled threat in their letter, but no actual information of what might happen to us without insurance. Maybe they’d come and flood the house, out of spite?

Oh, and attached to the same letter was some documentation stating that our homeowner’s insurance was not approved because we heat the house with electric space heaters, which apparently may burst into flame and dance around the house willy-nilly, setting things on fire. And if our house did burn down, apparently according to the inspector the home was only worth $10,000 – not the $100,000 we’d gotten it appraised at when we refinanced a few years ago. Wow, a $90,000 drop? I’m surprised there’s not more random gunfire in our ‘hood. And homeless drug addicts sleeping under my car.

Needless to say I was already planning on knitting us a tent that we could live in out on the streets, and Tim was as close to punching a baby in the face as I’ve ever seen him.

A few WTF emails later, between Tim and the Insurance Agent’s Daughter (which sounds like a Shakespeare play… sort of like “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”) and she got everything straightened out, and last week we got a letter stating that our house is indeed worth $100,000 and it is insured so if it burns down or blows away that we will be reimbursed, and also our mortgage company likes us again and we can sit at their table for lunch.

And I have quite a few more grey hairs, but you can’t see them because I’ve bleached them all blonde.