I was just about to go to bed when I realized that I mentioned something the other day that I haven’t yet elaborated on. (…the other day upon which I have not yet elaborated. Bite me.) Since I know you hang on my every syllable, you’ve all just been panting to know why an insurance adjuster came to my house last week, haven’t you. HAVEN’T YOU?
Well it’s like this: Despite being freaked right out that Hurricane Wilma was going to come right through my front door and sit down in the living room, as it turned out all we had here was a tropical storm. Overall it wasn’t too bad.
Okay, I’m lying. I was still scared shitless. But I’m like that. You know, jittery. Slightly high-strung. A little hyper about bad weather. Yeah. I’m like that. So while what had to have been 542 MPH winds howled outside all night, I cowered under a blanket in bed and waited for the ceiling to drop on me. All in all, it was great fun.
When we surveyed everything the next morning all we’d lost were a couple pieces of soffit and a few dead branches off some trees. I was relieved to discover we’d come through unscathed. Or so I thought.
That night J and I settled on the couch to watch a movie (The Perfect Storm, if I remember correctly). J put his arm around me so I leaned my head back on his arm and gazed up at the ceiling thinking impure thoughts about what to make for dinner the next night. I blinked a few times, not quite believing what I was seeing. We have sloping ceilings in the living room and part of it is about 25 feet high. A series of windows lines one section of this wall in what can best be described as a dormer thingy (all those years of watching This Old House has taught me words like "thingy."). All along this wall, in between the windows, were cracks. Not only that but the wall appears to have bowed in as if buffeted by oh, say, howling 542 MPH winds for many hours. It was really weird.
I called the insurance company the next day, filed a claim and waited, um, six weeks for an adjuster to call me back. Oh, don’t think I sat on my laurels that whole time (I’ve found that my laurels tend to fall asleep if I sit on them too long). Of course I called them a zillion times but never got anywhere. While I understand that hundreds of people had probably filed claims and I was likely to have to wait weeks for an adjuster to visit, I wanted to at least have the appointment made, you know?
The guy finally gets back to me and says he wants to come over the day after Thanksgiving. What is this guy? British? The Friday after Thanksgiving is still a holiday since people can’t be expected to be upright while overloaded on L-Tryptophan. But I agreed to let him come over anyway.
We settled on 9:00 a.m. He showed up at 7:45 with his kids in tow. I’d been out of bed about seven minutes and was staggering towards the coffee pot when I was horrified to see an SUV pull into the driveway. Out steps this guy who must have been 6’4 and two young girls around 7 and 9. At first I assumed hallucinogens had been slipped into the previous nights pumpkin pie for this just couldn’t be right.
Alas, it was right. He really was there and, unfortunately, not a mirage. He measured and photographed, noted and charted, questioned and tallied for about a half an hour (while my boys re-enacted the main fight scene between Anikin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi with incredible precision. The girls were not impressed.)
After all the time he spent, I expected the adjuster to be able to give me a full accounting of what happened, how it happened, what kind of interior damage there was likely to be and what the lot number on the cans of paint would be during repairs. Instead all he could tell us was that he couldn’t tell us anything. The damage assessment needs to be turned over to a structural engineer for further review before anyone can determine if the repairs will be cosmetic or will involve ripping down 1/3 of my house and reinforcing it with steel beams or some such thing.
Hey, I don’t blame the guy at all. He was nice and everything. It just frustrates me that now it’s going to be several more weeks until this thing moves any further and, though patience is my middle name :::snort::: I’d really like to have someone out soon. It’s not that I worry there’s any kind of imminent danger that the roof will cave in, it’s just that I’ve been dying to get a structural engineer to my house for almost a year so I can ask him a question about adding an additional doorway leading out of the house. But, hey, if it takes cowering under blankets while Wilma does her thing to get an engineer to come over, that’s cool.
I can’t imagine what will happen if it turns out to be structural damage. Fixing it would likely involve a total reconstruction of that section of the house to avoid having the same thing happen again. Oh, and they’d have to pull off part of the roof, of course. You know. The roof that was just replaced four months ago. And we know how well remodeling projects tend to go around here, don’t we? Well, I’ll keep a stiff upper lip because at least I’ll know I’ll never be at a loss for something to blog about.
Now I must take my leave for the evening. The day started with finding $20 in an old purse I haven’t used for months and ended with sirloin tips and bleu cheese slaw from Outback Steakhouse (yeah, I know. Outback isn’t exactly fine Kobe beef but, hey, it
worked for me). There were ten or so hours of coolness and good times in between those two events but I’ll have to tell you tomorrow because I have an appointment to slip into a coma in five minutes.
‘Night, y’all.
Posted by Lisa Hoover 
