Today, I woke up with a bad headache between the eyes. I'm hesitant to call it an actual migraine headache, but it was so bad that I was feeling nauseous. It was particularly inconvenient, since I was planning on getting our kitchen up and running today. I ended up sleeping about half of the day away, waiting for the headache to go away. At about 11am, I rose from my ill slumber and spent a few minutes checking email. The brightness of the laptop display hurt. The headache was still there, no thanks to the Tylenol I had taken.  read more »

I'm a bit concerned about the latest news regarding Washington Mutual. Our mortgage is (was?) carried by them, and while I don't think it is going to affect our monthly payments in any way, I am worried about our current homeowners insurance claim. The insurance company cut us a check, but included the mortgage company's name on it. As a result, we had to mail the check to them first. I had never heard of this policy before, but I guess it is pretty common.  read more »

Today, the insurance adjuster made it out to the house. After spending nearly an hour, he came up with 21 pages of repair estimates totaling about $12k. I have to admit that this is less money than I thought it was going to be, but his estimate doesn't include the tree removal that we already had done. What really shocked me was that he sat there in his van and printed out the estimate and the check and handed them to us.  read more »