My Little (Tired) Pumpkin

Allstate Really Sucks

I snapped tonight on the phone with Allstate. I was talking to a representative, explaining our situation for approximately the 300th time. Our house flooded during Hurricane Katrina, we are unable to live in it. We reported the claim on August 30th. We’ve been assigned to three different adjusters, each of whom eventually tells us that he’s not responsible for our case. Our home has yet to be inspected. The 90-day moratorium will end in another 30 days. And on, and on, and on.

And she, of course, told me that she couldn’t help me and would have to take down my information and have someone call me back. Then she asked me for my home phone number. And I completely lost it, I'm afraid. I may have ended up screaming, “We no longer have a home--that's what I've been trying to tell you for the past hour.” She was nonplussed, but it made me feel better. Maybe now they’ll assign us a fourth adjuster.

Halloween Dress Rehearsal

When looking for ways to entertain yourself during the next evacuation from New Orleans, I highly recommend trying out various hats and wigs on your six-month-old daughter to find that perfect "my first Halloween" look.

Allstate Sucks

I am exhausted. And I hate insurance adjustors. Our days are spent calling Allstate, trying to get an answer on when, exactly, our house will be inspected. The stress of not knowing whether our house will officially be declared totaled is getting to me. I keep worrying about what we’re going to do when the 90-day moratorium on mortgage payments ends and we have to start making payments again on a house that we can’t live in. So far, we've been referred to three different adjusters.

Looted and Traveling Light

K just got back from another trip to New Orleans, bringing with him a few salvaged post-Katrina possessions. It’s strange to have almost everything you own fit into two Rubbermaid storage containers. We would have had more, but someone decided to break into our utility room and help themselves to our power tools, etc. It’s bad enough to lose virtually everything without someone helping themselves to the little that’s left.

Decatur

What is there to say, really? The past few weeks have passed in a haze. We’re living in a house in Decatur that some friends of my sister were nice enough to “loan” to us. It’s an old 1970’s split level—pretty much the spitting image of the Brady Bunch house—that’s on the market as a tear-down. So now we’re living in it either until it sells and they start demolishing it or we figure out what in the hell we’re doing. Kenny wants to go back to New Orleans. The longer I spend in Atlanta, the more I dread the thought of going home.

I love that city, but this is so hard. How can we go back there and start over when almost everything is gone? I don’t want to go back, but I don’t want to stay here either. It feels like I don't belong anywhere right now.