(with thanks & apologies to T. Pratchett for the title)
I don’t remember Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor (of Green Acres) running into this maze of insurance requirements! (They jumped right into the lack of phone service or good repairmen…) I have heard that my house is “uninsurable” because of moss on the roof and dirt - they say ‘possible mold’ - on the siding. In a state that has chosen Rain as its state mascot, this is getting a little picky, I think (esp. considering the verdant, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” jungles I see on some houses -- are they all uninsured?), but now I must balance the need to be insured when I move in with the inability to fix anything until I move in. (How fast can I work while the moving van is on the road…?). I have had several variations of this conundrum, from “ineligible but we can sell you an interim policy at $200 more”, to “it’ll cost you two arms and a leg, but once you fix this, we can look at other cheaper policies” to “it’s cheap but contingent on a full 3rd party inspection once you’ve bought the policy”… and I foolishly thought I needed to live in the city to have high blood pressure! On the other hand, I just read that the Big Three insurance companies are canceling policies with abandon (as in “abandonment”) up the whole Eastern seaboard, and they haven’t taken a new policy in over a year in NJ, NY… what are they thinking?? But wait --I read that somehow those folks get insured, at another company, at a much higher rate… has anyone looked into the holding companies of all these willing “local” companies? Can you spell “scam”?? So I suppose I can be grateful (?) that they are simply gouging me out here, rather than actually holding a family member for ransom…
I did end up finding a policy that has a semi-reasonable rate (not the “door-buster special” offered as a tease by one of the Big Three, but perhaps that was never a real rate -- I’ll never know) and it’s a local company, so less feeling of some blind-except-to-the-color-green fatcat in Palm Springs dictating my rates… but I do have to join the Farm Guild… where do I buy my overalls?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Cathy - how nice to see your blog and see your head stick up from the undergrowth. Being in NJ makes it easy to believe things are going along ok when there's no empirical evidence to support that, other than the occassional email. Congratulations on your blogs vitality. In reading a couple past entries, one item stuck out in my mind. It read, "I don’t understand why it takes as much courage to sit still here, to give myself over to recording my thoughts and the best description of the day that I can muster, as it does to face down an angry patient in the psyche unit where I used to work. Why does it take courage to reject the American values of shopping, racing around, going to every event one can cram in or sit glazed-eyed with tv or internet when you can’t?" As a SHambhala meditation practitioner of some years now, I can emphatically tell you that sitting still IS the most difficult thing in the world to do, and the most fundamentally important. We allow the fear of truly seeing the world for what it is, objectively and without judgement, to prevent us from experiencing real joy and compassion. Your blog, perhaps, offers the possibility of finding that place and communicating it outward at the same time as you experience it inwardly. With deep respect and admiration, Paul.
Post a Comment