In which I compress 6 days of the most stressful days of my life into as few sentences as possible

The flood left Science Family homeless, but some wonderful friends let us invade their home, toddler, dog, cats and all.

The floors in our condo were a complete loss and had to be torn out in order to start drying the subflooring and the walls. Damage estimates for our unit are around $10,000. Water obeys the laws of gravity, so unfortunately the two downstairs units got it even worse than we did. The damage estimates for those units were around $15,000 each.

Initially the president of the homeowners association (a real piece of work named Bob) told Science Family that the flood damage would not be covered by the condos homeowners insurance because (according to him) I was negligent for leaving the house before the washing machine had finished its run. However, in the days that followed it became obvious that the policy probably would cover the damage... but Bob and other members of the board acted deliberately to try to keep Husband and I from getting information about the policy. In fact, they did several illegal things to try to prevent a claim from being filed.

With state law in hand, we finally forced the board (under threat of legal action) to file the claim with the insurance company. We got a claim number this morning. So a week later we're just now getting the process started.

Hopefully the insurance company will send an adjuster out soon, and hopefully the insurance company will agree that this should be a covered event. My major concern at this point is that without the support of the board (who are technically the policy holders), we are going to have to be sure that they don't have the ability to influence the insurance company's decision in any way.

It's going to be a long process, I suspect. But I'm pretty damn proud of the way I handled myself and stuck up for my family when the board was trying to bully us. I'm also amazed at how many people rushed to lend a hand when we found ourselves homeless. It takes a disaster sometimes to show you who your real friends are, and apparently we have many.

I'll return to more hilarious posting once my life is a little more stable. In the meantime, may I direct you to Dr. Isis? That's a good place for a laugh.