Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Wow! Lucky we live where we do!!

I'll tell you what, Mark and I have both lived in the Baton Rouge area most of our lives at this point and no matter what happens -- hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc. etc. etc. -- those things have NEVER happened to us where we live to date . . . thank goodness!  

Even if a hurricane comes ashore nearby, they settle down enough by the time they make it up to Baton Rouge that they haven't hurt our home.  In fact, after hurricane Katrina back in 2005 they brought all the dead bodies out of New Orleans and off the rest of the coast up to a huge building just down the road from us! Obviously they found this area completely safe!  And tornadoes until now have ALWAYS shown up north of Interstate 10, which is several miles north of us.  I have no idea how the weather understands the position of an interstate, but that IS what generally happens.  But yesterday the tornado came directly through Baton Rouge in the morning while I was at work downtown (they made us all go down into the parking area -- two floors below the main floor in our office building). Pretty darned scary.  And the tornado did go past our home property as well.  One of the trees on the land next door did go down, but nothing big happened at all on our own property. Whew!  What a relief!  

Now I hope nothing happens next month while I'm up visiting in Ohio.  But I'm sure glad Mark is retired so he would be able to deal with the horses and dogs in an emergency -- unlike an animal care person who wouldn't be there at all in case of a storm.  They'd sure be going to their own home instead of ours if there were an emergency.

I made my flight schedule a couple days ago but I had forgotten that we are supposed to have to go to court about a tree that fell during hurricane Gustav clear back in 2008.  A neighbor is suing us for not clearing one off his land.  Ha! Our insurance company said they would handle trees that fell onto our property from a neighbor's land, but not vice versa. Therefore HIS insurance should have covered that fallen tree, not us! Well, they haven't let us know when the court date is -- they just mentioned a couple months back that it would be in May sometime.   Well, I guess Mark will be stuck with that if I'm out of town at the time, but that is NOT a good thing.  I do have photographs of that tree having fallen so we can prove that it's been down for all those years, and it has not happened anytime lately.  (I was told by the attorneys here at my office that after more than two years he can't actually sue about it.)

Well anyway -- it's supposed to rain a final time this morning, then it's supposed to be nice and sunny and comfortably cool for the entire next week.  Yippee!  Now maybe Boo will go back to sleep in his own bed and not be right under our feet continually any longer.  (He is terrified of storms so when he hears something coming -- well before we can hear it -- he wants to be right next to us until it ends.)

And once the weather improves for a period of time, Blaze is planning to replace the roof on the storage building out in the back pasture, then Mark can clear out all the stuff inside and make the building ready to put all his tools and mowers, etc. in there so he can actually (FINALLY!) park his truck inside the garage!  Nice!  And then the next thing for Blaze to do will be either to extend our utility room OR build a pantry off the side of our kitchen.  (We saw one of those pantries we really liked at a house we looked at Sunday and that looked like a fine idea.)

I'll tell you what about those houses we looked at Sunday, though . . . we checked out a number of houses in several new subdivisions within 5 or 6 miles of us.  The costs varied from a little over $400,000 up to $700,000!!!  Good grief!! Sure glad we bought and revised our own home well before all the new houses have gone up around us, that's for sure!

Well, time to go clean our place up!  I'll tell you what -- I really need to get rid of a BUNCH of things.  I think we're going to have a huge garage sale sometime soon.  Maybe next weekend!  We've never done that before but we sure need to!  Maybe we can get some friends to bring THEIR things over and hang out with us during the day.  That might be a lot more fun.  Hmmm.  We'll see.

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