Movin' on Up.

Since the flood She has been spending much of her time in Atlanta. I have been here, mostly. She commuted here for several days each week and I visited there about once a month. We did that so I could get our office here up and running and She could oversee things there.

She decided she needed to come back to New Orleans, to work more directly on our house. She also decided she couldn't spend a lot of time in the Trailer. She decided to buy a small Condominium in Kenner (or Kennya as one of our Metarie resident friends calls it).

The purchase was an interesting experience.

I guess I should confess I wasn't all that thrilled with the additional expense, additional complications and inevitable delay on getting our house completed. She managed to pull it off and we are now the proud occupants of three and one half residences (An Apartment in Atlanta, a Condo in Kennya, a Trailer in the backyard and the hulk of a House in front of the trailer).

We learned a lot about the state of New Orleans. We learned how hard it was to get insurance, for one thing. Our current home owner's company for the house wouldn't cover us for another property, although if we sold the house we could get coverage on a new house. We contacted one State Farm insurance agent about getting condo insurance, and he agreed to provide it. We went to sign up and give them a check. They suddenly asked if we had any claims in the last 3 years. We had one so they denied us insurance. If we had moved here from Iowa and had no previous claims we would have been able to get a State Farm policy n the same property. I still can't figure out what a claim for a weather related event on another piece of property has to do with anything. If anyone out there has a clue please let me know.

We were able to get insurance from AAA (yes, the American Automobile Association). They were happy to write insurance. Apparently they are one of the few companies actually writing new policies. In discussing it with our new agent he expressed his frustration with AAA's constantly changing underwriting rules which, for example, have stopped him writing policies on the West Bank (apparently they had written too many). Of course he couldn't write a policy anywhere in Orleans Parish.

It turned out her life long streak of good fortune was still with her, because just a few weeks later the electric service at our trailer shorted out.