Spent today, Saturday, goofing off, watching other people play Warhammer Fantasy Battle (a colorful tabletop game involving dozens of painted plastic and lead miniatures that eats time and cash like they're going out of fashion).
On the drive home I got caught behind a cop car which was busting chops by driving slower and slower as it proceeded up a virtually empty Deer Park Avenue, obviously trying to provoke someone into passing so they could be stopped and ticketed for some petty thing, so at the first opportunity I took a right and drove the back way back to Chateau Stevie. Thus it was that I was privileged to see a panel of my 15 year-old cedar fence lying face down on the sidewalk.
I parked the fabulous Steviemobile1 and ran inside and told Mrs Stevie.
"Well, I was trying to call you but you weren't answering your phone. The wind went crazy about half an hour ago and blew the fence down" she sniffed. "It also pulled the siding off the side of the garage'"
"WHAT?" I screamed. "All of it?"
"Damn near."
I ran outside took one look at the scene, clutched my head and moaned. The siding had peeled off the side of the house from the roof line to about seven feet from the ground and had dumped itself as a collection of twisted metal all over the yard. Then the insulating panels, made of expanded polystyrene, had blown off, revealing the tatty asbestos shingles that the house was equipped with by the original builder2.
I plan on running the costs of this disaster through the house insurance because those bastards canceled my policy abruptly after twenty years of premiums. Not because of anything I had done, but because some actuarial gimp had calculated that Long Island was now a hurricane-prone area3 and recomputed the cost/risk ratio.
This unannounced move effed up my mortgage payments for the first time since I owned the house and took a while to sort out because it triggered default notices on my account.
Oh yeah. These gits are charging me for hurricanes that haven't happened, so they can bloody well pony up for the siding-wrecking gale that did. But the costs may be high on account of those Azathoth-damned shingles, which are now classed as a hazardous material and will cost much to get rid of.
The wind, which has been gusting strongly for the last 24 hours has now died down.
Its work is done.
- now suffering a suspected hole in the exhaust after dinging it up in snowbanks around Boxing Day↑
- A Mr Gak Eisenberg, who knapped flint arrowheads and hunted Mammoth and Giant Sloth in his spare time↑
- because the climatologists say we are "overdue" for a big hurricane - I wonder if these people are solidly behind the anthropomorphic cause of Global Warming since the same climatologists are saying so↑
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