My *%@&!# House Burned Down!

Watch Out For Locusts (aka The Last Blog Post)

I had originally planned an entirely different title and an entirely different timeframe for posting this, the last missive of the “My *%@&!# House Burned Down” blog. However, things don’t always turn out the way you plan which, now that I know what I know about one’s house burning down, also would have been a good title for the blog.

But anyway, I had planned to write one last post when we finally moved home which, technically, was Dec. 2 (about a week after Alice was able to move back home). We had been languishing in the previously mentioned house in the Sierras – the only rent-free abode we could find, details of which you can read about in the previous post -- for two months when Glenn the contractor finally called and told me that the building inspector had just signed the occupancy permit. The following day, Jon and I repeated our Mr. and Mrs. Joad routine (although this time we were headed in the right direction – west), piling clothes, kitchenware, furniture and even a queen-size bed into the back of a pickup truck and barreling down Highway 120 toward Menlo Park. All we needed was a bloodhound baying from the open bed of the truck to complete the scene.

We arrived at the house, which was empty except for a bed, on Friday night. We set up two folding chairs and a camping table in the dining room since the rest of the furniture wasn’t scheduled to arrive until Monday. We were finally home! Glenn gave us the keys and told us to keep testing every aspect of the house – lights, appliances, etc. – for a few weeks and to keep a list of whatever might not be working properly so he could make any necessary adjustments. Sunday evening, we decided to test the fabulous soaking tub in the master bathroom. We poured some wine, jumped in and gazed at the starry night through the massive skylights. We talked about how beautiful the house was, how even more fabulous it would look the next day when the furniture arrived, and how great it would be to celebrate the holidays at home for the first time in more than two years.

Five minutes later, the sewer line backed up and blew a massive amount of raw sewage out of the downstairs toilet. Gallons of wastewater poured out of the bathroom and into the first level of the house, saturating the hardwood floor.  It was exactly as gross as you are imagining. I won’t go into all the details of this episode other than to say that it wasn't Glenn's fault, and that after installing massive drying machines that sounded like the engines of a Boeing 747 and running them for 10 days nonstop (I took to wearing Bose noise reduction headphones day and night, taking them off only to bathe), Glenn decided the floors couldn’t be saved and had to be ripped out and replaced.  Jon and I packed our bags, moved out of the house again, and were not able to move back in until Jan. 5. 

The only other thing I’ll say about this episode is that while the sewage water was pouring across the main floor of the house, I called Alice since Jon and I had exactly three bath towels at our disposal as we desperately tried to mop up the mess. I had been waiting until I was home again to buy some nice, new bath towels and had spent the previous 2.5 years mooching this kind of stuff from my landlord. “Alice, the sewer backed up into the house and we don’t have anything to soak up the water!” I yelled into the phone. “Do you have any towels we can use?”

“I think I have maybe three,” she said. “I was waiting until I was finally back home to buy some nice, new bath towels.” The next day, when she came over to survey the damage, she looked at me and said, “Well, first there was fire, now there’s flood. We’d better watch out for locusts next. You want to come over and drink some wine with me?”

Oh, and the only other thing I’ll say about all this is that you can imagine how excited my insurance company was when I called them and said I had another claim to file.

So I am finally home – hopefully for realsies this time. There was no poetic ending to the “my house burned down and I lost everything” story since I can’t recall any poem I’ve ever read that included the word “sewage” or even a word that rhymed with it. Much more important though, is the fact that I like being in this house. It doesn’t quite feel like home yet, but I can tell that it will sometime soon.

Now that I finally am home, I think it’s time to wrap up the blog even though I don’t think you can ever claim an event like this one to be “wrapped up.” I think the best you can do is figure out a way to let it reside in its proper place within the broader storyline of your life. I’m confident at this point I’ll be able to do that and frankly that’s a big enough accomplishment for me.

One last thing I want to do before signing off is to share some pictures of the new house, since everyone has been getting on my case for being so slow to do that. What I’ve also done is also include some of the photos I took the day after the fire so you can also see the before and after. I’m not doing it for shock value. I just think the pictures show how far things have come – and how far I’ve come -- since July 2009, which of course would have been impossible without the kindness, generosity, patience and support of everyone who has been reading this blog.

With love and thanks, Chris

And the Winner is...Nobody

In my last post I let you all know that due to a confluence of crappy events we were being forced to move out of the house I had rented for 27 months and head to parts unknown for an undetermined amount of time until the new house was finished, because the new house WASN’T FINISHED YET. The instigators of these crappy events were my insurance company and some city bureaucrats who, because of their collective indifference and incompetence, were also forcing me to somehow find $50,000 in order to keep construction going. (You can read the gory details in last month’s post.)

I didn’t try to make total light of the situation since, well, look under your sofa cushions right now and see if you find $50,000 just lying there. Like me, you probably only found a few cashews and a leaking pen. And, like me, you accurately surmised that no city bureaucracy would take cashews as payment when what it really wanted was $50,000 cash.

But if I failed to find the humor in all of that, I at least tried to make it interesting for all involved. And so I offered a bottle of wine to anyone who could accurately guess the date we would, finally, move into the new house THAT WASN’T FINISHED YET. I also offered a bottle of vintage champagne for anyone who could accurately guess when the insurance company would reimburse me the $50,000 that I ultimately scrounged from various sources.

I want to thank everyone who participated. However I must regretfully inform you that nobody accurately guessed the completion date. There were a few adorably sunny personalities who chose dates in mid-October. You guys are the cutest things ever! Yet so, so wrong! But most of you chose dates clustered in the early-ish to middling November range. I interpreted this as reflective of the fact that you are, for the most part, a bunch of cheerful pessimists/hopeful cynics just like me, which is probably one of the reasons we are friends. Prepare for the worst, hope for something a scootch less terrible than that, then pour a glass of good wine and see what the hell actually happens, we always say.

And yet. Even the most dour among you chose November 12th, which I initially interpreted as a tad unsupportive, but even you were too bubbly about the situation. For as I write this we are aiming for November 18^th-ish. Or thereabouts. Perhaps a few days sooner but more likely a few days later. (Nobody even attempted to guess when the insurance company would reimburse me, proving again what a very smart bunch of people you are.)

Which leads to the question many of you have been asking: Where the hell are you two? We left the Bay Area on October 8th like a present-day, Silicon Valley version of the Joad family: SUV piled to the roof with clothes, bedding, bags of food and other flotsam of everyday life. Except, unlike the Joads, we were heading east and we stopped at Peet’s for coffee on the way out

Since then, we’ve mostly been living in a vacation house in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It is a spacious abode with beautiful views. The area is peaceful, the autumn weather is lovely and deer and wild bunny rabbits bound across the property day and night. We barbecue, we hike. We make the scandalously short drive to Yosemite for afternoons of photography. It’s kind of perfect, except when it’s a total pain in the ass. We don’t know any of the neighbors, it is a culture-free zone as far as I can tell, and while for the most part I’ve been able to work from the vacation house, at least once a week I need to make the 130-mile drive back to the Bay Area for client meetings or to Menlo Park to meet with Glenn the contractor. One night last week I was driving back to the hills from San Francisco. I was in the middle of a work crisis, tangled in hideous 580 commute traffic, illegally emailing while driving and pulling over approximately every fifth exit to make a call or take some notes. Somewhere in the city of Tracy, one of California’s foreclosure epicenters, I missed the turn to get back on the freeway and ended up driving a few miles on a surface road lined on both sides with dozens of identically bland tract homes, all of them dark since all were unoccupied. I was a little spooked and really tired and for the trillionth time in the past 27 months I thought, “I just want to be home.”

During my commando visits to the Bay Area I have been crashing at the home of some friends in Los Altos. They have a big house, so one more person hanging out there doesn’t bother them. They also have three kids, so one more person opening the refrigerator and standing there zombie-like for 15 minutes pondering what to eat does not bother them either. The kids themselves are completely unfazed by my presence. We all shamble downstairs in the morning sporting pajamas and bed hair, and we often work elbow-to-elbow at the dining room table at night, them doing their homework, me doing email or some other worky thing. Jon sometimes flees the vacation house when I’m gone. Most recently he spent several days with a buddy of his who also hails from Iowa and who owns some acreage near Mt. Shasta. I have no idea what they did up there, though Jon returned having showered once and shaved not at all, clear signs that good, grimy fun was had by the menfolk that week. What happens at Shasta stays at Shasta.

So we are here, and then there, wherever “there” may be as necessitated by work, the need to break the isolation or the opportunity to beg Glenn to please finish this #$@%ing house. Which is looking great (pictures below), if only it would be done already. I’ll let you know what day we actually get to move in. And thanks for playing.

 

Let's Play the Transient Game! Pick the Date, Win a Prize

I can tell by the emails I’ve been getting that many people are nearly as impatient to see this house completed as I am. (“WHEN will the #%$!* house be ready?” is typical of the missives I’ve received of late.) If you’ve been following this blog, you already know that 1) there is never an easy answer to what would appear to be a very easy question and 2) no progress can been achieved in this situation without attendant nonsense, chaos and stupidity. Ready for the September version? Yes? OK, here we go. There are a lot of moving parts that collide in a spectacular *#^@%-up mess toward the end. There’s also a lot of math involved. So get out your pencils so you can draw a diagram and run the numbers simultaneously, just like I had to do.

The first item on the agenda is that the estimated completion date slipped from early September to “sometime in October.” A small part of the blame goes to Glenn the contractor, but he and I have already had a verbal slap-fight about it and then made up, so I won’t go into the details. The primary culprit – shockeroo -- is the city.

Let’s see if I can explain this issue with the city without causing some blood vessels in my brain to burst. If you recall, the city required me to install fire sprinklers in my house. This cost about $25,000 and while it was covered by insurance, I couldn’t be reimbursed until that part of the construction was done. (Start drawing diagram and also write down “$25,000.”) In order for the sprinklers to actually function in accordance with current building codes, the city required that a larger water line be installed beneath the street to my house. Glenn started working with the city water department on this almost three months ago (add to diagram) and up until two weeks the city had made no discernible progress EXCEPT to submit a bill for yet another $25,000 to install the water line at some point. (Write $25,000 + $25,000 and compute subtotal.) I paid that bill to keep things moving but as with the first $25,000, I cannot get reimbursed until the work is done, paperwork submitted to insurance company, tense negotiations initiated, etc., etc., blah, blah.

You may also recall that the house must be 100% complete before the city will issue a certificate of occupancy. This work includes the new water line. So the city won’t issue a certificate of occupancy if its own work isn’t finished. And not only is that work not finished, it hasn’t even started. (Please continue drawing your diagram.)

You may also recall that for the last six months the insurance company has been giving me a very hard time about paying my rent, usually waiting until mere hours before I would have to give notice on the rental house before providing funds for another 30 days (continue working on diagram). They stopped paying as of September 1st and so I paid this month’s rent myself, hoping I would get reimbursed but again getting stonewalled by the insurance company. You will be shocked beyond your wildest dreams to learn the market rental rate for a furnished house in my neighborhood. It is – wait for it -- $6,000 per month. My neighbors and I have talked about this ad nauseum because none of us ever suspected anyone would pay even half that amount to live here and if someone had only told us we could charge $6,000 a month we would have fled the neighborhood immediately and become cash-rich landlords as opposed to mortgage-poor locals. So here’s the irony: I can afford to own a house in my neighborhood but I can’t afford to rent a house in my neighborhood (add $6,000), so Jon and I are moving out by October 9th.

Am I tapped out financially? Yes. (Do the math.) Will construction of the house be finished by October 9? I seriously doubt it. Do we know when it will be finished? No. Do we have a place to live? Not really. Do we know if the water line will be installed this month as the city’s subcontractor promised? No.

Do I care? You know what, I really don’t at this point. After living in a stranger’s house for more than two years and spending the last six months conducting a low-level freak-out over the fact that I might get displaced before my house was ready, now that my worst fear has actually been realized I’m too exhausted to worry about it too much. There’s that line in the Bruce Springsteen song that goes, “You can get used to anything, pretty soon it just becomes your life.” I don't universally agree with that notion, but in this case it is spot on. We are packing right now – the rental house is overflowing with bubble wrap, packing tape and boxes that we have pilfered from various local merchants -- and I’ve arranged to store our relatively few possessions with friends (thanks everyone!). We also have some potential back-up locales in which to crash for however many weeks we need (thanks again everyone!). So let's load up the SUV and  head on out to wherever. We’ll figure it out as we go.

What you also need to know is that while all this bull**** is going on, my new house is looking fantabulously great. I just love it. Cabinets and tile are being installed and yesterday they secured the floating staircase leading to the second floor. The floors (walnut!) and stone surfaces will be coming soon. It’s an airy, light-filled, modern thing. The colors are muted (blues, grays, creams and browns) and then there are those white walls I love so much. The views are great and a seriously badass Wolf range is en route as I write this. Maybe not the thing for you but man, is it the thing for me. It’s very weird to be preparing for yet another transient phase while watching the new house come together, but like I said, I am too wrung out at this point to get upset. It also doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun with it.

So here’s the deal. (Don’t put those pencils away yet.) You have the facts above about the current state of affairs. I’m also providing some pictures below that show you the state of the house as of yesterday. If you can correctly guess the actual date we get to move into the new house you will win a really good bottle of wine. If you can guess the month and year I get reimbursed the amount I’ve discussed in this post (check your addition one more time) you’ll win a bottle of vintage champagne. It is the more expensive prize because at that point I will actually have some money. Here are some additional facts to help you:

1. The subcontractors work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday without fail, but they do not work overtime because after all insurance doesn’t cover that.
2. Installation of the new water line was supposed to start this week but that hasn’t happened. Remember, this is the city that took four months to complete what should have been a four-week process to approve the building plans.
3. All of the materials needed to finish the house have arrived. There won’t be any delays because, say, a faucet is on back order.
4. Assume I will keep paying all the bills to keep things moving.
5. Don’t forget: Even if construction is completed on a certain date, the new water line has to be installed by the city or the city won’t issue a certificate of occupancy. Bad city!

Good luck! You can forward your submissions to the comments section of the blog or to my email address.

Wow, it’s been two years and if I have to write a “Wow it’s been three years” post I will seriously lose it

Yes indeed, it’s been a bit more than two years since the fire. To tell the truth, that July 16 was the two-year anniversary totally escaped me. We were up in Sonoma that day with my friend Geoff, snarfing down most excellent cheeses and quaffing wine at The Girl and The Fig restaurant.

But it’s hard to completely escape the passage of time, particularly after I received an email from my landlord this morning asking, “Are you going to be out of my house by Labor Day like you said?”

The answer to that question would be, um, “no, ” though the contractor has committed to a completion date in 8-10 weeks. “It’s like when I was pregnant,” says Alice. “Those last two months you just want that baby out.”

Truer words were never spoken. The interiors of our homes are being painted over the next couple of weeks, and then it’s on to cabinets, tile, etc.  As a lot of you know, when it comes to brightly colored walls, I’m a total hater, so I’m currently evaluating four shades of white. This has earned me a ton of love from the painters, who, after telling me their harrowing story of one client who used 122 different paint colors in her house, can hardly believe their luck that they’ll get to slap just one version of white paint all over my house and be done with it.

Which is a tenuous segue into the topic of what, exactly I’ve learned during the freak show that has been these past two years.

Big Lesson #1: I yam what I yam

I guess the first lesson isn’t so much a lesson as confirmation of what I suspected when this whole situation began: that even with all the turmoil, stress, change and drama/trauma, much about me would not change. As I think I wrote almost two years ago, I’m a firm believer that a lot of what we are is immutable. We can adjust and improve on the margins, but to a large degree, we just are what we are. And I think I have proved my hypothesis over the past two years since I’m still doing a lot of the same stupid shit I always did. The paint is a good example. I’m sure there are lovely shades of gray or whatever that would look even better and cost less than the four shades of white I spent approximately five minutes choosing. But you know what? I don’t care.  You’d think after everything that’s happened I’d pay maniacal attention to every last detail of this new house. But no. I am lazy in these matters and that’s just the way it is.  I am quite sure I spent more time pondering what wine to have with dinner last night than I did about the placement of all the sconces in the house (for the record: a nicely aged Rioja)

 
  Big Lesson #2: Sometimes the cosmos will don their steel-toed boots and give you one seriously swift kick in the ass and if it takes a while to recover, that’s just the way it is.

The older I get I notice the quieter I become, mostly since I’ve heard myself talk so much after 47 years I have grown a little tired of my own noise. But one piece of advice that, when asked, I have offered many times to friends over the years is that there are times when you just need to yield to the bad situation. Losing a job, getting a divorce, enduring an illness – these all fall under the Swift Kick header. I have always advocated that one will recover more quickly and more completely if one accepts and acknowledges that they have confronted a Very Bad Thing rather than try to ignore or deny it. Take a deep breath, recognize and be realistic about the scope of the situation as you deal with it and ultimately you will prevail, I have always said.

It turns out that this is not such bad advice. The bummer is that I didn’t really follow it. After my situation had dragged on more than a year, with the promise of at least another year before even the vagabond phase would be over and who knows how many more years until my life achieved some kind of new normal, I kind of decided that I was done with this crappy scene and was moving on emotionally. This was dumb. I was stubborn about accepting the scope of the situation and in denial about the time it might take to move through it, and so it didn’t take very long before I paid the price with a bunch of icky angst that needlessly impacted me and a bunch of other people. I ended up taking six months of vacation in order to clear my head, calm down and accept the fact that this particular event is going to run its course however it runs its course and that’s just the way it’s going to be. I’ve actually come to terms with that and feel fine about it, but if I had just taken my own advice in the beginning I probably could have avoided a lot of wasted time and energy.

Big Lesson #3 Just because you lose most of your personal history doesn’t mean you didn’t exist

This issue is probably the one that put me into the biggest tailspin for a while. Although several boxes of personal effects survived the fire, the vast majority of my personal history got wiped out.  The key thing here is that your stuff is not just “stuff.” Our memories are notoriously inaccurate and largely impressionistic. You might remember what your first job was, but how much specific detail about that episode still resides in your noggin? It is the physical artifacts – the stuff -- that jogs our memory, makes specific what was heretofore vague, corrects some of the mistaken recollections and gives us the context, time, place and, ultimately, the detail and shape of our lives. To lose most of that meant that, in middle life, I had actually lost a pretty huge chunk of my memories of all the years before.

For example, I remember that I graduated from college, obviously, and that it was excruciatingly hot that day, but what did my friends and I look like in our caps and gowns and what did we do that night to celebrate? I can’t remember and all the artifacts that would enable me to remember are gone and so that episode of my life is forever lost. Multiply that by the bazillion events and people from the 45 years before the fire and you can kind of get what I’m talking about:  I’ve been alive for quite a while now, I just can’t remember a lot of what happened, which is incredibly weird and disconcerting and seemed to beg the ultimate existential question: What kind of life can you say you’ve lived if you have no record, and therefore no memory, of much of it? Who, exactly, are you? Try wrapping your head around that one while you’re still sitting in some stranger’s rental house around month 16 of this adventure.

I have largely gotten over it, though don’t ask me how. I’d like to say I did something smart and fancy but honestly, at first I just tried not to think about it so much and then after a while I just didn’t think about it so much. After all, nothing is ever going to change the situation – what’s gone is gone -- and over time other things needed paying attention to, like going out to dinner, paying the bills and reading books. As Paul Simon once wrote, “Time passes, the mind wanders.” So true. I’m here today and that’s what I’ve got and I’m largely OK with that.

Big Lesson #4: Life is strange. Go figure

You might have heard I got married a couple of months ago and it was a whirlwind kind of a thing. As surprising as that might have been for some of you, that’s nothing compared with the news that Jon recently got me to go camping, which is not too dissimilar to saying Jon recently got me to enjoy walking barefoot across hot coals. But that is another blog post for another time. I won’t attribute every change in how I live my life to what happened in July 2009 because that’s just not the case at all. I’m also reluctant to attribute the fire in any way to marrying Jon (who is, by the way, Awesomely Super Duper) because it sounds weird even to me. However, I have to say there is a link.

I guess my point is that all of us have experienced a completely unexpected, truly terrible event at least once in our lives. We all hope it won’t happen, but I think most of us are realistic enough and grownup enough to understand that no one is exempt.  I think in my case, having accepted that my number did in fact come up in the form of the fire, somewhere along the line – I can’t say when -- I also became more open to the idea that the completely unexpected, truly great thing also could happen. I can’t recall really ever thinking about it, but clearly something changed in me. It’s probably the reason I could, literally, walk up to a friend’s house in Iowa, get introduced to a man wearing a straw fedora, look into his blue, blue eyes and say to myself, with absolute calm and conviction, “You’re the one.” I just understood in a way that I’m not sure I could have before the fire that the completely unexpected, truly great thing had just happened. Sometimes the cosmos don their steel-toed boots. Sometimes they place a lei around your neck. Go figure. 

Seriously, How Long Does it Take to Build a House?

A couple of weeks ago, Alice called and invited us over to dinner at her rental condo. “Chicken cacciatore,” she said. “Nothing special.”

Alice knows how to entertain and Alice knows how to cook and I also hadn’t seen her in at least a month so I was totally looking forward to it. We showed up promptly at 6:30 and while Alice poured wine and we mowed through the seven different appetizers she had prepared, she informed us that this was one of the last little soirees she would be holding at the rental condo since she was moving out.

You see, Alice’s insurance coverage provides for 24 months of rent. July 16 marks two years since the fire and our houses aren’t scheduled for completion until September at the earliest. So Alice has no choice at this point but to start writing personal checks for the outrageous monthly rent on her condo or move somewhere cheaper until our houses are built. She’s chosen the latter and is downsizing to a one-bedroom apartment for the next couple of months.

And yes, that sucks. Like me, she doesn’t own a lot of stuff so there’s not much to pack. But it’s more upheaval and stress and work and as she said as she was refilling my wine glass, “I’m too old for this shit.” She’s right. So we’re on call next week to help her with the move.

My insurance policy covers my rent until my house is built. And shockingly, particularly after my insurance company’s nasty shenanigans earlier this year (see previous post) I actually got a check last week to cover my rent through September. Granted it arrived on June 30, yet again just hours before I would have to give notice on my rental condo, and it was no doubt the result of my private adjuster Jessica’s verbal carpet-bombing of the insurance company adjuster, complete with threats of legal violence and the dropping of a thousand f-bombs.  I have the money though, and that’s what counts. But if I was in Alice’s shoes, I don’t think I could move yet again. In fact, I can feel the energy drain out of my body even as I type the words. Which proves once again that in many ways, Alice is tougher than I am.

As we ate dinner, passing around second helpings of chicken and Caesar salad, Alice and I yet again pondered aloud the seemingly impossible concept that it will have taken more than two years to rebuild two incredibly average houses. Alice and I could have easily run through the list of incompetent people and incompetent bureaucracies that added weeks and then months to the process. But we didn’t, since neither of us wanted to get nauseated before dessert (cupcakes!).

But after hugging Alice goodbye late that night and getting home, I did a little Internet search and here’s what I found: In 2005, Stanford University demolished and completely rebuilt its football stadium. It took 42 weeks. The Empire State Building, which has 102 stories, took one year and 45 days to construct. And remember Levittown, Penn., the first modern suburb developed in the early 1950s? The process was so efficient workers completed one house every 16 minutes.

Yes I know this is not an apples-to-apples comparison but you get my point. And God knows this is not an indictment of our contractor Glenn, who Alice and I both totally adore and who has been one of the very few people in this process who has not been a total disappointment.

A few words about Glenn: Glenn is not much taller than I am and sports an unfortunate moustache. But he is the most organized, detail-oriented, on-budget, ass-kicking general contractor I have ever met. Glenn is on email day and night and yells at me about something (wearing flip-flops at the construction site, being really slow to pick out faucets) at least twice a week. Whatever it is, Glenn is ON IT and I love him for that. In fact, just a couple of mornings ago I walked out of my rental house into my garage only to find Glenn standing there.

“What are you doing in my garage?” I asked him.

“You need to approve this cabinet sample for the laundry room.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

He handed me the sample.  I looked at it and approved it. He got into his car and left and I went back into the house.

But Glenn, his crew and I have been working together for over a year now and we’re all really comfortable with each other and so this is kind of how we roll. Sometimes I think we’ve gotten too comfortable with each other. Not long ago I was waiting for an important FedEx delivery that required my signature. It seemed to have gotten waylaid and so I called FedEx. The person on the phone said it had been delivered and signed for at my home address two days prior, which seemed impossible since there is no house, only a construction zone, and I obviously hadn’t signed for it. I walked over to the site and asked Glenn’s foreman if FedEx had been by. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You had a priority envelope delivered. Pete the electrician signed for you.” I found Pete, who unlocked one of the equipment sheds where he had placed the envelope for safekeeping. “Thanks Pete,” I said. “No problem!” he chirped.

There are at least five things wrong with this episode (note to FedEx: really?), but this type of thing happens all the time and I always let it go because these guys are really good at their jobs and they are working their butts off and I like them a lot.

Which brings me to me to next-to-last update: Sheetrock! For a year now, people have been saying things like, “Wait until they sheetrock! That’s the home stretch!”  Neither Alice nor I has built a house before and thus we believe pretty much everything we’re told in these matters. So when the sheetrock subcontractor’s truck pulled up and a half-dozen guys jumped out and started hammering those white boards onto the walls, we got on the phone with each other and screamed, “They’re sheetrocking, they’re sheetrocking!” the same way other people shout, “We won the lottery!” or “It’s a girl!”

Which now brings me to the last update: The house actually looks like it’s going to be a really nice place. This event has turned me into the ultimate Yogi Berra (it ain’t over ‘til it’s over), but despite that I have to say I’m really happy with how it’s turning out. I know a lot of you who read this blog have built houses and so might say, “What’s the big deal.” But it’s hard to describe the stress of having to do this type of project basically by yourself, under such intense time pressure and with so much, including the financing, being dictated by the insurance company. Frankly I’m shocked that I haven’t screwed up more things in the design of the house since I can’t even remember a lot of what I reviewed and authorized.

For example, not long ago Glenn told me to get over to the house pronto because he needed me to approve the location of the switch that controlled the heated floors in the upstairs guest bathroom. “Heated floors in the guest bathroom? That’s going to cost a fortune. What idiot added that to the plans?” I asked him. “You did,” Glenn replied. I looked at the plans and sure enough, there was my signature. I have absolutely no recollection of doing that and for all of you who may spend the night at my house, I love you tons but the truth is I couldn’t care less if my bathroom floors leave your toes a little chilled and so I am still kicking myself for such a stupid expense.

I do remember Brian the architect trying to explain how great the indoor/outdoor atrium thingy was going to look and me not being able to visualize it even after he walked me through the design about 3 billion times. I finally just decided not to drive him insane, trust his judgment and approve it even though I still had no idea what he was talking about.  But now that it’s built – way super cool! It’s an area about four feet wide and 16 feet long. It’s backed by an 18-foot-high wall, open to the sky and separated from the interior of the first floor by sliding glass. It lets tons of light into the house and can be used for outdoor sculpture. I love it.

That’s it for now. I’d write more but Glenn just emailed me and said he’d be at the job site in 30 minute and we need to talk about light switches and paint.

Getting Washing Machined

So in my last post I mentioned that one reason I hadn’t written anything for a few months was because I was going through some serious thinking about how I felt about my job and whether I should stay or leave, and obviously it didn’t feel appropriate to write anything about that until I made a decision. (For the record, I resigned and man, do I feel about 1,000% better.)

There was another issue brewing at the same time that I couldn’t write about until it was (hopefully) resolved, and since the dust has finally settled I can now tell you all about it. The short version is as follows: I hate insurance companies to the very depths of my being.

Following is the longer version:

Way back in spring of 2010, my insurance company, despite being slow, uncommunicative and indecipherable, had at last written me a check to rebuild my house. I remember at the time being so relieved that I wasn’t going to go bankrupt I didn’t know whether to cry or throw up. I can’t quite recall the details (it’s in the blog archives somewhere) but it’s quite likely I did both.

Anyway, there’s a tricky chicken-or-egg reality to this reimbursement in that the insurance company pays based on a “complete” estimate of what it will cost to rebuild, yet everyone involved knows that the estimate isn’t really complete since you don’t actually submit building plans and start engineering and construction (thus incurring even more costs as fees, additional code requirements, etc. come to light) until you know you have some money. Hopefully that scenario made your brain hurt as much as it has made my brain hurt. In other words, the first, big check they cut isn’t the last check they need to cut before your house is built and everyone involved knows that. It’s the way it always goes and the claim is not considered finalized until you are in your new home and have signed a document acknowledging that everyone involved, to their eternal gratitude and relief, won’t ever have to interact again for the rest of their lives.

The other way it always went, at least for me, is that my badass private adjuster Jessica would submit the bills as the costs were incurred and the insurance company adjuster assigned to my claim would ignore her. This has been going on for almost two years. Jessica would call and email for weeks and weeks and get radio silence.  Pissed off, she would finally leave a message saying she would be elevating things to his supervisors unless he responded ASAP, at which point he would finally respond. They would haggle for a few more weeks and then I would receive a check.

 So that’s how I figured things would proceed last spring when I received my initial reimbursement to rebuild the house. Once the money was safely stashed in the bank, I submitted building plans, hired a contractor and started the time-sucking and tedious process of rebuilding. And as expected, additional bills came in: $15,000 for the building permit, $20,000 to install fire sprinklers throughout the house since the city fathers apparently believe that Alice and I are The Cursed Fire Witches From Hell and want to ensure we don’t spontaneously combust together a second time, etc., etc. The bills flowed in and Jessica organized the claim for reimbursement, as she always does. And as always, there was radio silence whenever she contacted John, the adjuster at the insurance company. Except this time the silence lasted longer – much longer -- than usual. After a number of months, Jessica was getting seriously agitated and I was getting a major case of stress face myself because I had no choice but to foot all of these bills on my own until I got reimbursed. By now it was October and Jessica called me and told me she was going to have me sign a document compelling the insurance company to respond within 30 days. I forget what the document is called but it is basically the first legal shot across the bow when things start going sideways with your insurance company on a legitimate claim. Which made me feel like I might throw up again as I had the document notarized.

A few weeks after I signed the document – it was now almost Thanksgiving – I called Jessica to see how the insurance company had responded.

“You are not going to believe this,” she said. “John quit. In September. And he submitted your claim as closed and complete.” John had not contacted either of us. The insurance company had not contacted either of us. His email account had not bounced back her correspondence, nor was there a message on his company voicemail alerting people that he had left the company. He had simply vanished, neatly wrapping up his work at the insurance company by closing my case in violation of my policy and without my authorization and signature, which is required. I’m not even going to get into the ethics of the matter. Additional bills I couldn’t really afford continued to roll in, I only had a couple of months’ worth of rent money left in the bank and I was in the middle of construction on a house that I technically didn’t have the cash to complete and which would not be finished until July or August of 2011 at the very earliest.

What transpired over the next several months was one of those insurance company nightmares that we all hear about and which I had until that point dodged: Jessica had to hunt down executives at the insurance company and convince them to review the claim, something they agreed to do only grudgingly and after multiple contentious phone calls. That took weeks and probably only succeeded because Jessica kept meticulous records of every call and email she had ever sent and/or received from John and thus had a paper trail to end all paper trails. Finally, the insurance company assigned my claim to a new adjuster, who knew nothing about my situation and who was both seriously bewildered and totally annoyed that he was the one who had to deal with it.  And so the entire process for analyzing and reviewing my claim began anew, as if it had just landed in the insurance company’s inbox that very morning as opposed to summer of 2009.

And so we waited. And I started paying vendor bills late – really late. I was already out a scary amount of money and since there was no indication that this new review of my claim was going to result in any sort of reimbursement, I wasn’t about to go deeper in the hole financially any faster than I had to. I ran out of the insurance company’s rent money in January and while technically I could have afforded to pay rent on my own, I decided I wasn’t going to pay that either. Needless to say, this wasn’t going to thrill my landlord who, despite being possibly the nicest guy ever, never intended to let me live in his house for free.

And so a couple of times a week, Jessica called the new adjuster and yelled and threatened and dropped a round of F-bombs, and then at the end of every month, about 24 hours before I would have had to give notice on my rental house and find a new, cheaper place to live, the insurance company would cough up one month’s “emergency living expenses” as they called it, though they would not give any indication as to whether or not they would pay the rest of my claim.

“You tell those effers I am not some college student who can just pack everything into a hatchback and go crash at a friend’s house for a few months,” I told Jessica one day. Of course as I said that I realized in fact that’s exactly how I’ve been living. For my landlord Richard, I am like the obnoxious relative who came over for Christmas dinner and never left. Almost a year after the first year’s lease expired, here I am, still languishing in his house while he explains to his friends and relatives why they still can’t stay there when they come to visit San Francisco. And about the only items in the rental house that are mine and not Richard’s are a TV, a laptop, some clothes, some dishes and a bed. I actually could load almost all of it into a hatchback.

At one point I asked Jessica what my alternatives were if the insurance company didn’t reimburse me. “You are 100% in the right but if it came to that your only option would be to litigate,” she said.

And that’s the thing that always makes you feel you are going to throw up or go insane or go broke or all of that at once. The insurance company has all the financial control, and with that control of your future: Will the next few years be spent fruitlessly litigating against a giant corporation? After bouncing from a hotel to friends’ spare bedrooms to a rental house in the past two years, are you going to have to move yet again because they’ve stopped paying the rent they are contractually obliged to pay? And just where will you find the money to pay all those people with whom you signed legally binding contracts to build your house while a big chunk of the funding is in limbo?

I never really came up with any answers to any of it. I just worried and stewed and tried to believe Jessica when she said it would all get worked out eventually, she just didn’t know when because she wasn’t hearing anything from the new adjuster.

And then last month, Jessica called me. The insurance company had mailed a check for the additional building costs, as well as rent money through July. I drove like a bat out of hell to Jessica’s office to see if the check actually did exist and sure enough, without comment, explanation or apology for creating a completely unnecessary process that spanned nearly six months and wreaked havoc on my finances and my psyche, the insurance company had indeed paid the full amount I was due. I could actually pay my landlord and the contractors building my house. And I wasn’t going to have to drain anymore of my savings.

Like I’ve said before, in these situations it’s impossible to be happy when the good thing finally happens. Though now that I think about it, there’s a surfing term that accurately describes how it does feel. It’s called getting washing machined. It’s when you get rolled by a big wave that holds you under the surface, spins you around and around and grinds you along the sandy bottom before spitting you back above water. And while you are always quite happy to be reacquainted with sunshine and oxygen and super psyched that you also didn’t get smacked upside the head during the process by that surfboard tethered to your ankle, you nonetheless have saltwater up your nose, sand in the nether regions of your wetsuit and a few bleeding wounds. It all ended well, but it’s painful and you’re a little disoriented for a while.

Addendum: For those that are interested, the contractors have completed framing both houses and are working on insulation and plumbing. Things got a little slowed down due to the approximately 954 inches of rain we received in the Bay Area in February and March. Glenn the contractor is still estimating an August completion date but we’ll see how it goes. Will post some pics soon.

 

Things Are Just Different Now (not that there's anything wrong with that)

So it’s been literally months since I last posted anything and a lot of people have been asking, “How’s the house coming along and why the abrupt silence?”

 

The answer to the first question is straightforward: The house is coming along fine. After the four-month Extravaganza of Bullshit and Incompetence performed by the city planning department  (see last blog post for details), construction on my house and Alice’s house started in September and has continued apace.  I am living around the corner from where my former house stood and sure enough, every morning at precisely 8 a.m., I can hear the sound of hammering and sawing.  And from what a few of my griping neighbors have told me, it continues without a break until 5 p.m. I say yay. Alice calls me and says, “For god’s sake can’t they work any faster?”

 

Our contractor, Glenn, is building both houses simultaneously and has completed all the framing. I know this because I just got a bill for $50,000 that states, “Completion of second-floor framing.” I did my first walk-through with Glenn and the architect a few weeks ago to talk about some nitpicky details and, well, it definitely looks like a house. The layout is altered but not radically different from the original and I felt this eerie sense of familiarity as I walked around. The interior of the old house has resided vividly in my mind’s eye in the 18 months since it was destroyed, and so to see it again in its entirety, albeit in a newish and skeletal form was…a little weird. But not bad. In fact, after mostly avoiding the construction site for the first three months, I actually have been dropping by a couple of times a week to check on the progress. For the first time since this whole mess began, I feel kind of hopeful that I’ll have a home to live in again beyond the one I’ve been carrying around in my head.

 

Which brings me to the answer to that second question: Why the abrupt silence?

 

I looked back at the blog and saw that my last post was in August, which in hindsight I realize was about the time I started to fall into a bit of a funk. It was a nebulous funk: I had just started what by all accounts was a job I should have been excited about and yet I just didn’t have my usual mojo. I also was, according to a number of close bystanders, a tad cranky in my personal life.  I just felt off and I couldn’t really figure out why.

 

Anyway, to make a long story short, a few months ago, a friend urged me to just say out loud what I thought was bothering me.  I hesitated, opened my mouth a few times without saying anything, and then it finally came out: “I miss my old life and it’s not coming back.”

 

Now I realize that this is not exactly a news flash for anyone but me, and one could fairly state that I was more than a little slow on the uptake as far as realizing that things weren’t ever going to be the same after what happened. But, you know, I deeply miss the life I had before the fire. And it’s been really, really hard to let that go.  It was also hard to even say it out loud, since that made it real.

 

And so the next few months kind of sucked. I was upset and pensive as I tried to suss out how I felt about this new life.  I’m sure that wasn’t particularly great for anyone around me. But then a funny thing happened: Once I started talking about it, I actually started to get used to the idea that my old life wasn’t coming back no matter how much I wished for it. I also started accepting that I just felt fundamentally different about certain aspects of my life than I did before the fire. And I stopped being completely freaked out by all that.

 

The most startling revelation was that I didn’t feel the same about my job. I realized that after nearly a year and a half of feeling like my life had been completely hijacked, I felt much more protective of my time and just didn’t have the same patience and enthusiasm for some aspects of my work.  And although it was a relief to discover the source of my professional ennui, it was still a tough one to digest since I’ve been doing this kind of work for 20 years, have invested an enormous amount of time and energy into doing it as well as I could, and have always genuinely liked it very much. So imagine realizing that the one thing that you used to find very gratifying and enabled you to fund your vacations and pay your property taxes and afford those outrageous prices at Whole Foods is the one thing you don’t want to do anymore.

 

But you know what, I didn’t freak out about that either, which surprised the hell out of me and will probably surprise a lot of people who know me. I just decided to be honest with myself and everyone else. So last month I told my boss and the people who work for me that I needed to resign. I explained the reason, and because they are fantastic people and I was working at a really good company, they were incredibly gracious and professional about it. I can’t even begin to express my appreciation for how understanding they’ve been. My last day is Wednesday. I’m going to take a little time off and then start consulting on my own. I’ve wanted to try to build my own little business for a while but the timing was never quite right. Now the timing seems extremely right. I’m going to see if I can pay the bills by doing interesting projects with people I like, which is what I really want to do with my time rather than spend half of every workday in meetings. It might work, it might not. But I’m genuinely excited, a little nervous and (finally) feel like myself again. It’s a new life, but it’s not necessarily a lesser one.

 

Well It's About Goddamn Time

One night last week I got an email from the contractor that Alice and I have hired to rebuild our houses. It read, “Hello all, got a call just now that the documents are ready to be picked up.” Our contractor was referring to our building permits, which had been trapped in a bureaucratic spin cycle down at city hall since April. I picked up the phone and called Alice. She answered on the first ring.

 

“Well it’s about goddamn time,” I said without saying hello first.

 

“You’re goddamn right. I am so goddamn mad right now,” Alice replied, also bypassing anything resembling a salutation.

 

“Damn them anyway,” she added.

 

Alice and I can go on like this for a good half hour and often do – swearing back and forth at each other about whoever is currently the focus of our rage.  Right now it is the city planning department, which, after assuring us that the approval process for our building permits would last no more than 4-6 weeks max, lumbered along for three months before issuing the permits, thus ensuring that we would lose the entire spring and most of the summer for construction. By the time our contractor let us know that the permits had actually been issued, our angst and frustration had built to a point that that Alice felt perpetually sick to her stomach and I often found it difficult to simply breathe. The only thing that eased the tension even a tad was to say the “F” word about 400 times every time we talked.

 

Way back in April, when our architect dropped off our plans at the planning department, (along with the $5,200 fee we each had to pay) the department head assured him that every effort by every person in his department would be made to scoot our plans through the process ASAP. He also promised that the first round of reviews would take no more than two weeks.

 

Three weeks later we had heard nothing, so Alice went down to city hall to see what was going on. As she relayed the story to me over the phone, the head of the planning department happened to be there when she arrived. She reminded him of his promise of a two-week turnaround, at which point he yelled to an underling, “What’s the status on the plans for 15 and 19 Susan Gale Court?” The underling looked around and, lo and behold, our building plans were laying in the exact same place where our architect had dropped them off three weeks previously. The only action the planning department had taken was to detach the two $5,200 checks from the plans and deposit them in the bank.

 

“Your are f***ing kidding me,” I said to Alice as she recounted the story. No, Alice said, she was not  f***ing kidding me. For some reason, during that three-week period, not a single person in the planning department could focus their energies and muster the wherewithal to send the plans to the consulting firm down the street SINCE IT IS NOT THE CITY BUT A CONSULTING FIRM THAT ACTUALLY DOES THE ALL THE WORK ON THE FIRST ROUND OF REVIEWS.

 

 “I almost blew a goddamn gasket,” she added.

 

Since Alice and I take turns on these chores, the following week I went down to the planning department. The assistant called the consulting firm, which said it would have its first review finished in five days max.

 

Ten days later, the consulting firm had completed its first plan check. According to our architect, there were a few questions related to state requirements for energy efficiency, but that actually most of the questions were really unnecessary since the information was already in the plans. In other words, had the consulting firm actually closely reviewed the plans they were being paid to review, they would not have needed to ask the questions that were now going to take two weeks for our architect to respond to via multiple phone calls, meetings and resubmission of documents.

 

“What the f**k” is wrong with these people?” I asked Alice.

 

We never got an answer to that question, but we had three months to ponder it as the review of our plans plodded along. After the consulting firm was satisfied, they sent the plans back to the planning department. And what appeared to happen after that was that someone would give our plans a cursory look, approve them and then send them along to the next person. A month or two later, that first person would decide to review the plans for realsies, yank them back and generate an entirely new round of questions that our architect would need to answer, thus throwing into chaos the reviews that had been done subsequently and basically doubling or tripling the time necessary to review the documents. In other words, there was no process, just people passing  the plans around and around to each other while our architect chased them.

 

The final blowout came when our architect emailed Alice and me with the news that although the plans had been approved by the entire planning department and the outside consultants, the head of the planning department was now going to review the plans personally. It was unclear to our architect whether this was simply a formality or if he intended to request changes to plans that had already been approved by all of his workers, thus requiring those plans to spend at least two more weeks being reviewed and approved yet again by the exact same people.

 

As I mentioned previously, it is now August, more than a year after the fire. Everyone has assured us that it will take at least a year to rebuild our houses. And the thing about insurance companies is that they don’t just subsidize you forever. At some point they say, “Why is it taking so long to rebuild your house and why are we still paying your rent after 2+ years?” When your house burns down, you are still responsible for paying your mortgage, utilities, homeowners insurance, association dues and property taxes. Alice and I are both paying thousands of dollars a month for houses that don’t exist and we’ll both be goddamned if we’re going to pay rent on top of that.

 

“If he makes changes to those plans and holds us up unnecessarily, you tell him that if and when we get kicked out of our rental houses next year Alice and I will pitch tents on his front lawn and camp there until our homes are ready,” I told our architect.

 

“Damn right,” said Alice when I relayed the conversation to her.

 

That conversation between our architect and the city planner didn’t take place, as a few days later his department coughed up the building permit, along with a second bill – this time for almost $9,000 each.

 

After we wrote the checks, Alice and I asked our contractor what was next. He said we now had to wait for the utility company to install a temporary power pole and electrical supply to our lots for the construction. He asked if we had the name and number of the guy who capped the utilities on our property since he would be in charge of installing the temporary power supply.

 

“You mean Mike, the guy who took three months to get a piece of paper signed by the city in order to complete a 20-minute job of capping the utilities?” I asked. Our contractor confirmed that yes, that would be the guy.

 

“Shit,” Alice and I said in unison.

Wow, It's Been a Year Already

It was one year ago tonight that I was standing on my street surrounded by no less than 22 fire trucks, local news crews, my neighbors and a bunch of gawkers, looking at the smoldering remains of my house and my neighbor Alice’s house, both of which had essentially burned to the ground during the preceding six hours.  I was covered with soot and my clothes stunk of smoke. It was well after midnight at that point and the fire captain walked over to Alice and me and said that he and his crew were going to spend the night on our street just in case the fire reignited. “Do you have somewhere to stay?” he asked us. Alice and I looked at each other and I vividly recall my mouth literally dropping open as I realized for the first time that unless someone offered to let me stay at their house or I went to a motel, my answer to that question was “no” since I didn’t have a home anymore.

 

Much has happened since last July and a lot of people have been asking how things are going after the first year so I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts:

 

Things I’m thankful for

 

I’m really happy to be alive and well since the firefighters all made it very clear to me that if the fire had happened in the middle of the night rather than during the day I most likely wouldn’t be either of those things.  Their reaction has always stuck with me: They were just so openly and bluntly relieved that I wasn’t hurt or dead.  So I have to say that although I’ve always been consciously grateful for and aware of the fortunate life I’ve had, I’m definitely even more so now.  

 

I’m enormously grateful to my neighbor Alice, who has been my sounding board, partner in crime, and main compadre throughout this ordeal. What started out as an instinctive alliance between two neighbors in order to navigate an unusual, complicated and, frankly, very frightening ordeal has morphed into a genuine friendship. Alice is smart and honorable and funny and brave. Frankly, she’s a total badass and I hope I’m half as cool as she is when I’m 70.  I’ve learned a lot from her, I care a lot about her, and I am very thankful that she is in my life.

 

Obviously I’m very grateful to my friends, my family, co-workers and a lot of people who I don’t even know very well, all of who have been so generous and thoughtful and patient during the past year. There have been ten thousand acts of kindness large and small, all of which I needed. I don’t know how to begin to express my thanks, though I can say with total certainty I would have been a total wreck without your help.

 

Speaking of being a wreck…

 

After a year I am, for the most part, totally fine. I did have a number of PTSD-type symptoms after the fire: For months I would freeze in my tracks if I heard sirens, or smelled or saw smoke. I also had bad dreams in which I would be watching the house burn down again, or trying unsuccessfully to put out the flames. Sometimes I would dream that I myself was on fire.  In hindsight, it’s clear that it would have been much better if I hadn’t seen the house burn, but no one tells you how you’re supposed to react in these situations. It didn’t occur to me at the time to grab Alice by the arm and tell everyone we were just going to cool our heels at the Starbucks down the street and to call us when it was over. But it would have been better that way, and it’s one of the reasons that Alice and I both left town when our houses got demolished several months later – we just didn’t want the visual.

 

But most of the after-effects have faded. I still get a little uptight when I see smoke but I haven’t had a bad dream in months. In fact, a few weeks ago I dreamed that construction on my new house had begun (that really does remain a dream at this point, unfortunately) but they were building it in San Francisco by mistake. In the dream I was getting in the foreman’s face, asking him why he found it so difficult to at least get the city right. That feels a lot more like me.

 

I think another good sign is that unlike the first couple of months, when I was genuinely freaked out, stressed out and disoriented pretty much all of the time, these days I’m just intermittently frustrated, exasperated and tired. Dealing with the aftermath is still a daily job that is both tedious and chaotic. There is still tons of paperwork to do and decisions to be made and I am still subject to the ever-changing demands, deadlines and needs of a lot of people and bureaucracies – many of whom I don’t like very much. Every major aspect of my life, from the kind of career choices I can make to where I can live, continues to be tightly circumscribed by the fire. In fact, pretty much everyone I’m working with on this has assured me that it will be at least another couple of years before my life in any way resumes something resembling “normal.” And if you know me at all you know I really hate not being in control – almost as much as I really hate being told what to do.  So I am often aggravated these days.

 

But as I said it is a good sign, since aggravation is commonplace. We all get frustrated when we can’t do what we want to do and I’ll take that emotion any day over how I was feeling a year ago. It feels much more normal.

 

Does anything surprise me after a year?

 

Well, the fact that such a severe fire happened at all still catches me off-guard sometimes. I mean, DAMN. Everything gone! There’s a part of me that still can’t quite believe it. Even the insurance people were surprised. I remember walking through what was left of the house with the adjuster a few days after the fire. “Wow,” he said. “We almost never see a house fire this bad.”

 

I’m surprised that I continue to miss my artwork so much. It sounds really lame, I know, since there are so many bigger problems in the world and my situation could be so much worse but, well, it’s the truth. I do have the five photos that the gallery owner and the photographer replaced for me (an amazing gesture that I can still hardly believe). However, I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever buy another piece of art since even the idea of potentially losing it again is still more than I can bear. I just don’t have the heart for it yet.

 

I’m surprised how little I care about building a new house. The flicker of optimism that at least we’d have brand-new and better homes got snuffed out months ago under a mountain of paperwork and delays. The city, which cashed the $5,000 check we each had to include with our building plans the day we submitted them in April, has been needlessly dithering with those plans for months, seemingly unable to muster the energy to actually issue permits. This case study in civic incompetence was preceded by myriad acts of bureaucratic bullshit by other entities that wasted several more months. Alice and I are required under the bylaws of our homeowners association to rebuild but we both agree that if that weren’t the case we’d both stick a “For Sale” sign on our bulldozed lots, sell them and move somewhere else. We may feel differently in a year or two when we’re actually living in new homes, but right now we’d both prefer to just start over somewhere else. We’re done with this place.

 

I’m also a little surprised at how much I got done this year and how much fun I actually had when I wasn’t dealing with this event. I showed up at work every day, I produced a movie, I interviewed for a really cool new job at a really cool company and just started that job this week. I went skiing with friends in Canada, Colorado and California. I also took a couple months off and traveled through the Southwest. I went to Europe, New York, Las Vegas, the Midwest and a few other places. I went for bike rides, on road trips and out to dinner with friends. I spent a surprisingly large amount of time laughing.

 

It felt like everything went dark for a while after the fire, that’s for sure. But as the months passed, mostly thanks to everyone around me, light began to seep in. At this point, the fire really just casts its own odd and specific shadow over a few small areas. Like I’ve said before, far worse things happen to people. And I’m really, really happy and grateful to be alive and well.

The Difference Between Dead and Gone

 Last Tuesday morning around 8 a.m. I was pulling out of the driveway of my rental house and saw my neighbor Gary walk by with his German Shepherd. (Minor sidebar: The dog’s name is Canto, though I have called him Cujo behind his back ever since my ex-husband, a dog-lover if there ever was one, reached out to pet the mutt and was rewarded with two fang-shaped puncture wounds in his hand.)

 

I rolled down my window. “Rumor has it that they’re actually going to start demolishing the houses today.”

 

Gary was trying to get Canto/Cujo to heel using German-language commands that per usual, the dog totally ignored. “They’ve already started,” Gary replied. Indeed, with my head poking out of the car window I could hear the rumble and beep-beep-beep of heavy machinery and trucks coming from around the corner, where the burned remains of my house and my neighbor Alice’s house have stood for nearly eight months while we tangled with insurance companies and petty bureaucrats to get them torn down.

 

Canto/Cujo jumped up and put his front paws on the side of my car exactly like he’s not supposed to do, so it would be easier for me to scratch his ears. Gary yanked at his leash, the dog howled and I drove off, taking a side street that enabled me to avoid actually seeing the demolition.

 

Everyone, from our families to our private adjusters to the few butthead neighbors who have been complaining about having to look at our burned-out houses since last summer, is excited that the houses are finally being torn down, since only when the ruined homes are gone can new ones can be built.  Everyone, that is, except Alice and me.

 

Don’t get me wrong. No one knows better than we do that this is an important step forward. But while we have both pretty much adjusted to our houses being dead, neither of us has come to grips with them being gone. 

 

Yes, you could see through all three stories of my house, as the back of the structure and the roof had burned off. The windows were all blown out from the heat of the fire and the landscaping around the house was blackened. As for the interior, whatever didn’t get entirely incinerated was totally and thoroughly ruined: melted, distorted, broken, charred. You could stand in the street behind my house and literally look into my bedroom and see my burned-up bed. The sun baked it all through the summer, and buckets of rain poured into it through the winter.  And no matter the weather, it always smelled like smoke. It was a friggin’ disaster over there.

 

And yet I still felt comforted going by every day to pick up the mail. The mailbox was still there, so I never changed my address when I moved.  It made me feel better to stand in the driveway and look at the garage and front porch, which were largely intact, and imagine my house as it used to be. I had lived there for seven years and could vividly and easily recall every detail of every room. My home had died, but at least I could still visit and for whatever reason, that helped.

 

 The idea of watching our homes get destroyed a second time, of having everything that was ever ours smashed to bits, loaded into a dump truck and hauled off to a landfill, of standing in an empty lot where we used to have homes, was simply more than either Alice or I could deal with, even after months of trying.  So when demolition week came, we both just bailed. Alice went to Arizona with her kids. I lasted two days by to-ing and fro-ing via circuitous routes around the neighborhood that bypassed our street.  But on day three, when I once again heard the beep-beep-beeps of the heavy machinery at 8 a.m., I packed a bag and took off for the mountains 200 mile away.

 

I spent a couple of days snowshoeing in the backcountry of the Sierras. It was serene and exhausting and whenever I stopped to rest the only thing I could hear was the wind blowing through the trees and the sound of my own heart beating.

 

As Alice had told me on the phone before she headed off for Arizona, “We’re going to have to take a look at some point.” I knew she was right and so when I came home on Saturday I drove straight to Susan Gale Court and parked my car beneath the big oak tree that stands at the center of the cul de sac. A storm was just starting to come in from the Pacific Ocean, so it was blustery and clouds were blowing in from the west. A neighbor from across the street was standing in her driveway. “Hi Chris,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

 

The chain link fence that the demolition crew had erected a few weeks ago was still there and behind that was my driveway and beyond that just the hills and the clouds and the sky.  I wrapped my fingers through fence and felt as wide open and raw as everything I could see.

3 Checks Cut

I was at the car dealership last week getting ready to pay for some maintenance work when I heard a chirping sound inside my purse. Someone had sent me a text message. I sighed and dug through all the flotsam and jetsam in my bag, looking for my cell phone. I hate texting and actively discourage people from doing it to me. Help a sister out. Send me an email with some punctuation and a complete sentence or two.

 

Anyway, I found my phone, flipped it open and looked at the message. It read, “3 checks cut.” My mouth dropped open and I am pretty sure my hair stood on end for a few seconds. The text was from Jessica, my private adjuster, and she was telling me that the insurance company had approved the claims we had submitted to build a new house, replace everything that was destroyed in the fire and get reimbursed for all of my lost artwork. Still standing in the middle of the dealership showroom, I called Jessica’s cell phone. She answered, sounding like Louis Armstrong.

 

“You sound like Louis Armstrong,” I said.

 

“I hab a really, really bab code,” she answered. “That’s why I sent a text.” Then she let loose a sneeze that almost blew my phone out of my hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Bab code.”

 

Between sneezes and some really gross coughs, Jessica managed to tell me that my insurance company had OK’d the full amount of compensation we had requested.  Jessica, who has been negotiating on my behalf with the insurance company, had decided to push them to approve the entire sum of money in one fell swoop, rather than dole out payments incrementally.  She had swung for the fence and it had worked. The checks were, literally, in the mail.  We did some virtual high-fives together and I told her once again what a total badass she is. We agreed to talk in a few days when she felt better, then verbally high-fived again before hanging up. After which I’m sure she immediately passed out on her sofa next to a mountain of used Kleenex.

 

I paid the bill for my car and when they brought it out to me I jumped into the driver’s seat, sat there for a moment, and then leaned my head against the steering wheel and started to cry.  

 

A few employees saw me but they were totally unfazed. It’s a BMW dealership after all and I’m sure they’re used to people weeping uncontrollably after forking over several hundred dollars for an oil change and maybe a few air filters.

 

It’s kind of hard to explain but it just isn’t possible for me to be immediately happy at moments like that, even though it seems like I should. I can tell that I disappoint people with my response sometimes, but honestly my first reaction isn’t usually joy. It’s a feeling of relief. Excruciating relief, actually. It hurts.

 

That’s because at this point in the story I’m not fully convinced I’m going to bounce back 100% from the fire. Ever. My neighbor Alice and I – our houses burned down together -- have talked about it and she’s of the same mind. Our accounting varies slightly but we’ve both run the numbers many times and just can’t make them work.  Alice is using basic addition: She is 70 years old, and so unless she lives to be The Oldest Living Woman In The History Of Planet Earth, by her calculations there just isn’t enough time to rebuild the life she knew.

 

I’m playing the percentages. I clearly remember watching my house burn down and thinking, “Girlfriend, you may not come back all the way from this one.” As someone who always comes back 100%, I found this thought truly frightening.  Eight months later, I am still down several percentage points. Nothing dramatic – we are not talking emotional recession here – but having clearly lost some of my mojo I am very focused on ways to gain it back and incredibly anxious about anything that might lower my numbers even more. Getting into an extended knock-down-drag-out with the insurance company would do just that. Getting a settlement that is insufficient to rebuild my house and my life would also do that.  And so when Jessica tells me that the insurance company, while agonizingly slow, was also totally honorable, I can’t immediately get past the nearly paralyzing sense of relief that I am not going to lose yet another piece of myself.

 

On one level, Alice and I are quite aware that people are subjected to infinitely worse situations than ours all the time and that two or three years from now we’ll look back on this period as basically just a dark phase. We have everything in our favor – friends, family, financial stability and luck – to create something good from this. However, it is now and not three years from now. The fire still informs a lot of our day-to-day existence and so we’re not quite there yet. We’re still pretty stressed out.

 

But like I said, the sense of relief is the immediate emotion. Happiness follows eventually. I deposited the checks into a savings account a few days ago and when I looked at the receipt I saw that there is indeed enough to build a new house. Big smile.