The Day I Thought Would Never Come

I still can't believe how long it took, but yes it finally happened. The adjusters for our agent's E&O policy *finally* came to look at our house today! Just 112 days after the storm, no biggie. Now we get to wait and see how bad they try to whittle down or Professional Estimator's estimate. Yee ha.

I know I've been very lax about posting and updating after all my big promises. But like I said earlier, if I'm not posting it's because I've lost my sense of humor and am really struggling. December and January were rough. Really rough.

Conditions at work have not improved. We still have no heat or A/C, are still crammed into the 2nd floor of our building, with cords taped all over the floor and sharing offices. My "office", which I share, is really a reception area outside the director's office, so it's basically Grand Central Station all day long. Not conducive for accounting. I have no place to lock up confidential documents like payroll and my normal system is all amok. If you know accountants you know they cannot function outside their own system. It's chaos and I'm helpless to change it. Thanks to Big L for keeping me focused on the big picture...that I'm helping keep an organization afloat that is crucial to the rebirth of the island. Without that I'd probably have quit months ago and just stay curled in the fetal position at the back of the RV!!

School has also been a huge stresser. Before Ike we absolutely loved our school and I had a great working relationship with our fab Principal. Since the storm, however, another elementary school (Burnet) has been combined with ours. Their whole faculty, including their Principal are now at our school. Their front staff is mixed with our front staff. All "specials" like Music and Art have 2 teachers now. Our cheer team got absorbed by their drill team, etc. And everyone knows that they are now competing for the same jobs because Burnet is closed indefinitely. We've already been told that next school year will look like this one as far as which schools are open and where students are located. That means that the Parker/Burnet faculty are in competition for one set of teaching positions and there will only be one Principal that makes the cut. This is very scary news, considering I've had my only issues with faculty members in the last couple of months, and they both happen to be Burnet faculty.

I'm going to resist the temptation to post those stories. I'd love to get some feedback on them, but now I have some friends that work at the school that read this blog so I'd better refrain.

So...until we hear the final verdict as to who is staying on at Parker and who is not, we are keeping our options for the next school year wide open. Looks like I have some visits to some other schools in my future....the kind you have to pay for. *sigh* I surely hope it doesn't come to that. I'm such a huge proponent of public education that it would be a very sad day for us for sure. But, nothing has been decided yet and there is still hope. What would we do without hope??

With that, I'm also going to start taking more photos of the island, like I did in the beginning, so you can see the progress. For those of you who don't live on the coast...have you ever seen a real live FEMA trailer? Do you know what they look like in the yard of a house? It's interesting and totally different that what I expected. Now that people are finally getting them, I'll post some pics for ya tomorrow or so.