It's Only a Model, Part 2

Sigh. Everything is finally back in it's proper place. Well, except for the stuff we had to pitch, which wasn't too much. A lot of wrapping paper and gift bags, a few magazines--and all six of my Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. I had never meant to keep them as the collector's items they've apparently become, but I did hope to pass them on to Baby the Second, should it be a girl. All the remaining damage is to our books. The humidity generated in blowing the carpets dry warped over a hundred books. I've cataloged everything. Now I have to research their replacement costs. Fun.

But having renter's insurance has certainly paid off. We'll get reimbursed for everything. The folks upstairs aren't so lucky. No renter's insurance, and they're getting the bill for all the damages since they caused the break by turning off their heat. Ouch. So a move designed to save them a few bucks on their energy bills turns out costing them several grand at the very least. If they had renter's insurance, they'd have a small deductible to pay.

Now's a good time to talk about lessons learned. First lesson: always have insurance, especially if you're going to leave the heat off in an apartment during a record-breaking cold-snap. Second lesson: maintain an inventory of the items you own that you would not want to lose forever (side lesson: it may be wise to transfer all your pictures to digital data). Third lesson: back up your data someplace away from your property. I cannot begin to describe my horror when I thought there was a fire in the apartment above us and I realized that the quickest thing I could grab (my flash stick) would only have my two current works in progress. Grabbing my laptop would've saved nearly all of my typed writing, but all my paper-only notes, all my critiques of HD, The Masque, and SoD, all of my research would've been gone. I have remedied some of this situation by making sure I have multiple back-ups of my Word docs, and I will be researching off-site data storage. But I have to impletment a better habit of typing up my writing notes on a more regular basis and scanning what I can't type. Means a lot of extra time, but I can't ignore that punch to the gut that I experienced last Saturday.

And the final lesson of this ordeal: we need a clearly defined emergency response plan for our little family. We may have had one before Drew came along, but we certainly haven't put one together since. And it was painfully obvious as we scrambled to get ourselves safe. We will fix that.

All in all, as far as disasters go, this was minor, and it taught us a lot for a rather small price. Granted, it would've been nice not to have experienced this and to have done everything this taught us without the direct lesson. But lemonade from lemons, and all that.