The Zen Leaf

Since we’re now halfway through the year, I thought I’d do a quick halfway point check-in. I’m going to skip the rougher parts (those can be seen in individual month check-ins) and focus instead on my best-ofs for the year.

Movies
I’ve seen a lot more movies than normal this year – more on that next week – and my favorite by far has been The Greatest Showman. I’ve been obsessed with that movie and soundtrack for the last month or two. I wish I’d seen it in theatre. It’s odd, because I don’t normally like musicals at all! This one just hit all the right buttons for me. Runner-up was hard to pick because I’ve seen a lot of good ones this year. I recently finally got to watch Coco, and that actually brought some tears to my eyes (hard to do for me). I’m tentatively calling that as my runner-up for the first half of 2018.

Books
As you know, I’ve barely read a thing this year. Only 23 in the first half of the year, and of those 23, only a small handful stand out as wonderful. One, however, stands out far above the rest. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was by far my favorite book of 2018 so far. Choosing a runner-up was more difficult, because I really did read some phenomenal books in there. It seems my memory is doing that silly thing where books go in and go right back out, though, so I’m choosing my runner-up based on being a book I loved and that actually stuck with me all these months later: Consider the Fork.

Discoveries
I think there’s no denying that my favorite new thing of the year is LuLaRoe. I mean, that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world, was it?

Highlights
Despite the rough, there’s been a great number of wonderful moments so far in 2018. My oldest son finished driver’s ed, scored amazing on his SAT, and was one of six kids in the city chosen to represent San Antonio on the trip to Japan this summer (he leaves in just a few days!). My middle son also finished driver’s ed, got inducted into the National Art Honor Society, and is spending the summer basically apprenticing (for money) under our contractor friend, since he (my son) wants to do construction or cabinetry as a career. My youngest was in the school play and is now taking an optional summer school class in theatre so that he can start more advanced when he begins high school in August. Jason is doing very well at work, getting more and more responsibility, and is highly valued (unlike when he was at his previous company, which dropped him for no reason about this time last year). I’ve had some personal breakthroughs with regards to my health, and while I’m not doing anywhere near as well as I’d like, I’m doing better than I expected. Plus I’ve gotten to catch up with several friends this year that I hadn’t seen in years!

Additionally, our family (accidentally) adopted two rescue cats this year, saving both of their lives, and they became a bonded pair. Financially, while we may be struggling now as the insurance argues over who’s responsible for this current damage, we’re doing much better than we started the year, now that our Wisconsin house is off our hands and we (at one point) had our massive credit card bill paid off. I’m sure we’ll get there again after all this insurance stuff goes through. Jason has booked us on a cruise for September, which I’m really looking forward to, and we’ve almost finished xeriscaping our front yard (stalled when the indoor work began!).

Sometimes it’s hard to see all the progress we’ve made in our lives this year, with all the negative hanging over our heads, but we’ve really done a fantastic job moving forward in 2018. Now we just need to get over the hump of the summer and back to making this a really incredible year!

Little has happened in the last couple weeks, but this is the gist:

First, we got all our information to the USAA contracting department, who apparently went over the roofer’s heads and straight to their liability insurance. That seems to have lit a fire under the roofers, because last week we got a call from them asking if they could schedule to fix the back half of the roof that (if you’ll recall) they told us they didn’t have to fix even though we paid for it. Personally, I didn’t want them anywhere near my house again as they do shoddy work, but apparently if we don’t let them finish the job, we’ll have a hard time getting their liability insurance to pay for anything else. Ugh. So the plan was to have us both here with video and still photography the entire time. I’m also not letting them into the house proper unless it’s for repairs, and they can provide their own water, bathrooms, etc. The last time they came into this house, they were shouting, swearing, and nearly hitting our contractor, all with two of my kids nearby. They’re not welcome back into my home.

Beyond that, the contracting department at USAA called us back to ask us to file a claim with our insurance for the damage in the meantime. It’s supposed to be noted, with all the pertinent contact info, that this is in mediation with the roofer’s liability insurance. However, since that mediation will likely take a very long time (possibly over a year), they want us to get our house sorted before then. So we file a claim on our own insurance, and if the decision is eventually in our favor, then we get our deductible paid back to us and the claim disappears from our homeowner’s policy. Additionally, since USAA put this in mediation because it’s clearly not our fault (or something wrong with the house), it will (hopefully) not affect our homeowner’s insurance. So we filed that claim this week, and had an adjuster come out pretty quickly. They’re trying to sort out what of this mess is related to the original claim back in Feb, and which is related to the unrelated flooding claim from May, and what is new-claim-but-really-roofer’s-fault. They have to get a lot more info and probably come back a few times, and we’re currently waiting to see what they will approve of the claim. Hopefully it’ll be the whole thing because we really can’t afford to fix this on our own.

In the meantime, the roofers were scheduled to come by this past Tuesday, but had to cancel because it rained for several days. Yay for still having a hole in our roof! They eventually came at the end of the week though they changed days multiple times and finally just showed up late one afternoon, causing Jason to have to work from home more than he was supposed to. The roofing manager came with the subcontractors to verify the work was done properly, and they did a bunch of work to the siding and roof. The manager actually had them rip up their new work and redo some of it because it wasn’t to his liking, and he’s supposed to come back on Monday to do a leak test. That’s frustrating again, because Jason has to be at work on Monday and I have no idea how to verify that the test will be done properly…sigh.

In better news, I decided this week to rearrange my bedroom and living room, since everything was torn apart anyway. I was tired of having the living room arranged around the TV only, and also have it function as a walkway. So the books came downstairs, the decor came downstairs, the TV changed walls, the piano moved into the living room, and we now have a cozy little living room space with a walkway behind it. Upstairs, my office space in the bedroom moved over to the previous book area, and all our exercise equipment moved to my old office area. We now have four distinct quadrants of the bedroom: sleeping, office, exercise/yoga, and a sitting/reading area. It’s not fully complete, but I’m enjoying the current setup so far!