Z/Web

I spent the morning trying to get homeowners insurance. Now this is where I get annoyed at the world. From articles I read my new home is considered a modular or pre-fabricated home. It is not a mobile (manufactured) home which sit on a permanent metal sheath and have wheels for transport. My new home was simply built in a factory (actually better than a site-built since it’s not sitting in the elements during construction) and transported to the site on flat-bed trucks and assembled there on a real concrete foundation. To me this is a real house: it has real 2x6 construction, real walls with drywall, etc. Unless you’re a contractor, you’d never know by looking that it’s manufactured. My current place is definitely a trailer: it’s above ground on wheels, has a hitch in front, and the walls are paper thin (literally only 3” thick). Yet for reasons of stupidity or politics, the two homes are both considered “manufactured” and exactly the same for purposes of mortgage loans and homeowners insurance! It is really annoying. Many homeowners policies don’t cover manufactured homes and most insurance companies charge a premium for them, as I discovered today. I finally found one that wasn’t charging me two to three times the typical rate (it’s still about 40% higher), but it took some research. What’s annoying is they are grouping me in with trailers and mobile homes when this place is definitely unlike those. My insurance is higher because I’m grouped in with trailers that blow over in wind storms! That’s really stupid but unless I want to start my own lobbyist group and fight huge corporations, there’s not a lot I can do to change those technicalities.

Got some encouraging news from the bank. We’re moving forward with the new loan, so that’s good. It’s still too early to tell if there are some obstacles ahead but we’ll know soon. Even better news came from the bank’s appraisal department. Because the appraiser is going to Hawaii next week for vacation, he got out to the house yesterday and turned in his report today — wicked fast! Normally it can take two or three weeks, apparently. Best of all, he appraised the house at more than what I’m paying! That’s really good news on many levels: it means it’s a good house, I’m getting a great deal, and it helps my LTV ratio. (That’s loan-to-value, a bank term expressing the ratio of my loan to the value of the property. Since my value just went up, that means my loan is for a smaller percentage of the value, so in a sense it’s like I’m borrowing less. You see, I’m learning a lot about these things!) Anyway, I feel much less depressed today. Depending on what happens with the loan meeting on Monday, I think I’ll start packing on Tuesday. My plan is to box up 85% of my belongings and put them in a storage unit. The only stuff I’ll keep out will be stuff I’m using on a daily basis (TV, computer, bed, furniture, some kitchen stuff) and things I plan to sell at a moving sale. That way when it comes time to bring the moving truck, I’ll be 85% packed. But for that to happen I’ve got to get started. I’ve got a small car, which means I can only move a few boxes at a time, and a lot of small stuff (tons of books) which takes a while to pack. I’d also like to sort through stuff and throw stuff away if I can. Usually when I move I run out of time and have to just throw everything in boxes for sorting later. I’ve still got boxes I haven’t unpacked from my last move eight years ago!

Time again for a needed break and stress relief. This looked like a cool Thunderbirds spoof, but coming from the creators of the semi-funny South Park I wasn’t sure. Well, this film definitely had its crudity and foul language, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the South Park movie. That’s because it’s actually funny most of the time; even the dirty stuff was funny because it was parodying the original “tame” marionette show. The story itself is a jab against the USA being the world’s police force. For instance, Team America goes in and destroys Paris in the process of stopping a handful of terrorists. But what I really liked was the poke in the eye to Hollywood, where all the liberal actors (a group hilariously known as the Film Actors Guild… I’ll let you figure out the acronym) ban together to protest against Team America and violence, then end up helping the bad guy and getting slaughtered in the process. We actually get see marionettes of Helen Hunt, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and many others get destroyed. It was very fun.

The marionette work was very impressive. At the same time it was both cheesy (no attempt is made to hide the strings) and sophisticated (the puppets eyes and faces were amazing and actually conveyed real emotions), a tough thing to do. The bottom line is this a fun film. It’s hilarious, crude, and definitely socially unacceptable, which gives it a good rating in my book.