Tag Archives: wake up call

November 12, 2019 · 2:54 pm

Thoughts on a Tuesday 11-12-2019

Jeff Jett – LinkedIn

This morning was an adventure.

I had trouble sleeping last night, and so was up until about 2 a.m. or so. At around 5 a.m. our power started going off and coming back on again right away, over and over. We would just drop off to sleep again with a sigh and off again, on again. We finally gave up trying to sleep and got up for the day at 6. One of the reasons we were more awake that usual at that hour is that our generator is supposed to come on automatically when our power fails, and it didn’t.

I fed animals while my husband went out to look at the generator. By the time he came back in, I had lit a fire in the fireplace, because it was quite cool in the house by then (less than 20 degrees F. outside) and the generator does not run our heat or air conditioning, managing to serve hot drinks and a bagel with cream cheese. My husband had tried to jump start the battery on the generator with our truck and the jumper cables, but that didn’t work, either.

We had to wait another hour or so for O’Reilly’s, the car place, to open. I went around finding battery-powered lanterns while my husband went to buy a new battery for the generator. We installed it and got the generator going. HOORAAAAY!  We went into the house to find the public power had finally come back on.

We let the generator run a bit, and then did the test it is supposed to be doing on a weekly basis before turning it off. We have NOW put it on our calendars the day and time the generator is supposed to test itself, so that we don’t miss it. Our insulation is so good now that we can’t hear it come on unless we have the doors open. We also put it on our ‘winter prep’ list to check when we bought the battery for the generator so that we can replace it, if needed, BEFORE something like this happens again.

Since this morning, I have been going around turning lights off. We turned many on while we didn’t have power – as a habit – and forgot to turn them off when nothing happened. We also had to go to ‘manual’ on getting our garage door up without power, and then had to figure out how to hook it up again so that we can push the button on our remote again.  We reset all the clocks, turning off the alarm that was still beeping upstairs, etc.

This goes to show how spoiled we are – how dependent on electricity we are – and how very LUCKY we are that this morning served as a wake up call to be SURE we are prepared before we get snowed in!

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May 8, 2018 · 1:58 pm

Wake Up Call

We have a subscription to The Family Handyman magazine.  To be honest, we considering dropping our subscription each year, not because it isn’t a good magazine, but because very few of the projects pertain to us. About once a year, though, we find a really great project or article that reminds us why we renew. This year it’s an article called, “Avoid Insurance Surprises” by Lucie Amundsen, June 2018.

This was a wake-up call for us. We have house insurance, of course, but the article suggested that we make an appointment to have our insurance agent explain our policy in plain English, layman’s terms, so we really understood what we had. Were we SURE we had replacement insurance, rather than a lump sum that wouldn’t cover everything? How do they determine replacement cost? What do they think our house is worth? Is the well house covered? What about the shop? The greenhouse? Are we covered if our basement floods due to septic tank backup? Are all our contents covered? What restrictions do we have? What ISN’T covered? What has limits? Are there any discounts for the security stuff we installed? What would we do if we had a claim? What information would they need? Are there any endorsements or coverages we SHOULD have, but didn’t think of?

After spending 45 minutes with our agent this morning, we feel MUCH more secure. We did increase the coverage on our basement because that was limited and the limit was iffy, in our case. We DO have some homework to do. We make a DVD which has a picture of each thing we have that cost over $100. We take a pic of the receipt, too. We update it every 6 months, burning a DVD for our safe deposit box at the bank and another for our insurance agent. That’s good, but we could do better.

The first thing you’ll have to do in case of fire loss, or being blown to smithereens by a tornado, is to fill out endless forms listing each thing you lost, where you bought it and when, what you paid, etc. I’m going to do a spreadsheet using a copy of a claim form our agent gave me, so that I can go through our DVD and have a typed list I’ll put in the safe deposit box at the bank. I’ll also take more pics (like 4 views of each room) because I want to be sure that all we’ve lost can be identified.

We hope we’ll never need to file a claim, but losses happen in a matter of seconds sometimes, and it would sure be harder to list things when we’re wearing the only clothes we have on our backs and have a pen and a claim form in hand……

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Filed under Acting Like a Grownup, Bright Ideas, Surprising Information, taking care of yourself

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