Is Miss Cleo hiring?!

My older brother had a bit of a home disaster last week; the SIL was out doing something or other while the brother was at work, and she came home to find a house that was in the process of being involuntarily converted to an indoor swimming pool. The water supply pipe for the toilet in the front bathroom had burst, and whowoulda thunk they could have put out that much water in such a relatively short amount of time. I haven't seen the pictures yet, but he said that most of the rooms were under 1-2 inches of water. yuck!

Now waaayyyy back somewhere down the line in another blog, I have mentioned that I believe my SIL to be a little bit crazy. I use the term "crazy" at it's most UN-politically correct usage, in that I literally have suspected in the past that she has some pretty serious mental health issues that need to be addressed. She's sweet, she loves my brother, she'd give you the shirt off of her back if she thought you needed it more than her ...but she's still an agoraphobic type who believes that someone is trying to spy on her through her television set and that the government is in / has been in collusion with space aliens.

Since we currently have a fair-sized segment of the population that believes our current president is a closet Muslim that performs late-term abortions for fun in the back room of the White House while worshiping Karl Marx and has somehow time-traveled back to Hawaii in order to plant a fake birth certificate and newspaper announcements of his birth (which actually took place in Kenya during a Satanic lodge meeting); HER problems suddenly seem a lot less severe all of a sudden though; that or the WHO has missed out on the possibility that borderline schizophrenia may be contagious (one can never be TOO sure about these things). Since McCain lost the election, I've seen members of my own family that used to make fun of my SIL behind her back start believing in things that make her paranoid stuff sound almost reasonable by comparison though; ...I'm done throwing stones.

So anyway ...a few days before I was asked if I would babysit the tiny terrors; I was asked if I would consider house-sitting as well. And it was really weird how I was asked ...my brother simply asked if I would consider it, and I said that I'd rather not, but would be more than willing to go by and check the house daily (or at least every other day). This was fine with him ...but when I talked to SIL, her "sense of urgency" about asking me to physically stay there was almost creepy, and I kinda knew there was something else going on (I learned a long time ago not to even ask ...it's a LOT easier to hold a straight face when you don't know the reasons). To this day she remains convinced that working in one particular room of their house causes her family members to die of natural causes (because in the last 6 years, 4 family members have died within a week of the times she was working in there); color me a real dickhead, but I don't tend to go TOO far out of my way to accommodate her "beliefs." I'm an "agnostic humanist;" a bit cynical, and when one is a card-carrying member of the "evil atheist conspiracy" to begin with ...being a skeptic comes right along with that. I'm polite but firm ...just like when Mom or my sister invites me to church on Easter Sunday.

They dropped the whole "house-sitting" thing without too much fuss (all things considered), and were happy with me simply taking care of the evil ones. They got back fine, and all was well in the world.

Well, it was until a little over a week later when the water line broke. When my brother told me that the insurance company asked that the (plastic) water pipe be mailed to them for "testing" to supposedly see if they could pass on the liability to the hose manufacturer, I immediately smelled a rat. I asked him if he'd had the hose changed since they've lived there, and he said no they had not. I told him that the hose manufacturer would simply say "it's plastic for Chrissakes; they aren't designed to last forever!" ...and that they were going to try to blame HIM for not replacing it before it broke. He didn't really believe me (or at least was skeptical ...I've been burned by what I hope is a statistically scary amount of times by insurance companies though), but he patiently listened to me when I told him to stick with the "Dewd ...I work in the telecommunications field; I had no idea a license in preventative plumbing was required in my homeowners policy. When stuff breaks, I fix it ...but not before."

Well ...I was correct. So was my defense, they dropped that line fairly quickly. But then there was the NEXT disaster. The very next day after the flooding, the foundation on that side of the house split. And when I say split, I MEAN split!!! The visible foundation is broken on two corners, the mortar between the exterior bricks of the house broke, the paint in the corner bedroom room came off the walls when the crack appeared from ceiling to floor. There are plenty of pictures, the clean-up /estimation crews can attest the foundation was not damaged (or at least not obviously broken) on the day of the incident.

...so now the homeowners insurance has declined to cover the foundation damage since the pipe that broke was not WITHIN the foundation. The crews fixing the damage won't do the fix-up work until the foundation is repaired.

Although the insurance may have a somewhat valid argument on the surface, I can't see any court upholding it. Any way you slice it, the damage to the house (via the "iffy" foundation damage) wouldn't have occurred without the flooding, and that IS covered in the policy with no written exclusions pertaining to the foundation. He'll need to get an attorney at this point since he doesn't have the 20 grand just laying around the house for the foundation repair in the meantime.

So it sucks to be him right now.

Before I continue with this, I guess I should mention that my brother (both of my brothers actually) is also an agnostic and at least a religious skeptic. I was honestly a bit surprised when he told me ...out loud, that he guessed he needed to start paying more attention to his wife's "premonitions" ...it was a little over a week late, but she damned sure had a premonition that something bad was going to happen.

Well ...a lot of stuff went through my head. I remembered a Robin Williams bit when he was talking about Donald Rumsfeld appearing before the American people on television with the message "We don't know when, we don't know where ...but something bad is going to happen." ...and his incredulous response about the Defense department having been co-opted by Miss Cleo.

Two days after the "premonition" ...my SIL's pickup broke down and left her stranded in a city many miles away from home. SOME people would consider that sort of thing to be a fairly bad thing. SOME people don't have a BIL to drive down and get the truck running and send you back on your way, but still. Exactly what do you define as "something bad?"

What I actually said to him though?! "Ummm ...I not only told you that the insurance company was going to try to fuck you, I even told you EXACTLY one of the ways they were going to try to do it ...and I'm nowhere NEAR being psychic." He laughed, and said "True dat!"

I can tell you right now that something bad is going to happen in your future and I can guarantee that you will find SOMETHING to fit my prediction of "something bad" if you look hard enough.

I've seen some interesting stuff in my life that I couldn't exactly explain by science, but didn't necessarily fit into the realm of the supernatural either. Some of the things that might have made a "believer" out of other people, I merely thought was kinda cool. My sister and BIL told me once about staying in a motel in East Texas on their anniversary that was supposed to be haunted. They went out to dinner and came back to the room to find... *cue eerie music now*

...there was a tube of my sisters lipstick and her hairbrush on the vanity in the bathroom, and she was sure she had put them back in her overnight bag before they left for dinner!!! (you may now start shrieking wildly) According to the BIL, they were so scared, they checked out and found another motel to stay in for the night.

I guess there are obviously some folks who believe something like this to be "proof" of supernatural entities (one must keep in mind that my BIL refused to watch the movie "Hellboy" because he believed that watching such a thing constituted an invitation to demon's to be possessed by them), but one thing I DO know is that all of my siblings and I share one particular quality...


...what was I talking about again?!