Kookaburra and Insurance

*Warning: This post contains mild coarse language.

^ A remarkably not-shy kookaburra on the back railing this morning.

I noticed him perched there after wandering around the back yard a bit to inspect damage from Wednesday's gale-force insane winds. Of course there are branches down... And the house was damaged on Wednesday. Thanks to the weekend neighbour's trees. And the entire thing has been one enormous circus from beginning to end with insurance and calls and so on.

Ugh.

Lately life has been like some sort of diabolical combination of Days of Our Lives and A Country Practice. Minus the demon possession and wombats.

But let's start at the beginning.

I got back from work on Wednesday evening to find the bin missing. How irritating. Even more irritating is that I hadn't gotten around to spray-painting the house number on the bin. So the neighbour whose bin was actually missing had pinched mine to replace theirs. And I can't really go 'round and say, "Listen you thieving bastards, GIVE ME MY BIN BACK," when there's no number, etc.

Like they couldn't have taken the five minutes to call the local council to say, "Hi, bin's been nicked, please send replacement." No. They couldn't. They had to be thieving bastards. I hope they get hemorrhoids.

So I get further down the driveway and discover the house has been damaged by a great big dead branch falling from the neighbour's gum tree onto the power line, power box thing and roof, damaging it all. The power line's been yanked out of the house a bit, but thankfully it didn't cut the power off. Somehow. But the facure board has been completely shattered, which left the power stuff all dangling precariously (try explaining that to insurance when you don't know the names for most of the things involved... The words "thingy" and "stuff" really aren't all that explanatory. I had to get graphic with details and create an accurate picture based entirely on words describing what the things involved were).

Add to that an enormous leafy branch down on the driveway and about a tonne of leaf litter and so on down everywhere and I wanted to scream. A lot. Including some swearing.

Went inside and started on the process of insurance. And repairs. And all of that sort of thing. My God. I hate hold music. It's so awful, sort of like the music they have on 'planes that I assume is meant to make you feel more positive about the whole flight experience. And the worst thing is every time the "Thank-you for waiting!" voice cuts in, you get disproportionately excited that you may actually be about to speak to a real, live person who's actually looking forward to helping you.

Oh my!

The worst was going from Frank Sinatra to Michael Buble to Guy Sebastian, who was warbling about angels bringing him here. Or something. I would only welcome that if the angels were also bringing some things with which to fix the house.

Finally got to speak to a real, live person and they organised for someone to come do some basic fixing to make the thing safe, which would be followed by an assessor coming to check things out, and then some actual repairs sometime after that. The "make safe" stuff was organised for Wednesday night and the guys arrived to do that around 11.45pm. They'd been out all day and their sat nav had directed them the long, long way to my place.

Thursday was spent coughing up a lung and enough phlegm to make a lifesize phlegm accordian. I so love having the 'flu... Oh, and there was more chasing around with the insurance stuff, which hadn't been started with processing and so on. Finally got something organised late in the evening, and more stuff started happening Friday.

Although the "happening" mostly involved tradespeople coming around looking at the thing saying, "Ooh, they've done a great job with the makesafe. Nice." Although it was really a relief when the power company guys came to run a proper check on it, which showed that although it's been damaged, there's no risk of it killing us all. Unless another branch or something damages it.

So now I'm waiting for repairs to be orgainsed...

The one nice thing from this has been that the hippie neighbours from across the road wandered over this morning and offered to chainsaw up the big branches for me. How lovely of them! I'm going to let them have the wood if they want it.

But the bad thing?

Ohh, the bad thing of today.

Yeah. Those weekend neighbours whose trees damaged my house. Yeah. I was standing in the kitchen this afternoon doing the washing up when they arrived. The wife got out of the car and threw all of the things on their driveway INTO MY YARD. Were it not for the fact that the windows are the wind-out ones, I would have thrown it open and yelled, "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING YOU HUSSY!? HAVE YOU NO SHAME!?!?!"

And obviously they don't, because later this afternoon they were throwing MORE stuff into my yard.

I hope they get explosive hemorrhoids.

I'm sure I'll think more pleasantly about the weekend neighbours in a few days. I mean, really, it just means more firewood for me for winter in the end. But still. How utterly, totally, completely rude of the debris-donating bastards.

However, in happier thoughts, the kookaburra was awesome. He was so inquisitive and beautiful and I could have just reached out and patted him.