New Mexico Brand inspections

Yesterday I had the brand inspector out to replace the state required hauling permits on all the horses and the mule. The State requires that you show proof of ownership on your livestock and horses before transporting them. Since the house burned down, I have been busy doing other things, but I needed to get these permits so we can go on trail rides and other competitions. I was able to replace one set of registration papers on the three Appaloosa mares, but I didn't have anything on the mule.  I had my mom write up a letter that she sold me the mule way back in 1993. Yes the mule is that old. She was born May 3, 1993. Anyway the only other thing I have as proof of ownership is the book I wrote.
 


 Since the last half of the book is basically about the mule with photos and all. I gave a copy of it along with the letter from my mom. I got in return, a hauling permit for my mule.

I bet this is the first time that a brand inspector has been given a book to show proof of ownership for a horse or mule before.

Nice Review

I received a nice review for my book. Even though the reviewer gave it a 2 out of 4 stars because she wanted to read a more detailed horse facts and descriptions, she still gave pretty high praise for other parts of the book. To read the full  Official Review: The Horse That Haunts Dreams click here
 Things like:

"The writer’s ability to enthrall the reader with clever wording and descriptive imagery is enchanting. In addition, the story has touching moments that will engage the reader. One always has a sense of Larson’s pain and joy while she recalls her memories."

And 

"As an added bonus, there is a second part to the book that involves a “monster” of a mule who Larson lovingly calls the Shy monster. These short chapters were a treat to read. You’ll have to read the book to know how the Shy monster created chaos, thus getting her name. The author shares pictures that anyone will find amusing. I myself had a few laugh out loud moments. The author intentionally separates the two parts of the book which I found ingenious. In this way, the two stories flowed effortlessly."

Anyway I'm a happy camper tonight. That just made my day.  

wood stove install

Yesterday we had to make a mad dash to get the last boxes of stone to finish off the backing for the wood stove. 

The stone company called us on Wednesday Dec 31st at about 10:45 in the morning to inform us that the stone we ordered had come in. Then they told us they would be closing at noon. It's a 2 hour drive for us to get there so we wouldn't make it that day. They also said they'd be closed the rest of the week and the next time they would be open was January 5th. Then we got a call from the Wood stove installer. He scheduled to come out on January the 6th. Our wall looked like this as the stone company had miscalculated the amount of stone we would need.

But we were able to get our stone yesterday and get it all set up so now this morning it looked like this:

  

The wood stove crew arrived later in the morning and this evening, the space looks like :

And now we have the first fire in our new stove in the new house!!

I'm so glad we finally got a replacement wood stove. Now I'm going to be busy cutting wood for the fire.

I really hate

Keith and I bought some furniture to add to the new house, but now all we are doing is fighting with the seller to replace it because it was delivered damaged.

I found this wonderful horse themed furniture with green accents.  Oh boy how can I turn down both green AND horses. LOL. I couldn't, however now all I have is damaged furniture.  They did come in boxes and the boxes appeared undamaged, but as soon as we opened it, we saw this:

The hinges on the door of this cabinet are completely damaged. One hinge is broken in two and the other is ripped out of the wood. but that's not the only damage. the top was almost ripped off and one of the legs is broken.

To get an idea of what it would look like all put together, it should look more like this only with the door in place.

The second cabinet was less damaged. Only a portion of the corner of top was broken.

So it looks a little better and is more easily repaired than the first, but still we received to damaged pieces of furniture and can't get the company to respond to our complaints.

Hopefully the Better Business Bureau will be able to get them to correct the issue and we get a resolution soon.

Painted Ponies

Before the fire, I had several Painted Ponies that were destroyed.  I wanted to purchase back some of the models that I'd lost and I've been given a few for Christmas. My problem now is in the display because they come in "lefties" and "righties". I have all of these Cornices ( I think that's the right word) over the top of all of my windows, and they make a great displace place for my Painted Ponies. But I think I'm going to need to buy several more ponies. I will probably need to put the "lefties" over one window and the "righties" over the other window. 
Right now they are all together:

But as you can see I only have the two that face left and a whole bunch that face right. I've put them like that for now to balance out the numbers, but do you think I can justify buying another 4 "lefties" and move those remaining to "righties" to the other side?

What do you think?  I think I need to get shopping. LOL

Trying to find replacement dishes.

I used to have all Blue Willow dinnerware in the old house, but since I'm forced to start over, I wanted something different. I've been looking for horse related dinnerware for a while.
The problem is that none of it is economical.
I really like this:


But a place setting for 4 people is over $400.00 and as I've been searching, I find that is actually not bad expense wise compared to others. The serving dishes are available separately.

I also found this one:


But it doesn't have any additional place settings available such as platters and serving dishes etc.
We had ordered something similar to this:

and we ordered an 8 place setting with additional serving dishes and canisters and a cookie jar etc. Basically everything we would need. But the company that makes them has become unreliable and the company we purchased them from hasn't been able to provide us with the dishes. So we are still searching. 

I've been looking at these plates:

and these:

and

and these are really my favorite:

As you can see I have expensive tastes in dinnerware. I still haven't decided which one I'll finally go with and for now we have a set of four plain green stoneware plates that Keith's mom brought from a thrift store in Massachusetts.
So if anyone knows of some really cool looking horse related dinnerware available for sale, please let me know.

New House Part 2

Here are some of the other things we've done in the new house. I wanted light in the master bathroom, but didn't want the fully exposed window or curtains. The house came with mini blinds through out the house including the master bath, but I don't like those and will be working on replacing them as we go along.  For the bath though, I thought it would look cool with some stained glass window treatments. So I was shopping at Amazon again and found this. 

I wasn't sure how it would look and I didn't want to buy too much of it so I only go one and it fit one side of the bathroom window quite well. So now I'm off to get a second one for the other side of the window. Then I'll have light an privacy and when I want to look out the window, all I have to do is open it.  This is how the window looks with just the blinds.

Then we put up the stained glass film. I've left the blinds up for now because until we get the second side done, we still need a little privacy. But I think it looks really cool.

We also had an old dresser that came from Keith's family in Massachusetts that was being stored out in the shed because we didn't have room for it in the old house. 

It needed a little restoration work because that top was not the original. It was supposed to have a marble top to it. We took it down to a local woodworker who glued some parts back together and found us a granite top to put on it.

We had planned on using it in the guest bedroom, but once we found the other furniture for the room, it became obvious that the dresser just wouldn't fit in with the other decor.

We also didn't have any type of TV stand or entertainment center so we decided to move the dresser to the living room and re purposed it as the entertainment center. The drawers work very well to hide the DVD's we have been re acquiring, and right now there is also room to store some of the extra pillows and throws that I use to help keep warm.

New House

In less than a year, we have gone from this.

to this:

Well as you can tell we finally have a new house. Here they are moving it on to our foundation.

Then just as soon at they had it all put together and at least water tight, it came a gully washer.

 

We finally got it all ready for living in.

Then we started filling it up with all the new stuff. We knew that we wanted to put in a new wood stove because we always have a power outage during the year and need some type of back up heat. So Keith started building the hearth for the wood stove. He even built a cardboard replica of the size of the wood stove to use as a guide.

Right now we are stuck at partly finished, because we didn't order enough stone. I think the guys at the stone company didn't compute my request right. I told them we were going all the way up the wall, but they only calculated for the lower portion as that is the only amount required for protection. So we had to order another box and we are waiting for it to come in.

While we were waiting on that, I found this wonderful tile on sale at Amazon and just had to buy it.

 So Keith went to work on it and now I have a really awesome backsplash behind my stove. The smaller edge tiles we found at Home Depot. I think they accent the main tiles really well.

Now we are finally in and enjoying our new home. It doesn't feel as strange as it used to and it's way better then living in the camper trailer. I still miss things daily. I go to look for something and then realize, that was the other life in the other house. But it's getting better and I have new stuff now. 
I'm thankful that we've been fortunate enough to get everything taken care of as easily as we had. I can't imagine the horrors of having to go through something like this with out homeowners insurance.  While we were living in the camper trailer provided by my mom, I watched the news several times about others who also lost about as much as we did. We didn't really get much in the way of community support. Not like others. Almost every thing we did was on our own or family support. But we had insurance and that covered most things. 
Things I've learned from this experience:
1. Don't let your homeowners insurance lapse when you pay off your mortgage. We had made the final mortgage payment in March and Keith was waiting for the release of lien documents to take to the insurance. I don't know if was intending to drop the insurance, but since we were still waiting on documents, we were still covered and paid up. The insurance covered the full coverage on the house.
2. Contents- Make sure to update your contents insurance regularly if you pick up anything like family heirloom antiques or extra guns, or if you have a lot of jewelry. We only had a contents insurance for $39,000 but in the end turned over a list that contained nearly $75,000 in items. Many antiques from my dad's side of the family, all of my silver jewelry (I was completely shocked to learn that I had accumulated over $10,000 in jewelry alone) and all of our guns. As we were set up to do mounted shooting competitions, we had accumulated around $27,000 in guns and ammo for competitions. However since we hadn't updated our contents insurance, we are still fighting with the insurance company as they have "depreciated" our items down to only $29,000 and apparently aren't interested in paying out the full value of the contents insurance.
3. Jewelry- If you have any type of plastic container for your Jewelry, Get them out of it NOW! I had a large plastic box that I kept much of my jewelry in because it was easily portable and easy to use for travel.  Well it melts ALL over your jewelry and entraps your items in a horrible blob.  The jewelry that survived the best was in regular jewelry boxes from the fine jewelry stores and in surprisingly also some of my wooden jewelry boxes.  I did go out and purchase a pottery jewelry box after the fire that I'll be keeping some thing in now.
4. If you have guns and ammo, get fire proof safes AND metal ammunition cans. We had one set of plastic ammunition cans that we had gotten at a Friends of the NRA dinner once. The rest of the ammunition was all in US military grade metal cans. None of the ammunition actually survived the fire, but almost all of the ammo in the military cans stayed in the cans. The rounds in the plastic cans when everywhere.  
Well that's about it for this round. See ya later.

Published in nook format

The Horse That Haunts Dreams is now available in nook format for those of you who don't have a kindle.
If you are interested, you can find it here at Barnes and Noble.com.

IN other news, we finally got our new house after the fire. We have replaced most of the furnishings but we haven't replaced the wood stove yet. Hubby is working on the stonework in the corner where the wood stove will go and we are waiting on the certified installer to come install it. 
Otherwise, things are looking up on the house front and I'm back to working on some writing projects also.

Frustration

Today is a vent and rage day.  Feel free to ignore this post as I just need to get some stuff off my chest, and this is going to be really long.

April 29th, 2014 I came home to a completely burned out shell of a house. I basically had nothing except the clothes on my back, the extra stuff we usually keep in the horse trailer and what ever had been locked away in the shed. House wise that wasn't much. At least all the saddles and horse tack was saved. 

So we filed our insurance claim and started getting reimbursement for portion of the house and contents. Unfortunately due to some other bills, and the cost of the new house, we needed to take out a new mortgage even though we'd just paid off the old one in March of 2014.  

All was going well, we found a replacement house, the contractor started in on the foundation, the mortgage company started processing the paperwork, the insurance company started processing our claim, and we thought the home company had started building the house.  

Everyone keeps saying how it was a good thing we weren't home, and that no one was hurt (except the cat), but We found out a few things during the fire and investigation right after that bothered us.
1. The local dispatcher dispatched the WRONG fire department not once, but TWICE before they finally dispatched the right one the third time despite the correct fire department CALLING into Dispatch to request to be sent because they could see the smoke straight from their bay doors.
2. The fire crews ADMITTED to driving past our gate not just once, but again TWICE because they didn't have maps of the area and didn't think it was the right gate. So they broke into all the neighbors properties trying to find a way to our house but didn't bother with our gate. GRRRR

So if we had been home, we could have done the following:
1. Used the fire extinguisher that was sitting by the front door.
2. Called the dispatcher ourselves and gotten the correct fire department to respond in a timely fashion.
3. Had the gate to the property open and directed firefighters to the correct property.
4. Might have been able to at least save the cat and maybe a few other important items.

So honestly at this point I don't ever want to hear "It's a good thing you weren't home" because I don't believe that.

Anyway there's even more to my ranting and raving.  Apparently the insurance company believes that our $75,000 content list that we turned into them is only worth $29,000 and closed our cases even though we were insured for up to $39,000 in contents. 

Two lessons learned here:
1. Make sure your content's coverage is updated when you purchase new items or bring in family heirlooms. We didn't so things like Grandma's 300 year old bed and other antiques weren't fully covered.
2. Make sure to double check that you agree to the final payment. Keith thought they were sending him a partial payment and it ended up being what the insurance wanted to give to close the case. 

Then there is the mortgage company and the house company.
I told the mortgage company that we needed a construction loan and they indicated that they could do that. But almost a month into the process I found out they'd lied to me and were not doing a construction loan. So the home company had to do an extra construction loan.

The home company told us on May 30th when we signed the agreement and put a 10% deposit of almost $12,000.00 that it would take two weeks to get approved plans back from the state CID and they were supposed to send the plans right away.  Unfortunately they just sat on the plans for another couple weeks. So they didn't do anything until they finally got the plans back on July second.  An entire month had gone by where they hadn't done any work on my house. By then, the foundation was already completed and is now just waiting for the house to be moved in.  Anyway the house company was shut down until July 7th and that is when they finally started working on my house.  A total of six full weeks AFTER we put down the deposit.  What's even worse is that they can't give me a time frame of when they will have the house ready. 

Right now, EVERYTHING and I mean literally EVERYTHING is riding on when the house will be delivered and set up. The foundation contractor can't proceed with anything on his end, the mortgage can't proceed until they get the "occupancy" permit. I can't buy or get furniture, house wares, dishes, or even more clothing until the house gets here because we don't have a place to put it. 

Now for the most frustrating and probably stupid on my part thing.  People keep asking what they can do to help. We have to tell them "nothing". The reason is because we don't have a place to store anything. People have offered furniture, etc and we've had to turn them down. We are currently living in a 7 ft wide by 20 ft long camper trailer. We barely have room for what's already in there and no room for anything else. The storage shed we already had on the property is full and we had to get a second one for some of the other items. It's still not big enough to store furniture in. 

Another reason that I've been turning people down is because I don't want just anything in my new house. This is probably the most stupid thing ever. I'm probably being really selfish at the moment, but when I move in, I want to choose what towels I have, what dishes I buy, etc. I don't want some mish-mash of stuff cluttering up the house. I know that later on I could gather it all up and donate it to some thrift store or charity, but right now, I just don't feel like doing that. 

But on the flip side, I really feel like our situation has been ignored. The only way it made the local paper was because one of my co-workers was a friend of the editor of the newspaper. As I watch the local news, though, other cases just make me mad. The local news ran a story about a disabled veteran who's house burned down and he was left with nothing.  Yet my house has not one but TWO veterans who are now essentially homeless and our story barely makes a middle page in a tiny, published twice a week community newspaper.  Apparently having a job and insurance (even if it doesn't cover everything) is an excuse not to help a family in need based on what I've seen so far. Or maybe I'm just mad that I've lost a lot of things that were important to me and no one else seems to really understand or care. I don't know. 

Today, I just want to be mad at everything. Tomorrow, I'll press forward and move on and try to get back to living normally. And hope my house gets delivered soon.