Did We Survive Hurricane Katrina or Not?

The SBA closing appointment has been officially cancelled. Dave made the call for us because I was afraid that whatever I would have had to say would have gotten us into even more trouble. Oddly enough, apparently when he explained our reasons for not wanting to accept the terms of the loan... the telephone representative suggested that we ask for a larger loan amount instead of giving up altogether. ??? Er.. after being denied twice for an 'inability to repay' - being offered a drastically reduced loan amount and refusing to accept the terms - the solution is to ask for more money? You know -- I'm just not even going to bother with that one....

In the meantime - I hadn't heard anything from Allied American - despite Mr. Brown assuring me that someone would call within 24 hours to set up an appointment for an assessment. We found out what was going on late last night when Dave's parents called. It seems that they have been calling the wrong number all week and finally decided to call one of the 'emergency contact' numbers on our application -- which happened to belong to Dave's family in Pennsylvania. I talked to Mr. Brown on Monday. He called our cell phone number (which is, as a matter of fact, our only number since Katrina). He had the number. Why did they not think to call that number again? Uh.. You know -- I'm just not going to bother with that one either...

Does anything work right the first time? The second? Within the first dozen times?

Right. And why is that, exactly?

Now -- while trying to pretend this past week simply did not happen -- we are searching for baseboards and trim in earnest. We are well aware now that no local lumber companies are carrying the casing to match our existing window and door trim. We had considered simply giving up on matching and starting over with all new trim but this would result in an extreme waste of plenty of nice woodwork that can be salvaged. Therefore, although it may be more expensive to special order casing than to pick it up in a hardware store -- in the long run it should even itself out because we will be purchasing much less than had we started over from scratch.

Have you seen this moulding?

The top profile (2415) is what we're looking for -- except we need it in 3 1/4 inches... so you see - we haven't actually found it yet. If anyone out there has any suggestions as to where we can search... please pass me an email!