Tuesday was the Big Busy Day.

Tuesday morning I got up at 5am as is my norm, packed the husband and kid off to work and daycare respectively, then waited for the insurance adjuster who said that he would be there at 7:30am. Miraculously, he arrived at 7:15, which was just dandy with me since I had Much to do that day. He was extremely nice and cool and grabbed his ladder and tromped all over our roof. He dutifully noted that yes, the top of our chimney really was gone, and then found another area where we had some shingle damage. Amazingly, we suffered no other roof damage, which he attributed to the high qualilty of shingles we had on our roof. And the fact that we had high quality shingles actually surprised me, since Sunrise Homes is not exactly the gold standard for home construction. But I can’t really complain about them now, since out of 60+ homes in our neighborhood, we only have four Blue Roofs, and only two houses took major damage, even with winds over 150mph, and one of those was from a humongous tree taking out the second story.

So, after he took measurements he climbed down and then took measurements of the back yard where our privacy fence used to be. I explained that the cleared land next to our house was a playground and so we’d had to clear away all the debris from the downed fence since there were broken boards and nails and stuff, and we really didn’t want to have the kids hurt by any of it. He took measurements of the yard, then asked me about other losses including food, debris and tree removal, evacuation expenses, etc, and then went to his truck and dinked with numbers for a while. After about ten minutes he came back inside and gave me two checks for amounts which I considered to be quite fair. So far I’m impressed with State Farm. Yes, it took two and a half months for an adjuster to come out to the house, but I did have one call me a week after the storm to find out how critical my damage was, and when I informed him that ours was minor he told me flat out that it would be a while before anyone would get to me. I have no problem with that.

Next on the agenda for the day was racing to the courthouse. I had to testify in a trial against a man accused of possession of child pornography, and since I did all the computer forensics on the stuff, my testimony was pretty much key to the whole case. I didn’t get called to the stand until late morning, but then I testified for over an hour until finally the judge called a lunch break. When we came back from lunch I was back on the stand and testified for another hour and a half or so. The most excellent thing was finally being qualified as an Expert Witness in computer forensics and digital imaging. I’ve been qualified as an Expert Witness in Video Analysis for about a year now, but I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get qualified in computer forensics. A lot of CF people have this problem, because usually these cases don’t go to trial and you can only get qualified if you’re on the stand for trial or motions. Usually if someone gets popped for kiddy porn and the CF confirms it, the bad guy pleads out. Well, this guy was a multiple sex offender, and so the state wanted to triple-bill him, and thus did not offer any pleas. Sucks for him. Good for me.

I finally got released from court in late afternoon, and asked the prosecutor to please call me with the outcome since I then had to race home, change clothes, then drive to Slidell to help Kat pack her house up into a moving trailer for her move to Oregon. (Still jealous!!) We worked our asses off getting most of her worldly possessions stuffed into the trailer (with one break to watch “House”) and I finally left there at about 11pm.

Got home, stuffed something vaguely edible into my mouth, checked on the baby and tucked her in, and dropped into bed shortly before midnight. Didn’t even take my makeup off.

Then up at 5am again the next morning.

Needless to say, I’m pretty behind on the whole NaNoStuff.

Oh, and the jury came back with guilty on all counts.