Up on the roof

The washer lid is fixed and the chimney work is done.
There was no charge for the return trip to correct the washer lid mistake and the construction company charged me exactly the $1,800 in the contract. Amazing – no overruns or surprises.
Well, there was one surprise.
The guy in charge of the operation, same guy who did some roof work for us in March and gave us the estimate for the chimney work, said we got severe hail damage to the roof from a cluster of storms that blew through here in late April. He says we need a new roof ($4,500) and seems confident our homeowner’s insurance carrier will agree.
If he’s right, that means we get a new roof paying just our $500 deductible.
The insurance company says they’ll send an adjuster out to look at our roof sometime next week, so we shall see.
Like I said, it’s always something.
When I logged onto our online banking connection this morning, I was astounded to see that the check I’d written to the construction company at 4:30 p.m. yesterday had already cleared. I had no idea that was possible.
The foreman must have raced to a branch of Chase Bank – it’s at least 20 miles to the nearest branch – and made the deposit before the 5 p.m. closing.
And Maria’s daughter decided yesterday that she didn’t want to wait until tonight to come home, so we cleared out the Subaru Forester as soon as Maria got home from work and headed down to Bloomington. We managed to jam all of her stuff into the car without a cubic foot of space to spare and hauled it home, arriving about 10:30 p.m.
So our empty nest lifestyle goes on hold for about three months.
Dragging the trashcans out to the curb this morning, I noticed the lawn is overdue for mowing. And it looks like we’re running a dandelion farm. I’ll get on it as soon as the dew evaporates.
The child support agreement proposed by Maria’s ex and forwarded to us by her attorney has been sitting on the center island in the kitchen for a week. Maria finally pulled it out of the envelope yesterday, but has not signed it and we haven’t discussed it.
I glanced at it this morning and stopped reading when I felt my blood pressure creeping up. The item that made me put the paper down and walk away was the requirement that we make the $100/week support payments through the county clerk’s office, rather than directly to the ex.
Back when both kids lived with her, Maria tired repeatedly to get him to make his support payments through the clerk’s office because he was a slow pay, often letting it slide for two or three weeks before catching up. Now the sonofabitch has the audacity to imply, through this request, that Maria and I require court supervision to make timely support payments.
I also read, with some amusement, his request that he be allowed to count their son as a dependent on his income tax return, beginning with the 2005 tax year. As I mentioned before, I discovered last month that the tax laws on dependents changed this year and that neither child can be used as a dependent because the both earned more than half of their support in 2005. I confirmed this with H&R Block and Maria communicated it to the ex, but he refuses to recognize it.
Fine. Explain it to the IRS, moron.