Rickey, Of course it was Fred. Who else his age is out driving around visiting gardeners in the middle of the afternoon? LOL If you see Billy Fred, do see if you can find out what he knows because he may know more details. Nowadays, when I ask Fred "who" he is talking about, he often can't remember names and will say something like 'you know...that guy that lives over yonder' and, of course, I have no clue who he means. Having said that, I hope that when I am Fred's age (and I'm not sure what it is but think right around 90?) I still get around as well as he does. Sometimes I do have to get Billy Fred to tell me who his dad is talking about because, while Fred always seems to have his facts straight, he does have trouble remembering names now and then. I had wondered about those goats....about how he keeps them safe because I've never seen any kind of guardian dog like a Great Pyrenees out there with them. I heard a loud growling this morning from the woods oddly enough (and I was inside the house and it sounded like it was right there in the room with me!) and it about scared me to death. As far away as your house is from ours, it is odd we've both heard that growling sound recently. It isn't like we're so close geographically that we'd hear the same growl at the same time. I've never heard this sound before and I pretty much thought I'd heard everything there is to hear around here. The dogs were going nuts in their dog yard, and I ran downstairs and didn't see a thing, but the cats were on the porch wanting to come inside. After that growling sound, I canceled my plans to work in the yard. James, I feel like much of what you say is true, but we have both good and bad government employees and always will. I know sometimes the local wildlife people seem to say whatever the 'official' story line is but their eyes and body language are telling you something else. Our local law enforcement officers are pretty good about telling us to 'do what you have to do' to stay safe, because they know they can't be everywhere at once. They also come as quickly as they can when called, but with only 1 or 2 or 3 county deputies/reserve deputies on duty at a time, their response time can be frustratingly slow. Game bird, I promise, if you tell me you see three dinosaurs crossing the road, I'll believe you. And. on a funnier note....Chris was 15 when we moved here and had a huge iguana named Alex. He built Alex a nice roomy outdoor pen, but somehow Alex would escape and run around although he always came back to the cage when he was hungry. We alerted our neighbors, and I showed Alex to Bill one day. We were watching Alex from the road and he climbed to the top of the pecan tree, which was then losing its leaves for autumn, so you could see Alex very clearly. At that point he was about 5' long. When Bill saw him, he said he needed to warn his wife and daughters because he feared they'd about run off the road and wreck their vehicles if Alex ever ran out into the road in front of them. Bill was afraid the women in his family would think Alex was an alligator. Carol, I do think a lot of people know exactly how to play the system. Tim and Chris both work at D-FW Airport, which is incorporated just like a city, and has a large Department of Public Safety consisting of police, fire and emergency medical personnel employees. Their department has several hundred employees and most are wonderful, but there are a couple that of virtually worthless. How people like that keep their jobs is just beyond me. Dawn

We shopped for insurance a year or so ago, and based on a similar thread like this, I got quotes from Amica, Anpac, AAA (the auto club), and USAA. Since we got married, we had been using Erie for our home and USAA for auto (oddly, it was cheaper that way, even with the discount you get for putting everything with one company), then about 5 years ago, Erie jacked up their homeowner rates statewide, so we moved everything over to AmEx through Costco - going through Costco got us a discount over the regular Amex rates and it was a significant savings (close to four digits) over the Erie/USAA combo. We were happy with the Costco coverage but decided to shop around a year ago because they cheesed me off when they started charging a $3/mo convenience fee to charge my premium to my credit card (it had been free for years and they didn't tell me they were going to start charging the fee - it just showed up one day). I didn't really expect to find anything cheaper since the Costco rates had thoroughly trounced everyone else when I went with them, and they hadn't really gone up that much. Anyhow, to make a long story short, Amica seemed to have good coverage, but there rates were MUCH higher than the Costco insurance. USAA was a bit higher than the Costco and AAA was right about even. We ended up going with Anpac (American Nattional Property and Casualty). They were a company that was recommended on the thread just like this one from someone who had filed a claim and been happy with the service. They have a local agent, their rates were fantastic (we saved almost $1K/year for the exact same coverage when we switched over from the Costco plan). Plus they have this thing where if you go claim free for 3 years, you start getting a percentage of your premium refunded to you at the end of each year. We're into our 2nd year now, so in another year and a half, we should start getting rebate checks from the insurance company - it's a significant percentage too -- something like 20%. I don't know how they're doing it since their premiums are already lower than all the competitors I checked. But I'm not going to complain, LOL! I (knock on wood) haven't needed to file a claim so I don't know how that will be, but the agent is very responsive and I have no reason to think the company would give me a hard time. We do have fairly high deductibles since we figure it would take a lot to get us to file a claim that would ruin our claim-free streak and cut off our rebate checks, LOL! Oh - for reference, we are in southeast PA - not a lot of significant weather stuff here, but we do get snow/ice/hail storms. We're in a fairly crime-free rural area and haven't filed a claim on either auto or home (other than a windshield chip or two) in about 10 years.

We have Farm Bureau for home and auto. Also have a life insurance policy with them (hubby) and have had both boats and rvs insured through them. We have had FB for probably 25-30 years. In this house we have had 3 roofs in 18 years. This one has been on a while (knock on wood!). For several years we had some bad spring storms with some serious hail. Both times FB was wonderful to work with. We didn't have to submit multiple estimates and the claim was paid quickly. Last year on a day I was working, I was coming back from lunch and a student and I collided. Police could not assign blame (I honestly think we were changing lanes at the same time) so each of us handled our own vehicle. They are great to work with on an auto claim. We had to use them once before for an auto claim and the one body shop in the area we would choose to use is set up with FB. All you do is take your car in. They handle everything, even a rental car if needed. My only complaint is we had a wonderful agent for years, and are not so fond of the younger agent who took on his clients (original agent retired). But it's a personality thing, I can't say he doesn't do his job. In both the roof claims and the recent car claim, our rates didn't go up. The home owners did eventually, with an explanation of so many claims, etc. due to storms in the area. It was not a major increase though. We do get discounts for having multiple policies, for having an alarm system, for having fire coverage, etc. I manage my grandmother's affairs and she has had Travelers for years. She also had a claim a few years back due to hail and they were good to deal with. However, they did the depreciating method, which I do understand. Her rates seem high compared to ours.

We use American National for everything - home, auto and umbrella. (Our umbrella policy is under $300/year, iirc -- and there's no $500K deductible, though we do have to keep the limits on our auto and home higher than the minimum since those pay first-- I suspect that is what the scenario above is saying -- the $500K "deductible" on the umbrella is actually the $500K that the auto policy pays, then the umbrella kicks in for anything over that. So the mimimum auto liability has to be $500K even though the state only requires $100K) At any rate, I've not had to file a claim but when I was rear-ended, they were helpful in dealing with the other guy's insurance. However, like someone above said, I really do think you need to switch often to get the best rates -- they have steadily jacked my rates every year in spite of not having any claims. I shop once in a while but they make it hard to compare because they give you a cash-back rebate of 20% of your premium every year after you've been claim-free for 3 years. After the cash back is taken into account, they are always the cheapest....but if we ever file a claim, we lose the cash back for 3 years. It's actually genius on their part because it discourages us from filing little claims -- we get anywhere from $700-800 back every year so losing 3 years of that would cost us around $2400 in lost cash back -- ergo we wouldn't file a claim for anything under that. That said, we are going to be adding a new teen driver to our policy soon so I fear our claim-free streak may come to an end. Anyone have any good experiences with insurance companies that don't eat you alive when you add a teenage driver????