The Story

In all my retelling of the van story, I seemed to have gotten mixed up and thought I put it on here. I guess not so here it is:

On New Year's Eve we had dropped the van off early in the evening after picking up Larry's truck. He was going out of town the next day to go hunting (I stayed home due to a super-duper nasty cold). While he was gone I was going to drive his little MR2. Well when a friend took me to pick it back up, it was gone. The police found it a few days later in the condition you see. To the best of our guess and with what happened, we figure some young people decided to celebrate New Years with a different kind of "fireworks". They somehow got in to the van, found our hidden key, went for a joy ride, stole the battery (of all the things to steal. and they even tried to cut it out before wising up and just unscrewing it), and then lit the seat behind the driver seat. The windows were rolled up, so it smothered itself out, otherwise the whole thing would have burnt to a crisp.
The reason we have it back is a whole other mess. We had an insurance payment I had to pay on NYE, and every time I called to take care of it they said their computers were down due to updates, call back in a couple of hours. Well I guess when I did get one supposedly working, it really wasn't. There was some screw up and our payment was returned, causing us to supposedly not have coverage on the date it was stolen. No one found out about this till mid January after the claim was almost complete. And the person to discover first was actually me when going through records. So even though I supposedly didn't have coverage (I went to remake the payment and they told me they wouldn't except it. I had to pay a balance owed, which happened to be money to cover the grace period which is when the van was stolen, before I could set up a new policy.) They had almost completed the claim 3 weeks after the loss. But once that was brought up, I wasn't allowed to fix it. They just put a dead stop and denied it. We have spoken with a couple people who said that what they did was wrong. Weather the payment return was our fault or not, they shouldn't have gone that far with it after the mistake (which was handling all of it), to then just deny us. So we are starting the process of fighting that now...ugh.
So as you can see with all this, 2009 hasn't been my best year so far.