Sunday night on ABC, the Extreme Home Makeover show which I never watch featured a family from Hattiesburg Mississippi. I am familiar with the neighborhood where the family lived--they had a house damaged by Katrina; the husband is on his second tour of duty in Iraq, and the house was falling apart. The wife is left with three kids to raise while hubby is overseas.

Now this puzzles me--the family had a mortgage, and it is my assumption that when you have a mortgage you have to have homeowner's insurance that will pay off to make repairs when your home is damaged. Am I wrong? No repairs had been done on this house--it was razed to the ground and the Makeover folks rebuilt it from the ground up--and paid off the mortgage for them. I heard at least 200 "Oh My God's" from the family. The new home is gorgeous, by the way.

Hubby had been brought over from Iraq--I don't know how the Makeover folks arranged that, and the family sent off to Disneyworld while construction was done. The show made me realize how much editing is done for a show like that, because no rain was shown, and it rained 24/7 while the crew was there. It was a boggy mess at the site. Building went overtime, and construction had to be halted once because the proper permits hadn't been obtained.

After the show left town, there were pleas in the paper from the contractors and others who donated tme and supplies that they were $25,000 over budget and asking for donations to get them out of the hole. I'm sure they made out okay though--and think of the publicity they got.

Bye from ole crab; susil