If you have not see the Strongbad “Trogdor” video, here it is.  I know its weird, but since Homestar Runner and Strongbad tend to be internet icons, I’ll let you decide if the internet is weird before the video, or after the video.  You see: my wife’s relative had her house burn down on Monday last week.  Burninated.  Most everything is gone or destroyed.  It is pretty tough since that sort of event is so life altering.  She’s still waiting on more information about insurance and hasn’t begun (to my knowledge) the process of discovering the costs of rebuilding.

As you can imagine, this post is a reminder to back up documents off-site, or to keep them in a safe-deposit box at a bank/secure location.  I need to do this, too.  Some of the documents that she had are gone forever, some can be had for a fee (reproduction and shipping and handling costs), and some are going to be sorely missed.  Things like children’s first moments, photos, some computer data, and of course various valuables that are destroyed when flames hit them.

Consider her fire as a great lesson for us to learn from.  Consider her blessing in not being home for the fire (and therefore unscathed).  Make sure you have life-important things like wills covered in duplicate.  Make sure you have considered a location to store offsite data (external hard drives or sites that offer low-cost data hosting for such cases are a good idea).  Make sure that you tell your loved ones they’re loved - you never know what might strike, but you do know it won’t be Trogdor.

Note: This post is a tiny bit light hearted because the relative is actually doing pretty well emotionally.  I’m actually feeling kind of sick, but such is life.  Gotta travel tomorrow, so we’ll see how that goes.