A cautionary word of advice: if you haven’t already made your new year’s resolution, please pledge to do something: take photographs of everything in your house and upload them to an online photo site like Flickr or Picasa.  Write down serial numbers of all of your electronics and valuables and store that on a thumb drive or an online document management site like Google Docs.

We’re in the middle of a prolonged tiff with our insurance company over ownership of some of the stolen items, and having pictures and serial numbers would have been a tremendous help.

Your photographs don’t have to be high-quality, but just having them on hand is a big help.  If you have a video camera, even better.  Narrate while you shoot video of everything you own that you know you’d need in case it was stolen.

We were fortunate enough to have original boxes for some of our items and all of my power tools, but for the jewelry, electronics and computer stuff that was stolen that we had no records of, well, the fight continues.

So please, take an inventory of your items and catalog them in a secure location.  You’ll be glad you did if you ever have to deal with an insurance company’s claims department.