Good News!!!

Our car insurance people got back to Hubby this morning and it was good news!!! Finally! Some good news. They're going to give us $5100 for our 10 year old Grand Marquis!! Fantastic news!! We're looking at a 2004 Grand Marquis for sale for $7500. So we won't have hardly any car debt.

Also, there's good news on the nutty neighbor front. Since we moved in, we've had a nutty neighbor catty-corner from our house. In his yard, just for fun, he keeps a 6 foot Jesus, 4 foot angels on either side of his driveway, plus a smattering of 5 or 6 foot tall angels scattered around the yard. Also there is a nice collection of tombstones (no joke) both in the front and back yard. Each tombstone, upon installation, creates a flurry of wheel barrow and shovel movement around the yard. Last time, though, I strongly suspected that there was nothing in the wheel barrow, he just kept moving it and walking around with a shovel. There's a 40 foot wooden cross in the back yard. There's an enormous eagle sculpture on his roof where the eagle is just about to land on a huge sphere. He has slowly formed a mosaic over the majority of his driveway. He has installed stepped terraces over his whole yard. Just after the birth of my son, he installed two coup-alas on the top of his house to look like church belfries.

Please understand, he is not religious. He's just a nut. This is the same guy who during neighborhood yard sales will loudly advertise that he has underwear for sale. He refuses to shake hands, too.

We have a home owners association that prohibits all of these items and they're sufficiently scared of him and wouldn't say anything to him, much less fine him, for years. Finally, there has been a court order forcing him to remove all that stuff. And the amazing thing is that YESTERDAY HE MOVED ALL THE STATUES, TOMBSTONES, CROSSES AND THINGS!! It took him all day with one hireling and they took a sledge hammer to a couple of the tombstones.

All us neighbors were calling each other to report what we could see out of our windows while peeking and not obviously staring. I set up my camera and would zoom so I could more closely examine things. Awesome!!!

And then....and then.....

Oct 19th, Tuesday morning, I rear-ended two SUVs. Stop and go traffic. They stopped, I went. Couldn't swerve because of stopped traffic in the lane to the left and large SUV in the lane to the right. One passenger went to the ER, but her car companions didn't seem that worried about her. She had lower back pain and had been sitting in the back seat.

Quint was home in bed. My cell phone was on the coffee table at home. So I borrowed the off duty cop's cell phone and woke up my husband. So he had to dress himself, and Quint, and then take Quint to Priscilla's before he could come rescue me.

The car did its job. This is why we buy big huge cars. With this much damage, I didn't have a scratch. The airbags deployed but didn't scratch me. The wheel did not touch my belly at all. The worst that can be said of the car's performance was that the airbags caused a whole lot of smoke. That's what drove me out of the car at high speed.

Hubby had a feeling that I'd have a wreck that morning when I was about to leave. He didn't say anything about it because I've been kind of fragile lately. You know, extra hormones, extra stress, etc.... Hubby handled it extremely well. No (extra) guilt was induced. He was light hearted (proportionally), matter of fact, logical, and let me cry on his shoulder. Usually when he's concerned about something that he can't control, it comes across as angry. There was none of that. I had told him on the phone that the car was probably totaled, so he was ready for that. But his first view was of the back of the car.

He said, "Honey, that doesn't look so bad. Why do you think it's totaled?"
I said, "You haven't seen the front yet."
When he did see the front, he said, "Oh."

So we're shopping for another Grand Marquis. In our married life, we've had two Grand Marquis, one Crown Victoria, and one Lincoln Towncar. If you think about it, those are virtually the exact same cars. We really like what we like.

So I'm OK, the grape is OK, and Quint and Hubby were home in bed when it happened.