Fire & Ice (& Rain)

Rain

On Thursday night I was in a wreck. Fortunately, I'm OK, my car is OK, and no one else was involved. It was rainy and generally gross and I over corrected on a curve (twice), twisted my car around, plowed through some lady's mailbox, and ended up in 8 inches of mud and hay!

I was on Fox Rd. coming from my dentist's office to the Honda dealership on Capital to meet Brian to drop off my car for an inspection, oil change, and some other work. I drew a picture of the whole thing on Photoshop so that you can get a feel for what happened. The red line is the path my car took and the blue line is the mail box I plowed through:

I'm super, duper lucky that no other cars were coming because I definitely crossed over into the other lane before I jerked back. When my car finally stopped, I had landed in this lady's newly grass-seeded front yard in 8 inches of mud and hay. It was GROSS, but I'm really lucky that the mud slowed down my car or I probably would have hit a tree. I'm also really lucky that I went clear across her driveway and not over the huge ditch that probably would have sent my car airborn.

Right after it happened, I immediately called Brian who was pretty close nearby and two people stopped to make sure I was OK. One of the people who stopped was the guy named German (he's Hispanic, so it's pronounced Herman) and he was super, super nice. He stayed with me until Brian got there and then helped Brian get my car out of the mud.

After the car was out, we went in to me the lady who owns the property and it turns out that she owns an African-American beauty shop and had all these customers in there. They were all very nice, but it was incredibly evident that Brian and I are extremely white. It was so out of a comedy movie!

One of the customers has a husband who does yard work and other handy work, so he came over and talked with Brian and he agreed to fix her yard and put in a new mailbox, so all we had to do was cut her a check for parts and labor. Yay, for small miracles.

After we got settled up, Brian was able to drive my car to the Honda place, where, luckily, we already had an appointment scheduled! Turns out, the only issue with the car was that the alignment was out of whack and the bump stops and the right strut needed to be replaced. I have no idea what these things are either.

It also passed inspection, had a bunch of other already-scheduled work done, got an oil change, and had the A/C fixed! My A/C and heat have been broken since August 2008! But, I've been too lazy to go get it fixed! But, now, all is well! :-) So hopefully, if nothing catastrophic happens, my car should be in good shape for the next couple of years. Our goal is to not have to replace my car until we get the new car paid off. No thank you to having two car payments at the same time!!

Fire

After we picked up my car today, we went to Lowe's to pick up a few things. We finally got around to buying a firesafe. It's not like we really have anything really valuable to put in one (none of grandma's old pearls or anything like that), but we did want to have our super important paperwork protected in case of a fire or something like that.

As I was putting the stuff in it tonight, I started thinking about the differences between a fire safe and a safe deposit box at the bank. I'm not really one for conspiracies or anything like that, but I can't imagine paying to have our stuff "imprisoned" in some box at some bank that you can only access at the most inaccessible hours known to man. Maybe I'm foolish and maybe I'll regret it if our house burns down and the fire safe doesn't do what it's supposed to do, but at least I'm the most comfortable with the decision. Who knows?

So, anyway, this is the safe we got; it's not too big, but it should be just right for what we need it for:

Ice

While we were at Lowe's, we also bought a freezer to put in the garage. As you can see from the following pictorial representation, our regular freezer is packed to the hilt and it is not uncommon for something to fall out on your foot when you open it:

The new one is going to be delivered by Lowe's on Sunday (for free!!). We were originally going to get a chest freezer, but as we looked at all the ones available, we realized that a chest would be really impractical and it would be super hard for us to get to the stuff in the bottom, so we decided to get a regular freezer:

I am so, so, so excited about it arriving. It will be incredibly nice to be able to buy stuff when it's on sale and have enough space to freeze it!