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missybgreen

A tough 2 weeks

Since I have had a rather tough two weeks, I am going give you an explanation of why I have not been on here. It started two weeks ago Thursday, when my son, who was sick and was actually going from work where he had dropped off his doctor's excuse, towards Publix, where he was supposed to pick up his medication, when he hydroplaned on a turn. He actually did not wreck the car, but when the tail of the car slid off the road, it broke something in the axle and the tire was sitting crooked. It turns out that when you do $7000 damage to a $1500 dollar car, it's time for a new car. The worst part was that my son had been saving up to buy a used car from one of my co-workers and he had just met his goal. Now, that money, along with what they make selling the roommates car for parts, will go towards buying the roommate a new used car.

Around the same time, we found out that the county had gotten a grant to pay their county workers a bonus and to pay extra money for the first responders for every hour we worked during the pandemic. So, that money will pay for my son's car and it will be his Christmas and Birthday gift. Of course, the freedom I will get from having to drive him around will be worth for more than that for me.


Oh, but it get's worse. Two Saturdays ago, and two days after my son's car mishap, I was driving down Cedar Shoals to meet up with a friend and get dinner, when a deer suddenly appeared in front of me. Now I have avoided many deer on the streets around Athens but my time had finally come. The deer hit the front drivers side of my car and pretty much wiped out that front corner. It left me without that headlight and with some plastic rubbing my tire. As my brain was processing that I had, in fact, hit a deer, I looked in my mirrors and saw a minivan pull over and stop on the other side of the road. Thinking that person had possibly also hit the deer, I carefully turned around that pulled up close to them. I did not see any damage on their car and when I went to get out of my car and approach them, I discovered that my door was jammed shut. The van drove off before I could get their attention.


I called my friends Glenn and Nikki, a wonderful couple who I happened to live near in my last house, and they came out to help me. I also called for an officer to come out in the hopes that they could pull my door open and help me out. While waiting, I got tired of sitting there and wanted to see just how much damage was done to my car so I managed to contort my old, out of shape body into impossible positions and squeeze across to get out of the passenger side. Now I am really happy that I was able to do that before anyone was there, because I am sure they would have been laughing hysterically at my attempts. I did get out, though, and I walked around to survey the damage.




It was hard to tell just how bad it was, but I knew it was making a weird sound when I had turned the car around, so I knew I did not want to drive it far. Once my friends got there, we were looking around for the deer. Since all I could see of the deer was its rear end and many hooves flipping through the air, I figured it was dead. We were having no luck finding it when the minivan from earlier came back by. The very nice female driver stopped to make sure I was okay and told us that the deer had run off into the woods beside the high school. I was stunned. That deer had just used its left hip to remove a good portion of my car, and it just ran off. At that moment, if I were not allergic to all mammal meat, I would have gotten a large venison steak off of my friend and eaten it just out of spite!

With my friends following, I managed to limp my car home after the officer had completed taking the notes he needed for the report. I had reported the accident to my insurance on my handy little app on my phone, and had informed my family members. The other ironic part was that I kept forgetting to sign up for church that Sunday. I will make sure that I sign up for church on my off weeks to prevent any more catastrophes such as this. Yes, I am just kidding, but it is funny to think about. Anyway, I decided the next day, since I was obviously stranded at home, to go check out the damage in day light. It did not look any better, in fact, it looked worse. My biggest fear was that it would be enough to total my beautiful Dragon Soul. I really didn't realize just how attached I was to that car until that point. I mean, we had driven half way across the country together without any problems and now this! It was pretty disheartening.



Since I had to work the next two days, I had to figure out how to get around. My mother helped me get my groceries that I still needed on Sunday, and my nephew helped me get some other errands run so that I was ready for the week. I texted one of my co-workers who lived nearby and asked if she could pick me up on her way into work and she cheerfully agreed (thank you so much, Catrena!). I knew I needed to look into rent a vehicle, so I set up with my nephew for him to pick me up at lunch time and take me to Enterprise. Unfortunately, I was not able to afford a rental at that moment, so I went back to work in not so happy a state. My coworkers all assured me that they could give me rides if I needed them to and from work. I have some absolutely wonderful coworkers!

On Wednesday, the insurance agent was able to come out and look at the car. She immediately noticed the deer fur on several parts of my car, including the wheel, and made sure she put that in the report. She also was able to simply pull my headlight out completely, along with a couple other parts. This left my poor Soul with a gaping hole in her front end. I assured her that I would get her fixed up as best as I could. The one piece of good news for this was that the car does not appear to be totaled. I am very thankful for that.



Due to Veteran's Day and then me working all weekend, I was not able to get Oldham's to come pick up the car until Monday. But I was able to get a rental car, with help from my amazing mother!! I was rented a Mitsubishi Mirage, which is one step up from a go-cart, but still a vehicle. Finally, on Monday, Mr. Oldham was able to come get my baby and take her in for her facelift. It was sad to see her go, but Mr. Oldham was wonderful and assured me he would take good care of her. Of course, I had to be there to see her off.



For those of you wondering why I call her Dragon Soul, you might find this helpful.

I am obsessed with dragons and have dragons on each of the front doors. My one request of Mr. Oldham was that he do what he could to salvage that door, even if it was not perfect. I am not sure that I can find another one of these stickers. My car is also a Kia Soul, thus, she is my Dragon Soul. Funny how we get attached to objects like these.

So, now I have wheels to get around in, and am sort of back on track, but in the confusion of the night of my accident, I placed my SD card from my camera down somewhere in the house and now cannot find it. I will be moving furniture around this weekend in an endeavor to locate it since I had just taken a ton of photos at Ben Burton Park earlier that day.

One other reason that I had not gotten around to writing was that we had an incident on Sunday that was a little rough. As many of you know, I am a 911 dispatcher and things can get a little exciting at work. Well, we had some of that unwanted activity on Sunday and I left work that day feeling as if I had been run over by a train! I often find myself unconsciously tensing up when work gets stressful and when we have days with several stressful incidents (that, in this case, all ended up being related, though we were not sure they were at the time). This leaves me physically sore, along with emotionally and mentally exhausted. So, I thought about posting here several times, but I could just not get up the motivation until tonight. And, in case you are wondering, here is the news about what we were dealing with.

Thank you for sticking with me and being patient. I hope you enjoyed my story of why I now do not like deer as much as I used to. I also find that life is much easier if you can learn to find the humor in life's little obstacles. I will finish off with some photos of beautiful leaves that I was able to photograph this week (using my spare SD card).













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