I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to figure out why I'm suddenly so achy, since I wasn't anywhere near the accident. It finally dawned on me -- pushing the stroller a mile uphill to check out the for sale sign on a car Bill noticed the night before probably played a part.

And maybe wrestling this baby out of her cabinet and toting her up form the barn helped a bit, too. She weighs an absolute ton. But I'm not about to blame Great-Grandma's sewing machine.



I'd been reading blog post after blog post about wonderful old vintage machines and it finally dawned on me that I have one. Until yesterday, it was bolted into a cabinet, so there was no way I could move it around myself. So it sat in Bill's shop at the old house, and got put in the barn when we moved into this house, and there it's sat.

After having it tucked away in storage for so long, I'd almost forgotten what it looked like. The last time I used it, for Alex's first Halloween costume, it worked fine, but now there seems to be something wrong with the belt.

I was hoping it would work without a trip to the repair shop, but at least it's got the foot pedal, which has been lost and found a couple of times over six moves and almost twenty years!

My life has been taken over by the insurance adjusters. I spent most of the day yesterday on the phone with people at our insurance company, people at the other insurance company, the doctor's office, the car rental company... Not to mention several hours in my driveway with the guy whose job it was to decide if the car could be repaired or was totalled.

If I'd known he was going to base part of its value on how clean it was, I would've washed the thing and drug out the shop vac. How stupid and unfair is THAT?!

The car isn't happy, either. I don't know what happened, or how it could have happened, but I walked past the kitchen window and she was running. Not like a car is supposed to run, because the front end is totally smashed and the radiator is gone, but the engine was revving and smoking. It has a remote starter, which must have malfunctioned, but we still can't figure out how.

Tapping the brake is supposed to stop the engine, unless you put the key in first. I can't tell you how much I did NOT want to get near that car, but I did. And it didn't work. Pushing the buttons on the remote didn't work.

I'd already called my husband at work once yesterday, which involves going through several people to get to his supervisor and then leaving messages, so I don't do it unless it's a serious emergency. I'd already called once to find out what to do about the rental car situation and he called me back in a panic because they made it sound like the house was on fire.

This time, I told his supervisor that if I didn't talk to him right that second, I was going to have to call the fire department. And in the two minutes it took for him to call me back, the engine died. Of course it did. And somehow the men completely misunderstood me and Bill got home thinking that the alarm had been going off.

I'd like for today to be much calmer. I've got snails to piece.