Herb’s blog, Herbdate 16317-006:
Wednesday Night Bible Study, Pastor Johnson had taught about being excited and full of joy when you are out among people and letting the world see that you have joy.
What a day! The steenking dog episode happened around 4 A.M.ish on Thursday and was just the beginning. Oh yes, i get up around 4 or before almost every day. I got in the habit when i was in the Army and never got out of it. We left for Margaret’s first patient of the day, who lives about 27 miles in the middle of nowhere in eastern El Paso County. The car started acting up. I knew i had several major problems (with the car 😛 ) that need attention, but the minor factors of time and money keep popping up.
We left her patient’s house and went down Squirrel Creek Road, which is as rural as the name implies and is located in central nowhere. The antelope kept running away when i would ask them if i could use their cell phone and, well, a longhorn cow-critter is not a fellow to ask anything from. So there we sat.
Flashing back to an incident that happened several months ago, on a cross road from this one, Peyton Highway, we had seen a really bad accident. It was a rollover with the Flight-For-Life involved. Margaret and I prayed that the person would be okay as soon as we saw the helicopter and emergency vehicles re-routing traffic. She found out the details of the accident later on because one of her other patients out there in the middle of nowhere is related to one of the EMTs on the scene. Apparently, the victim was a young girl whose head was crushed under the car and the folks on the scene had little hope. The terrain out there is such that the car would not only have rolled over 4 times, but would likely have flipped up in the air like a pancake in a cartoon 4 times. The first responders initially started looking in the fields for an ejected body.
So, back to yesterday, a car came along and took Margaret into town to get our son and a tow-truck and so she could call her work and have them tell the rest of her patients she was not going to make it, etc, etc. The woman driving the pickup was the mother of the girl in the accident! Small world and amazing “coincidence,” huh? Well, she told Margaret about how they had to reconstruct her daughter’s face and the daughter is home with almost no scars! She has no brain injury, not paralyzed even though she broke a couple of vertebrae, she is well. We invited her to church, of course.
So, there we sat at the shop and waited. The shop we go to is honest and they help us out when we need it, but car repairs, even if you have an honest shop, are extremely expensive, and i was expecting that the tranny had finally gone, which would be between $1500 and $2500.
In the meantime, the girls were at home giving Snoopy a bath with tomato juice. It took 2 cans, but the smell was gone off of the dog. Now, the whole house still had the odor. This means that we will have to clean every thing the dog could have possibly touched or sat on or rolled on because even the most powerful of sprays don’t work. Normally Margaret has a big, deep-clean on Saturdays anyway, but this will be even more. We did manage to make it livable by cleaning the worst, most likely parts and spraying, spraying, spraying, but, it needs more than that.
The car turned out to be a computerized deal in a command module in the electronic ignition and “only” cost around $300. Well, the car runs nice and the tranny has been put off a little longer, so, all-in-all an interesting day. I am sure it was all so that we could meet the mother of the girl in the accident and not only invite her to church but also hear what happened to our accident scene prayers. (Whew! That was 701 words up to there! Woo-hoo!)
