New Ride Take 2

You may not have heard the saga of what happened when Brian went to Detroit to look at Oakland University, the weekend of November 2nd and 3rd.  If you have, then you can skip ahead.  Brian had a great feel for the university and was driving around the area trying to get a feel for the city.  It was Saturday night around 9 pm or so and he was driving on the interstate when a car pulls across 3 lanes of traffic, directly in front of Brian which made Brian slam his car into the side of the other car.  Brian was fine, thankfully, as was everyone else involved in the accident.  His car was not fine.  The driver who caused the accident, stopped for a minute and then took off.  The police officer who had talked to Brian about the accident said that it was being written up as a hit and run.  They found the car abandoned under the highway a few exits up.  It was a stolen car.  They keep calling to ask if Brian has any more information and details about who was driving.  They are trying to get a picture of the man driving but Brian has no more specifics than what he already told the police.

Brian's car had to be towed to the impound lot and Brian had to find a way to get back to his hotel.  He could not have access to his car again after it was towed.   Brian in the meantime has called the insurance to find that they can't access our policy after hours.  They wrote up the claim but couldn't tell Brian any information about car rentals.  I had been on the phone with him at the time of the accident so I was able to look at our insurance paperwork to see that we did have car rental coverage.  It took him close to 2 hours to get a cab to come and get him at the impound lot.  He decided to go to the airport to rent a car.  He had to go to 4 places before someone would give him a car-it was after midnight at this point.  The one company had to shut down all their computers because of day lights savings time.  He finally got a rental car and got back to his hotel around 2 am.

He went back to the impound lot the next day and took pictures of his car and emptied it all out.  Brian figured that the car was totaled.  The insurance company said that they would come out within 24-48 hours to assess it.  Brian went back on Monday to take more pictures of car since the insurance company told him that now it would be Thursday or Friday before someone could look at it.  He also found out that the insurance company only covers rental cars through certain companies because they have contracts with them but yet no one could tell him that Saturday night!

Brian had to rent another car to drive back to Chicago in.  The insurance company said they wouldn't cover the full cost of it but never told Brian that he could have rented a car through Enterprise who doesn't care about where you drop the car off at and it wouldn't have cost more than a regular day.  Grrr.  He arrived home about 1 am on Tuesday.

Tuesday night we had to drop the rental car off at the airport and pick up another rental car in our town which our insurance company arranged for.  Brian went to pick up the keys for the rental car to find out that the insurance never booked the car, they only preapproved it.  Luckily they found him a car in Schaumburg.  So he had to drive to Schaumburg, pick up the keys, drive to O'Hare to drop the car off where I met him.  Then we had to go back to Schaumburg to pick up the car.  Brian sent the pictures to the insurance company.

Luckily Brian's pictures were good enough for the insurance company.  They declared his car totaled on Wednesday.  They estimated that it would caost $14,000 to fix!  So guess what?  We had to go out car shopping the next day because we could only have the rental car through Monday.  So Thursday night, we went out to test drive cars and Friday we went back to buy the car we decided on.

So now we own 2 new cars!  Not really what we planned for.  But we needed a car for Brian!  Luckily I was able to talk him into getting a smaller car because we had bought a bigger car for me.  No need for 2 big cars!  We bought a Honda Fit.  It is so versatile and has amazing room inside even though it's not a big car!

 Here's the color.  Brian really likes it because it doesn't look purple except in direct light.

Brian with N2

While at Brian's band competition, Natalie and I sat with Brian and his band.  I tried to get some pictures of Natalie and Brian.

 Then I got some on the wagon ride out to the pumpkin patch.

Natalie's faces

I love taking pictures of Natalie because she's very expressive and very willing to make faces at me.  I might now always get the best smile but she does make some great faces!

Pumpkin Patch

This year we went back to the pumpkin patch that we went to last year.  We did manage to go between rain so we didn't get wet but it was muddy!  The pumpkins this year weren't that big and they were very flat on one side.  Not sure it it wasn't a good year for pumpkins?  Natalie and Noah each picked the first pumpkin they saw that was decent size.  They do not have my need to examine every pumpkin before picking the right one :)  Here's Natalie with her pumpkin.  Not sure why she always makes that face-I guess since she was a shark for Halloween that she felt like she needed to make that face all the time!

I tried to get pictures of them on the wagon ride with the pumpkins but they were less than cooperative.

They played in a bouncy house, with their pedal tractors (which they couldn't do this year-maybe the grass needed to be shorter), in the corn crib, the sand box and rode on the barrel train.  We didn't stay and play as long as we did last year but maybe because it was much cooler this year and it was damp!

Carving Pumpkins

On Tuesday of this past week we carved our pumpkins that we picked out at the pumpkin patch.  N2 had drawn several drafts of their pumpkin faces before deciding on one face.  Noah wanted a pumpkin with 5 eyes-he wanted an alien.  Natalie was also going to have that but then she drew a regular face on her pumpkin.  We let N2 draw their faces on the pumpkin (with some help) and they also carved their pumpkin (with help).  I am just realizing that they carved each other's pumpkins.  Oops!  I had put the funny shaped one in front of Natalie at first and Brian corrected me that that one was Noah's and I think Noah did too.  But now that I go back and look at our pumpkin patch pictures, I was right!  Glad no one else noticed!

 Noah's on the left and Natalie's on the right.