Wow, what a whirlwind the past 4 days have been! Most of the time life is fairly calm and there's not much to tell, but it's nice to maybe be settling back into a bit of a routine again.
Thursday, the girls and I went down to Chattanooga to pick some stuff up for my husband's office. One the way there, I noticed that the check engine light blinked on and off a few times. At that point, I didn't have a cell phone signal, so I had to keep going until I got into Chattanooga and then I called Russell. We weren't sure what was going on, but he had me check the oil since when it's low the check engine light will sometimes come on and it had been a while since the oil was changed. Sure enough, it was low. Thanks to the help of one of our friends at the office I was picking stuff up at, we put some more oil in and off we went heading for home.
(can you sense that there's more to this story?)
Just as I got to where I had no cell phone signal (we have no signal for about 30-40 minutes of the hour long drive), the check engine light comes back on and my car starts having trouble getting up to speed going up the mountain. It continued to get progressively worse, yikes! I should add that once you're up that mountain, there's nowhere to stop that would have a phone until Dunlap, which is about the halfway point of the drive. So, I spent to next 20 minutes or so going "Please, dear Jesus, just let us make it to Dunlap!" We made it, somehow, and my mother-in-law and our local tow truck driver came down to rescue me; thanks in large part to the kind gentleman who let me use his cell phone when Walmart's phones wouldn't work for the number that I needed to call. End result? My car is dying a slow death as the transmission starts to go out. It's still driveable right now, but it's definitely only a local vehicle now.
Thoughts from this. First, always make sure that you have a comfortable pair of shoes, waters, a stroller, etc... in your vehicle. If we had not made it to Dunlap, I was going to be in a pickle because I did not have on good shoes for walking a long ways and, although I had my moby wrap with me, that would not have made much difference if the girls and I had needed to walk for miles to get help. Second, always make sure someone knows where you're going and when to expect you, especially when driving through an area with no cell phone signal. Luckily, I had told Russell when to expect a call (it just was a longer time than normal because we were suppose to stop in Dunlap at the produce stand), so a search party would have been sent, eventually. Third, there is a problem when, due to the accessibility of cell phones, there are no longer any pay phones to really speak of but to make a call in a situation like I was in was very difficult and stressful, and would have ultimately been unsuccessful if I had to only rely on Walmart, because I could not make a long distance call from there and they were in a different area code than me (we live in one time zone/area code and cross into another on the way to Chattanooga). Oh yeah, fourth, if you see a frazzled mother of young children trying to use a store's phone or something to get help because of car trouble, be sure to be a guardian angel like the gentleman who let me use his phone. Thank goodness he was also standing there at the customer service desk!
Needless to say, I got nothing that I planned to do done on Thursday because I ended up gone all day! Playing catch-up, still.
Friday was less stressful, thank goodness. My sweet hubby took the day off from work and we went out and milled around for my birthday, dodging heavy rains as we went. I think that my sister-in-law tired my girls out, too, both apparently fell asleep on their own pretty quickly after their 2 hour park adventure, lol!
Saturday was a whirlwind of photo session, working with our horses, and catching up in the garden along with a full day of gardening yesterday. But, we are finally just about caught up on weeding after all the rain! Hopefully our garden will continue producing well; our cabbage and lettuce certainly has done well, now we are just waiting on the summer harvest to be ready. Btw, every kid needs a garden, just saying. Our girls can't do much in the garden yet but they are learning so much from the time out there. I also think that every kid needs a pet. Seanna is already learning responsibility where she is in charge of feeding Kitty each morning.
Bit of a different post, today, I know, maybe the whirlwind will slow down some, right? Probably not, though, because then it wouldn't fit with our busy lives!
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