Blog Number 304

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Last night I had a meeting between 5 and 6 with some folks in Australia.  I still have trouble grasping the concept that I am the funny sounding one in those kinds of meetings.  After the meeting and a quick dinner, we all hopped in the Buick and headed to the church or more specifically, the church parking lot.  There the wife did something that she has not done in 58 days, namely get behind the wheel of a car and drive.  I will admit that we were all a little nervous but after a few laps around the biggest parking lot, she pulled out onto the road and drove us home where we arrived safe and sound and none the worse for wear.  She had quite the look of freedom written across her face and even the kids were excited as they are basically stuck at home all day with no vehicle and no one to drive them anywhere even if they had one.  As I write this blog, the son is in the shower and the wife is readying herself to drive me to work and keep the car for the day.  Some sense of normalcy is creeping back into our lives again.

Our focus will now shift to picking out another vehicle to replace our totaled minivan.  In a future blog I will have to detail the process that we went through to narrow our search but I will tell you now that crash test safety ratings played a big part (safecar.gov).  A little warning about that site, don't go there if you would be afraid your current vehicle did not fare well in their tests.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss.  I think we might have talked about these crash ratings a little too much lately as yesterday the son had his toy cars out and had them separated into 2 rows.  One row contained those cars with high safety ratings and the other row contained those that (now that he has been in a crash) he would never ride in again.  He seemed a little frustrated with some of the cars as they were not replicas of real models and therefore there were no safety ratings for them.  He could not understand why we could not research the safety rating of a funny car drag racer or a monster truck.  So those cars he just threw back in the box, better safe than sorry I guess.

Well it is about time to be driven to work.  Today while I am there, the wife is going to go look at some of the vehicles that made our short list.  Once she narrows down her choices then I will be allowed to look at the finalists.  I will keep you posted but until then...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon