Farewell to Car and Computer

So...to seriously understate, it's been an eventful week! Keri's okay, but on Tuesday morning she got rear-ended on the freeway on her way to work. She slowed down for an accident ahead of her, but the guy behind her didn't, and he was apparently going really fast. When the police arrived on the scene, Keri shakily asked the officer if she should move the car off the freeway to which the officer replied, "Umm... honey... you can't... you don't have a wheel." You can look at the picture below and see that yes, our car is totaled. Farewell to our faithful Nissan Sentra. Keri's neck was hurting right away, and she hit her head on the doorpost, so she went to the ER in an ambulance for x-rays. Luckily, C.J. and Keri's mom were able to come to the hospital right away (with some slight detours because of the traffic the two accidents were causing!). The x-ray results came back okay, but Keri's been really sore. She did get some good meds though--she loves her muscle relaxants! Keri took Tuesday and Wednesday off of work to recover, but it wasn't a fun way to start a work week after a good Labor Day Weekend! Now we get to experience the fun of looking for a new car in the next 2 weeks before we leave for Nova Scotia (only 2 weeks away...so much to do!) and dealing with insurance companies, though we have already been given a generous offer for our car. We are incredibly thankful, however, that with how hard the guy hit Keri, the only injury she has is a sore neck. After working in the Spinal Cord Injury unit at Mary Free Bed, she knows only too well what a car crash can result in. Thank God for his protection.

No wheel + tweaked frame = total loss

On a positive note, another somewhat big thing looming over us was the fact that our computer has not been working correctly for a while. We had many discussions over whether or not to buy a new computer and had decided to take a while to pray for guidance. To shorten a lengthy story, we have a warranty on it and gave it to Circuit City to fix a bad motherboard fan in June while we had 2 weeks we would be on vacation. They ended up sitting on it for 2 weeks because of incompetence, and we had to have it returned to us after them having it for 3 weeks in the same condition as when we brought it in. C.J.'s been using the computer for work all summer, so he's had to deal with a very slow, very hot, and very loud computer to make us money. C.J, spent hours on the phone to Circuit City customer service about the whole situation and it FINALLY (at least 20 calls later) paid off! Circuit City is replacing our computer with a brand new Sony computer! They've overnighted everything, so we sent our old computer to them yesterday and should have our new one tomorrow morning! We're so thankful that C.J. finally got to someone who know how to take care of a customer. This is such a gift before we leave the country. We will now have a computer that will support communication with our friends and family, and we don't have to pay for it in a time where the budget is tight! Thank God for his provision! If anyone is ever in the Brentwood, MO Circuit City store, Jamarr (the Operations Manager) is the guy to deal with!

So, another crazy week (after so many, you'd think we'd just call this normal!), but we have so much to be thankful for. Please pray for us as we now enter crunch time in our preparations for Nova Scotia. We still don't have a place to live there, so that's currently our biggest concern. Also, continue to pray for Mike and Beth Werkheiser. We've heard that everything with the funeral was beautiful and moving, but they are due to arrive back in St. Louis on Sunday and have to enter their hectic lives again.