God Has a Sense of Humor

As of Wednesday, this week was shaping up to be one of the worst that either Rachel or myself have experienced. On Monday, something happened with our car and we ended up with a hole the size of a baseball in the engine of our 2001 Toyota Camry with 72,000 miles on it. See my previous writing for some more info on that.

On top of that, the rental car company (which is covered by our insurance- as I had the foresight to realize that if our only car dies, we'd need another one) had no cars. It was 11 am (after the 7:20 fire under the hood) before they were able to pick us up and get Rachel off to work. Long story there, as well.

As if that was not enough with the rental car company, when we wanted to trade in the truck they gave us for something more economical, and within the budget assigned by the insurance company, the guy treated Rachel like a child and kept trying to make a little extra money on our misfortune. Of all the potential positive points, I would not rent from Enterprise again- and would advise anyone else to consider how much treating customers right matters, because they have not treated us well at all.

Rachel had been scheduled for surgery on her wrist on Thursday. A ganglion cyst that she had previously had removed with a 10% chance of return had, in fact, returned. So, on Wednesday, she called our insurance company to make sure that pre-authorization had taken place for her surgery. They hadn't gotten it or any of the referrals except for the MRI, so they were requiring her to get all that from our "family" doctor, who is only listed on our policy and not actually our family doctor, in order to ok her surgery. So Rachel called them, and they would not simply call the doctors who had done the work- they required her to leave work and go see them so they could look at her wrist and say, "ok, we can give the ok to the insurance company."

All frustrating things.

On the other side of things… After much searching, the prior Friday, Rachel and I had found and decided on what we were going to do for a 2nd car- a 1995 Nissan Maxima. We had gone to the bank for our financing- to refinance the Camry loan and roll the Maxima into it. They had pretty much ok'd, but required approval of a manager. With the Camry engine blowing up/catching fire on Monday morning, and us not having signed the papers, we were VERY concerned that this may not go through.

Talked to the guy at the bank- wasn't going to say anything, but felt that I should out of honesty. He told me that he could either forget I told him what happened, or they could deny us financing for the Maxima alone because it is too old to hold the title as collateral. We decided to go with the first option, as the Camry is still ours until the insurance company buys it.

We had planned to sign that paperwork on the loan and the car on Tuesday morning, so we made plans to visit a couple apartments on Monday night. One of them, we really liked- a lot. But with this week's luck, what's going to happen, right?

Rachel's surgery on Thursday went well- as well as could be expected. We spent the day uneventfully resting after that- having had to get up early, and Rachel being tired from the anesthesia.

Friday, we got a call from the auto insurance company- they'd sent an adjustor and finally got back to us. They valued our car at almost DOUBLE what we had expected based on the Kelly Blue Book value. WOW!!! Then, as we were at Borders waiting for our table at Olive Garden (meeting with some of rachel's friends from YWAM), I got a call from the apartment. They wanted to rent to us, but wanted to ask a few more questions to be sure first. ???

So, the beginning of this week was abysmal. Had to look at the positive, but overwhelmed by just about everything going wrong that could go wrong! The middle of the week, things started to look up and the worst case scenario that looked like it might be happening was not actually happening. And as the week ended- even with Rachel having her wrist immobilized, things started to look up!

So here we are- going to be moving- a little later than we'd hoped, but still this fall. we have a car- we were hoping for a second, but the insurance money will almost completely pay off our loan for the 2 cars. Rachel's still got a job- i'm still looking. and we've got our church- the reason for moving and most important of all.