I know God loves me because this day ended.

So, as you can tell from the title, this day just didn't go as intended. It seemed like a promising beginning but who can ever tell in the morning. :-) Terri & I realized that today could be the day we took little sister, Ani, to Ikea to get her room set up at Terri's house. (For those of you who don't know. Our 15-yr-old baby sister, Ani, has come to live here in Texas with us. We are so excited to have her here with us. She's staying in Terri's 3rd bedroom so we were going shopping to get her room stuff set up.) We decided to get headed out quickly so we all got ready quickly. I got into my van to drive over to Terri's and pick her up and noticed my car was sounding weird. We've been having many problems with our other car's transmission so we aren't anxious for more problems. Luckily, I'd just plowed down my helpless garbage can. I thought I'd checked to see if it was back there but I didn't look well enough to catch that it was laying down in my driveway's opening. It makes a pretty weird sound when you go down your curb with the can stuck under your back bumper. Oops. Fortunately Rob was able to unsmash it.
We get ourselves to Ikea after picking up Terri's car from her husband's place of employment. We had a delicious lunch that we were all starving for. So yummy. We shop and shop and shop. Of course, several of the things Ani most likes aren't in stock in the color of wood she most wanted so we'll have to go back another time. It ended up being a bit of a frustrating trip since they were out of stock of some of the other things they said were in stock. Checkout was insanely slow, too, but we made it out with a bunch of fun stuff.
As we were leaving, Terri went a different way so she could pick Tyler up from work. She hadn't been that way before and, unfortunately, it started to rain in a blinding sheet. She got some turned around and then finally had to pull over because some of the street sections were in too much water to drive through safely. She also wasn't able to get in touch with Tyler which made it a little more stressful but everything worked out fine in the end.
Luckily, Ani, Kyr, and I drove out of the storm and stopped to get gas...just in time for the lady in front of us to back into us. She pulled back forward and stopped...and then drove up to the convenience store. She parked and went in. She came out a couple of minutes later with a coffee and drove off. I'd thought she might be going in to call her husband or something before she came and talked to me but apparently not. Unfortunately for her, I'd written down her license plate number and called the police. The cop that came was very nice and hunted them down for me. The husband showed up first and was very apologetic and kind of cheesy but nice. She showed up a bit later and said she'd gone into the store and was then waving for me to come in to talk to her. I saw nothing. Also, did it make more sense to just talk right under the cover for the gas pumps when our cars were 3 feet away or to drive across the lot where there are no parking spaces and it is POURING rain? The cop got after her about driving off at all and said she should have talked to me at the pump. I got their info finally so that was nice.
As I expected, the next morning the husband called to see if we'd skip filing a claim. He said he'd be glad to meet me at a body shop and just pay for the repairs himself. I said I'd talk to Rob about it but didn't really want to do that because of the complication of it and also because I just wanted the money. Have ya'll seen my van? I love that thing but I'm not spending money to fix the body. I went ahead and talked to the insurance and they mentioned I was due the cost of a rental car and such as well. I decided to just file. That afternoon, he called back but I didn't answer so he called Rob and they made a deal. He asked Rob how much we thought it would be to fix it and he guessed $500. He offered $750 paid by a business check and we would agree to not pursue them further as long as the check cleared. He said we could pick it up that evening. So Rob said yes and we did. Now, we're getting a garage door opener. Woohoo!! So it ended up working fine but sure made for an interesting (aka stinky) day.