To top it all off... When we blow the leaves, we blow them across the road because there is a big field right across the road. Well, yesterday I decided to go grab some more leaves before they got taken up by the park manager or waste management. I would suck the leaves back up with my blower, dump them back out when it was full, suck them back up again (which shreds them even finer) and then fill the leaf bags. My neighbors all must have thought I was crazy! A lot of people around here don't understand the value of their fall leaves. They just blow them all out on the road and forget about them. I must have looked like a crazy woman yesterday as I stood there sucking back up the leaves from across the street that were just blown across the street, dumping them back out again and sucking them back up! lol I don't really care what they think, because next year when my garden is flourishing with the help of some leaves, they'll all wonder how I did it! lol

We live in a pretty rural area, so I wonder if that is why they are more flexible on the test drives. They know us, our kid, our parents... LOL! Basically - they know were we LIVE! They always give us a super nice car to drive while they are working on any of our cars too. I asked if they could start a punch card. After so many car purchases - could we get a free one? We have bought 4 new vehicles in 3 years from them. I asked if we bought 5 could we get the sixth one free? No deal... :) I did get some free oil changes though.

It does make it a little better to swallow when they let us know and are humorous about it, don't you think? I thought it was my ISP at first, as that is usually what it is. My ISP is pretty slow though with other sites this AM, thus making GW really crawl. Hopefully all will be fixed soon as it is raining and I don't want to do any of my rainy day chores.r

Funny -- Reminds me of a true story when DD, then 22, had just moved to Colorado, over 1000 miles from home. The phone rang late one night while I was sleeping in the recliner recovering from shoulder surgery and still in a sling. It was DD, "Mom! There's a snake in the house!" Seems that DD's roommate was out of town and DD came home to her basement apartment after work late at night and saw a snake slithering down the hall. Me, "Well, I am 1000 miles away, and there is not much I can do about it." She was scared of the snake and also scared that her dog -- the original Mojo -- would find it and get bitten, so she thought she couldn't stay there. Although we had a condo not far away at the time and she wanted to go there, it was in the vacation rental pool and I was pretty sure we had guests that week. I finally just ended up telling her that if she couldn't stay at home just take my credit card and Mojo and check into the Holiday Inn for the night and she could call the landlord in the morning. The next morning, she called again and said the landlord (who lived upstairs) couldn't find anything but he did say that there were garter snakes around and when she described what she saw, they were both comfortable that it was probably a garter snake and that it had probably found its way out of the apartment. However, now she said she was running a 104 degree fever and, "what should I do?" Me, "Call your doctor's office and see how fast they can get you in." (she had had a minor injury earlier in the summer and had established a GP). Fortunately, they had an opening that morning. She was a really sick kid for almost a week, and it was hard on me not being able to be there to take care of her. Since that time we both have wondered if maybe she had a high fever the night before and just imagined or hallucinated the snake. We will never know the answer to that. Now this might make her sound like a helpless kid (and she certainly was that night) but actually she was pretty mature and capable about most things even at that age. Now she is a confident, responsible 37 year old who can handle anything. But sometimes it still helps to call Mom.