This post is dedicated to

Just a regular evening, "hiding" in the couch.

J, and Kyle, the tow truck driver who rescued us from freezing to death in rural Cloudy State and gave us a scenic tour of State Capitol while driving us to a repair shop.

This post was going to be about the stress of planning for a research trip with partner in tow (no pun intended), but now it's about the stress of having a minor single car accident during a research trip. I am ok, J is ok, we didn't really nearly freeze to death. What we did do is decide to try to leave Cloudy City for State Capitol before Snowmageddon '11 was supposed to start, and spun out into a guard rail on the interstate without hitting any other cars. We broke a headlight, a turn signal, most of the front passenger corner, and probably the radiator. At any rate, when started back up, the engine runs but belches a lot of anti-freeze smelling steam/smoke, makes horrible noises, and spills antifreeze everywhere.

We have AAA, who called a tow truck for us, but because we decided to drive in Snowmageddon '11, there were a lot of other people who needed tow trucks also, and we had to wait for two hours for ours. But at least that gave us time to call J's sister and have her look up the best-reviewed mechanics in State Capitol on the interwebs, for us to call them, and find one that had space to look at the car tomorrow. Right now the plan is to see if they can make it safe to drive so we can be back in Cloudy City by Friday (both J and I are scheduled to work), rent a car to get to the state archive in the mean time, and if it's not, arrange to drive the rental car back to Cloudy City and come back for the broken car later. It may get sold or scrapped once it's repaired-ish. We're not sure about that, it depends on how much the repairs get quoted as.

So far the cost of repairs, towing, etc, is not going to break our budget. I got a very generous research grant to look at collections at this archive, and we've been very frugal with the hotel and other expenses, so my research grant will probably cover the accident and our hotel and rental car, maybe with a little bit out of pocket. Of course, I can't report that the research grant money was spent on the car repair, but it makes me feel better to think about it as replacement of the money spent on the very foolish car accident.

So that's why there's a picture of our cat sitting with his head in our couch. It's a cat blogging kind of day.  At least today will make a good anecdote on the dedications page when my dissertation gets published