Roblog

It's been almost a month since my car wreck, and I'm doing quite well. The physical effects from the crash had an interesting progression:
   - day 1: sharp pain in my left side when twisting or clenching, minor bruise on inside of left arm
   - day 2: pain lessening
   - day 3: sore neck when turning my head; moderately severe vertigo with nausea when I look down or up
   - day 4: very sore neck, dizziness a little less and no nasuea
   - day 5: sore neck a little better, dizziness lessened, a big sneeze reaggravated my side
   - day 10: neck soreness almost totally gone, dizziness very minor

Now at day 30, I still have to admit to a sense of very slight dizziness when I look down sometimes, but it is very minor. I fact, I played soccer two nights ago, and took several tumbles, but felt no accident-related effects afterwards and never felt even slightly dizzy.

Another unanticipated side effect from the accident is that I discovered more than my dad, wife, and Jeff read my blog. I had responses from one of my former coworkers (who I hadn't talked to in almost a year) and a friend from high school (that I hadn't talked to in over 20 years!) after reading about my wreck. That was surprising and heartwarming.

There are other accident-related storied to tell, but I'll leave them for other posts.

Never having been in an accident before, I never had to challenge my auto insurance company with a claim. My experience with Allstate was a very positive one, and I definitely have no intention of shopping around for a different insurer. The check they sent me was more than I expected since they gave me a great value assessment on my former car.

So my first instinct would be to apply this cash to the down payment of my replacement car and end up with a small monthly payment or short term loan (after all, I had just one year left to pay on the car). But Donna had the good sense to think some more about it. We have to make some bathroom repairs, and we'd have to get a loan to fund that remodeling effort. We hadn't yet shopped around for rates on loans, but here the Saturn dealer was offering 0% financing on new car purchases! Hmmm....

We ended up putting a modest down payment on the new car and financing the rest at 0% for 5 years. So we are now free to apply that cash from the claim to our remodeling effort and finance the remainder. In effect, we are getting a 0% loan for a large portion of our bathroom remodeling.

We went to The Great Indoors on Friday and enlisted their services to oversee the remodeling effort. They should be contacting us this week to schedule a project manager to come out and give us an estimate of the labor costs. That is pretty exciting, since it's our first concrete step to actually getting started on the long-overdue bathroom repairs.

Santa Claus brought the family a Wii for Christmas. He must have gotten it several months early, since Wiis were hard to come by this holiday season. Donna got me a game to go along with it: Super Mario Galaxy. It has gotten rave reviews from every site I can find, and it's my kind of game (no excessive blood and gore).

I was hoping the girls would play with the Wii more than they are. They liked Wii Sports Bowling, and play every so often, but they seem to enjoy helping me play Super Mario Galaxy more (it is a one-player game, but there is collaborative play in which they can assist me while I play). That's OK. I enjoy playing the game, and I suspect they'll use the Wii more as the get older - until it is so woefully outdated that they would be embarassed to be seen using it.

We had to take the iMac in for service this weekend. It would suddenly turn off (lose all power) anywhere between 5 seconds and 10 minutes after turning it on. These are the same symptoms it had a little over a year ago.

So what's going on? Did I get a lemon? Is there something in the way we use it or in the environment that causes the same problem to recur? It turns out it may be a design or manufacturing flaw. The Apple service technician found an entry for this issue in a Repair Extension Program at Apple. This indicates that multiple people have had this issue and that there has been some amount of root cause analysis performed.

This means that the repairs should be covered at no cost to me! Yay! But that also means we're without a computer for about a week. Boo! I figured out how to read our email via my ISP's web interface, so at least we won't be totally out of touch. It does mean, though, that I can't extract the 6th birthday photos from my camera just yet (although I can print them out directly from the card from my printer - they'll just be totally unedited).

This event also brings home the fact that our computer is nearing the end of its useful life. The new iMacs, while nicer than the one we have, don't seem so astounding that they make me crave an upgrade. Historically speaking, the iMac is upgraded about once a year, so if the repairs to our current iMac allow it to run well for another year, maybe we'll consider getting its replacement for my birthday in 2008.