Home again, home again, jiggety jig

I've been traveling for the past 10 days or so. Don and I drove to Maine to spend some time with our daughter who has just moved into her first home and she wanted some help with getting things situated in the house. She and her boyfriend had also broken up and she was feeling a bit blue over that. So we thought we would take a late fall drive out to the East coast to help her out.  It was a great visit for the most part. Don and Tessa put up shelves and so forth while I sewed simple curtains for the dining room and Lily's bedroom.

It was a great visit with our daughter and granddaughter except for a couple of things.  On Wednesday evening, the day before we were leaving to return home, I accidently blew out the electrical system for the kitchen stove!  That meant going to a number of shops in Portland that night to find a replacement that could be installed before Tessa's housewarming party on Saturday. Fortunately, we found a great stove (it has a convection feature in the oven!) in our price range which was delivered and installed on Friday afternoon.  I hadn't planned on giving her such a housewarming gift but that's the way it worked out!

This is the sweater I'm knitting for Lily but in a black and gray with silver sparkle yarn.  I was working on it in the car and at the house.  The second thing that went wrong that Wednesday night was, I sat on my bamboo knitting needles before we went stove shopping, and of course, broke one.  Which had a bunch of stitches on it.  So we had to find a Michaels after buying the stove and get another set of knitting needles. Not such a bad thing.  I was able to transfer all the stitches and get on with the knitting.

Bad things happen in threes, right?  The third thing was the worst and it happened on Friday as we were sailing down the highway at the Pennsylvania/Ohio border.  Deer hit.  Here's the car. Nuff said.

We had no injuries--thank goodness for seat belts and air bags!--other than my hearing hasn't returned to normal yet and I'll be seeing a doc about this. The car likely was totalled--we'll get the news later this week from the insurance company.  We left the car in Ohio as the insurance set us up with a rental so we could get home. Which we did without further incident.  I can't tell you how happy we were to be in our own home yesterday and to sleep in our own bed.  It was very disconcerting to have this accident so far from home where you don't know anyone or have any knowledge of the area and the people you have to deal with. You simply have to trust people and these days, that's not always easy to do.  All I can say is, from the PA state trooper to the tow truck driver (Mac)  to the folks at Conneaut Collision Center to the Enterprise rental agent (Doug) in Ashtabula Ohio, we were treated so, so well. They all knew the trauma and stress that we were going through and did everything to smooth the way for us. 

So, we're home now and it looks like it'll be a gorgeous late Autumn day here.  If it gets warm enough, I'll spray paint the two little tables I'd like to get done before winter sets in, go to the garden to harvest the brussels sprouts, do a little sewing on a quilting project and maybe catch a little football on TV if there's time.  Quilting comes before football, for me anyway!  :)

That's my adventures for the past few days. I hope your adventures were less dramatic!