WANTED: A Shoulder to Cry On

My husbands shoulder is currently unavailable as he is crying himself. Our evening last night started out very nice. We took the kids out to dinner & to the Jazz game. So far so good, right?! We were headed home on the frontage road along the point of the mountain. It's a dark road, but we know it well...we drive it often because there is less traffic. Last night however, we would have done better to stay on the freeway. A giant raccoon decided to dart in front of our car. You know how in one small moment a thousand things go through your mind? James knew there were two options: swerve to miss it, or hit it. If you have ever traveled that road, you know that if you are heading South & you swerve right (which was our only option since this raccoon was attacking from the left) to miss something, you drive right off the side of the mountain. That quickly took away our swerve option. Which of course meant we had to hit it. It made the loudest, most aweful sound in the world & scared the crap out of the kids. We did feel bad for the poor animal but quickly moved on to figuring out if our alignment was all screwed up. It seemed to be okay, so our focus turned to what kind of mess we were going to have to clean off the front of our car when we got home. We parked in the driveway & James got out to make sure it wasn't bad enough to scare the kids (we were sure that pieces of that animal were all over our car). Fortunately there were no pieces of the raccoon, unfortunately the pieces of our car that were meant to be there were not there either. James & I both let out a few choice words as we noticed that the entire front, left side of our van was gone. AAAHHH!!! STUPID RACCOON ON STEROIDS!! Darn thing took a chunk out of my Odyssey. So the bad news is that we haven't had to put any money into this car yet, so we have our deductable to meet before the insurance will pay anything...CRAP! The good news is that none of the internal parts of the car are missing or damaged...whew!! Plus, it's a Honda (one of the reasons we haven't had to put money into it), they're built so well that once it's all pretty again, we're sure there will be no long term problems. Needless to say, I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that makes we want to cry everytime I look at it.

Can you believe a raccoon did this?


And here's the pieces we could find...


Trey has been replaying it for me all day. This is his take on it...
(Sorry, you'll have to pause my music at the bottom before you listen to it)