Good News - Bad News Time

Good News - they won't be operating on my neice a second time after all, they think keeping her off food & drink (incl. water) for the next few days will help.
Bad News - this means she will be missing Thanksgiving dinner .... I don't know about the rest of her family yet, I'm thinking they will probably be here.

Good News - my son is in one peice and not all my hair is grey
Bad News - hubby came home early because my son's wouldn't start.

Good News - the car is probably fixable (if we can find the part)
Bad News - he has more than likely been driving around for over a month with a broken engine mount

Now if you are like me you have no idea what this means .... the engine sits on the mount so that when the engine runs it doesn't shift from side to side when all the wheels & gears on it are spinning and shaking.

Under the engine, since this is a front wheel drive car, is the transmission - yeah, bigger problem - so as the engine on the broken mount shakes, it is going to play havoc with the transmission as well.

Hopefully (fingers crossed) he didn't screw up the transmission.

Now my dad had Mercury's all his life ... okay all my life, except for one ... in 9th or 10th grade he decided that since we no longer really needed a big car - my brother's had their own cars and I was the only kid he needed to drive to school every day - so he bought a two-door Cougar.

It was White with red interior - also my school colors, the selling point for my mother, btw.

He had it a sum total of 2 days ... when he was driving me around, just cruising, seeing how it handled on curves - when suddenly the transmission dropped! wouldn't go forward ... would only go in reverse - and it was auto-transmission, so he didn't do anything.

yikes, good thing we were (a) close to home & (b) on a 'back road' instead of the freeway.

Now you can kind of see why I would be concerned about my son driving around with a broken engine mount that could take out or damage the transmission --- he does ALL highway driving ... well okay the majority of his day is highway driving.

Good thing he only uses the car for school & work ...

Note to all kids out there:

TELL YOUR PARENTS when you get in an accident no matter how 'trivial' you think it might be -- it may be worse than you think!