At around noon, the clerk at Midas called to discuss what they'd found wrong with my car. I'd asked them to check the brakes, and sure enough, she reported, both the front and back drums were slightly warped. They could replace everything and fix it within two hours, she said, to the tune of nearly $500.

I winced -- hearing a car repair bill in that range always reminds me of the last one I had, the one that cost about that a month to keep from falling apart. Still, it's a small price to pay for my family's safety. (I'll decline the transmission/radiator/defibrilator/whatevorator flush until the world is populated solely by roaches and sentient Twinkies, but I don't neglect my brakes.) So I told her to go ahead and do it.

Little did I know that $500 was on the low end. Of course, these places always lowball you with the price, but before this the difference was never the price of a new car.

They'd gotten the brakes fixed, the clerk told me when she called back, and the technician had taken it for a test drive to make sure everything worked. On his way back, however, as he passed one of the myriad college apartment complexes in the area, a girl (late for class, no doubt) came screaming out of the entrance doing at least 40 and smashed into my car's front fender.

To think I had almost taken the camera along for Dad and Avery's Grand Outing. (We went to the park and the library while they worked on the car.) Now I have to attempt to paint the total destruction of my poor Sentra with words. It was sitting in the middle of the road when we approached, in a lake of its own breached fluids. The hood was folded almost in half along the diagonal from the front driver's side to the rear passenger's. The front bumper was loose and hanging on the ground. The grill was shattered, pieces sticking up out of the top of the engine compartment. The windshield sported a spiderwebbed hump where the driver's head hit it. (Wear your seat belts, kids!) The airbags hung limp and impotent as I harvested my belongings. If this car is not totaled, I don't know what is.

A lot of people believe that everything happens for a reason. The worst accident I've been in was a harmless bumper tap (it was jarring, and the guy who hit me drove off, but my car was undamaged and Avery didn't even wake up), so I could have been karmically due. Plus we've been talking about getting a new car anyway, something family-sized so we can fit kids and dogs at the same time. Perhaps some greater powers were working to make it so. I'm not so sure, but if my car was due for an accident, it certainly is a stroke of good fortune that neither I nor my baby was in it at the time.

Still, I'm not looking forward to having a car payment again. Damn Florida. I totally blame you for chundering out such horrific drivers.