Amy brought home a bright pink flyer from school Thursday saying that there is a diagnosed case of swine flu at her school. Joy. It seems it is one of the teachers.

Of course, despite reports of a 4th death in the last 24 hours, the US death rate has been hovering at about 1 in 1000 for most of the last week. Which if I read Wikipedia correctly is about the average for an regular old fashioned influenza epidemic.

But we still got the bright pink flyer reminding everybody that if their kid is sick they should KEEP THEM HOME. Which is of course what you are supposed to do ANYWAY. It isn’t swine flu specific. They did however add that if you DO send your kid to school, and they appear to be sick, they will call you to come get them ASAP.

A week ago Tuesday while Brandy and Amy were somewhere and the Nissan was parked nicely in the parking lot a teenage boy in his pickup truck with a damaged bumper tried to park next to it, and in the process wedged their damaged bumper in the Nissan’s wheel well.

The kid did come into the place Brandy was and ask who owned the Nissan, which is good. Going back out, it became clear that the two cars were jammed together but nice. In the end they had to jack up Brandy’s car before the truck could pull away. But when all was said and done, there was the nice rip in the car that you see above.

At some point, the boy’s mom showed up. According to Brandy, one of the first things out of her mouth to her son was “You have GOT to stop hitting things!” Soon after was “I told you to get that bumper fixed!”

Insurance information was exchanged.

Brandy got one estimate last week, and a second estimate this week.

Problem. It is an old car with more than 200K miles on it. This is body work. Body work that requires replacing a large panel. The lower of the two estimates is close to the book value of the car. The other estimate is a decent bit more than the value of the car.

The conversation with the insurance company will be tomorrow most likely. There is a good chance they will just call the car totaled.

The car runs absolutely perfectly. But the stupid body damage is more than the value.

This sucks.