We have a farrrmerrr doon... again. :(

You have to give me credit for always finding weird new ways to put myself out of commission. Early-onset arthritis, a raging case of Campylobacter... I like to mix it up. This time it was a car accident, a doozy of a car accident.

It was during the last third of our great western road trip. We'd driven to Phoenix, Arizona via Oregon, Idaho and Utah, and had taken the road northwest, homeward bound via California, when everything went all el poo.

Somewhere outside of 29 Palms, beyond Joshua Tree National Park is where it happened.

I have no memory at all of the crash, and only a few horrifying flashbacks of the subsequent rescue.

According to the story cobbled together by my girls (who were THANK GOD, unharmed) and the police on the scene, I may or may not have had a student driver in front of me who swerved, causing me to swerve in response. None of the stories match up exactly, so it's hard to say. What happened next is the larger part of the mess. My car went off the road at some point and rolled for quite a distance, eventually coming to rest mostly on the driver's side. I was out cold, unable to be woken by my kids slapping me across the face (thanks!) or by screaming in my ear. They crawled free and found a police officer already responding, which is a miracle, considering it was the middle of the dang Mojave desert.

I was eventually extracted via the jaws of life and flown to the nearest hospital able to handle my injuries, in Loma Linda.

The next 4 days are reduced to tiny snippets.

Clawing at my neck brace in confusion, having my head very painfully stapled closed, crying, good & bad nurses, my husband.

Suffice it to say that I am at home now, and on the mend, but two weeks-plus on, still broken. My arm and thumb are broken, my brain bled some, the crown of my head was (gulp) "de-gloved", according to the guy who it set to fix it tomorrow, I had a pretty good concussion and whiplash, road rash, etc. I've been roughed up. And my haircut, if you can call it that is NOT SEXY. I need to make new line in my budget for wigs.

All that being said, I know how lucky I was. I know exactly how lucky I was to go through all of that and still have my babies, my life, my limbs and my personality. I am slow, typing with one hand, wobbling when I walk, forgetting a lot, having trouble getting words out there. But I'm still here. Under the drugs and the mumbled speech, I'm still me. I have miles to go to heal things, but I'm going to get there. My husband, Bill, has been by my side since he got the call about the accident, doing a million little things for me, our girls, and this place to keep it all running.

This farmer is dooon, but not out.:)