Denisa vs. the Deer

We had another run in with a deer over the weekend. Well, by “we,” I mean “Denisa,” and I suppose this is her first run in with a deer, so saying it’s another one is also kind of off. But you get the picture. She had just picked up MC from a party, and on their way home, a deer decided it would be a lot of fun to jump in front of a car going 40mph or so.

Spoiler alert: I don’t think it ended up being that much fun for the deer.

The bad news is that it wasn’t much fun for our car, either. It’s the older of the two we have. A Honda Civic we picked up just after we moved to Maine. Actually, now that we started looking at things with the car’s damage, I realized that car is 17 years old. It’s a 2007. Trying to put that in perspective, when I first bought a car in 2000, the equivalent would have been a 1983. In other words, our Civic has done very well for us for a very long time. It’s almost never had any serious issues, living up to the dependability of the Civic name.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the car now. That deer wasn’t small, and the it managed to hit both sides of the car and the hood in its little stunt. We can’t open the hood easily to see what the engine looks like, but having had some run ins with deer in the past, I know how pricy fixing that damage ends up being. I’m not sure what the insurance company’s going to want to do, but I think there’s a fair chance they just throw in the towel on the car. If that happens . . . we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Suffice it to say that it would be right in line with the rest of the unexpected expenses 2024 has brought us.

The good news is that Denisa and MC are both fine, and we still have some money in the reserves to at least be a downpayment on a car, with hopes that we’d have enough in the near future to pay off any loans we have to take out. We bought the Prius outright, and I’d rather not take out a loan for a car, but I’m not sure we can really swing having a single car at this point in our lives.

Stay tuned.