How I Livened Up Etna during the noon hour on Wednesday

The car needed help...it had popped out of park a few times...mostly on an incline.  I reminded Brian that me MUST put the emergency break on all the time if we drove it (which we hadn't been much since the darn thing wasn't starting!!  But then a guy from church fixed that problem and was going to work on the stay put problem next week).  I did remember to do so when I went to storage, was at my grandma's and when I stopped at Napa to buy a new radiator cap for the dumb car.  However, for some reason it didn't even cross my mind to do so when I parked in front of the post office to run in and get the mail.  Grace was sound asleep in her carseat, so I ran in to get the mail (car in park and turned off because I needed my key ring to get the mail of course).  Next thing I know, as I'm picking up a package, someone is sticking their head in the door and asking if anyone had a dark blue Explorer because it had just rolled across the street and hit a telephone pole.  I about died...it was high school lunch break and some high schoolers were getting Grace out of the car...she was NOT happy.  She was fine except she'd bit her tongue.  But she was mad.  After calling out the fire, ambulance and police (our police chief and I think he's the only police officer on the force currently - was in Yreka having just sat down at a meeting (and he'd made good time getting to that meeting because I'd passed him at Kellems Lane (about 5 minutes or less from town...a good 20 minutes from Yreka) when he got the call...he told me he was fine with missing the meeting...he'd gotten to drive really fast to get back to the valley...glad I hadn't been on the mountain then!)  Anyway, the car smashed the left front pretty well.  We've been feeling like we were keeping the darn thing running with prayers anyway.  Now we have to wait and see what the assessment from the body shop is for the insurance company. The car's 11 years old and has almost 180,000 miles on it...trade-in value isn't very much.  But we fit in it more comfortably than we all fit in the Nissan Sentra...