Surprisingly, a lot of good things have come about in the aftermath of what I’m calling The Great Crash of Yesterday. I’m reading and hearing about a ton of other people’s car accident stories, which makes me feel infinitely better, and I’m coming to terms with the idea that crashing my car does not make me stupid, it just makes me human.

One of my favorite phone calls was from my Dad, who called last night to make sure I was OK (it occurred to me that a good daughter would probably have called her parents to tell them about what happened and not just blogged about and assumed they’d read, but I digress.) To be honest, once he ascertained that I was OK he did spend an inordinate amount of time laughing with me. That was really the turn-around moment for me. It’s hard to beat yourself up for crashing your car when your Dad is laughing about it with you.

The rental company has supplied me with a 2008 Dodge Caliber to drive around for awhile and I’m doing my best not to get confused by all the features (there are buttons on my steering wheel that I’m hoping won’t eject me the moment I press them.) The car is fine but it’s huge compared to Kermit and I’m having a really hard time pulling it into the garage. Wes had to re-park it for me because I can’t quite figure out where I am in the car and I’m terrified of running the brand-new rental car into the side of my garage.

Other than rental-car paranoia and the suspicious lack of Kia in our garage, life is dandy. I’m feeling no ill effects from my 2mph collision and am optimistic that the future will be less smash-y. I do worry that I haven’t heard an estimate from the auto-body place. I wonder if they took a look at my car, totalled up how much it would cost to repair it, and decided the repairs would cost more than the car is worth and just decided to push it into a lake and claim it was stolen.

I promise I won’t blog about The Great Crash of Yesterday tomorrow, mainly because the name of the crash will be different and I’m pretty sure I’ve milked this life event to the last drops. If you’re unfulfilled and aching for hilarity, I highly encourage you to watch this video and join me in cruel, delightful laughter.

In what is the ultimate turning lemons into blog lemonade, I now present to you my newest work: A Tale of Two Bumpers…

It was a cloudy Seattle day. I was stopped at a red light. I thought the traffic was moving (but was distracted because I was putting my hands-free headset on. According to state law, it’s safer to drive with this stupid thing in my ear. They fail to mention that in order to abide by this law and inhabit the 21st century you either need to drive with it in your ear constantly, which makes my ear hurt, or learn how to put it in while driving, which as you can see, is neither safe nor possible. In so many words, this law sucks) but it actually wasn’t and I drove right into a stopped pick-up truck.

The end.

Today I was involved in my very first it-was-my-fault car accident. Somewhere, my mother is pulling out her baby album and writing all these details down under the section, “Baby’s very first moving vehicle violation.”

I am so fortunate because not only was the guy whose truck I hit an absolute nice guy, his truck was not damaged. As for my car, it’s not pretty. Here’s the money shot:

Kermit, my trusty Kia car, will not be winning any beauty contests any time soon.

I was able to safely drive him home only to discover, upon asking Wes why our garage smelled like celery, that the radiator is cracked and is leaking antifreeze like it’s going out of style.
Can you believe that damage? I was going less than 5mph (because I only had 2feet to travel between me and the other car) and my car looks like it was rammed into the side of a tractor by The Hulk.

Of all the accidents to have, though, this was a good one to have. No one is injured (thank goodness!), the other guy’s car is fine, and we have excellent car insurance coverage thanks to my brother in law so we’re only going to have to pay our deductible out of pocket in order to get this whole mess cleaned up.

I only wish I weren’t such a moron. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I mean, seriously, who in the blue blazes drives straight into the back of an unmoving vehicle because they thought traffic was moving and it wasn’t and they weren’t paying attention because they were trying to put in a headset?!

Of course, Wes has been amazing throughout this whole ordeal, as has my brother in law. Honestly, everyone in this whole situation has been angelic. The only person who hasn’t been very nice to me is me. I’m mad as heck at myself. In fact, I’m not even speaking to myself.

Oh, and you know what the almost worst part of it was? Right after the accident, when we were all pulled over and I reached into my purse to grab a pen, do you know what happened? This:

My purse decided it absolutely had had enough with this nonsense and broke. The strap just flopped right off. It couldn’t have given me one moment of peace in that situation, it just needed to bust the heck out.

So, while Wes is off at the autobody place to get Kermit some reconstructive surgery, I’m going to bust out some thread and a needle. After my expensive little foray into real-life bumper car-ing I don’t think Wes will be down with the idea of letting me go shopping for a new purse anytime soon.

If you, or someone you know, has ever been involved in a car accident, injury-causing or otherwise, please share your horror story in the comments section. It’ll make me feel like a lot less of an absolute imbecile and anything that helps in that endeavor is greatly appreciated at this time.

Did you ever have do-overs as a kid? Like when you were playing with your brother/sister/imaginary friend and you had to take turns and your turn was less than satisfactory you’d do a do-over and hopefully things would go better the second time? I feel like that is how my weekend was. It was ok, I guess, but man if the 2-day-time-constraint doesn’t put a lot of pressure on you to enjoy yourself, dang it!

I got my eyes checked on Saturday. The appointment took for-freaking-ever! I had to have my eyes dilated which makes waiting even worse because the light hurts your eyes and everything is blurry close up and far away. You can’t read and you can’t look out the window. I busied myself by organizing my purse. It was awful. To top it off, my prescription is wrong so I have go back. Balls!

So that was Saturday. Oh yeah, I went grocery shopping and cleaned the house (with Wes’ help!) and did the laundry too, but I feel like my appointment sucked the life and fun away from Saturday and what was left was a bleary tired mess. Two things I learned though: one, it’s fun to go out in public when your eyes are dilated as wide as saucers. Two, Wes is super-fast when it comes to cleaning and I should ask for his help more often (kidding, Wes! Maybe…ok, not really).

On Sunday I went to church, ran some errands, went back to church, got my oil changed, and then tragedy struck (why does tragedy always wait to strike on the weekends?). I was driving away from the oil changing place (don’t even get me started on the derelicts they employ there) and making a right turn when suddenly my steering wheel became really heavy. I mean, whoa! you know? So I’m not familiar with what it means when your steering wheel gets heavy and I try to accelerate out of the turn only to find that my gas pedal isn’t doing anything when I press down on it with my beautifully-boot-clad foot.

This is when I look down at the dashboard and every single indicator light that my car possesses is on. I look at the RPM-meter-thingie and it’s on 0. That’s when it all came together: at some point when I was turning right my car turned itself off. The power steering was off and that’s why my steering wheel was heavy. I slip the gear shifter to neutral and drift my sassy little way over to the side of the road and call Wes. He says that since I’m so close to home I should try to turn Kermit (my lazy car) back on and drive home.

I turn the key and Kermit starts and then dies. I try again and as soon as he starts I give him a little encouragement with the gas pedal. Kermit’s engine is running so ragged that it feels like I’m being scrambled but he’s going so I start my way down the street (don’t mind me, it looks like my car is in the depths of an ether binge but everything is fine!). Just before I’m about to turn left onto our street the engine shuts off again. I’ve got momentum going by this point and I’m thinking I’ll just drift into the driveway and everything will be fine.

Wrong! Traffic is coming from the other direction, I’ve got to stop my dead, lifeless car in the middle of the street and pray that it will turn on again so that I can drive into my garage. I’m still on the phone with Wes at this point and he may have been exposed to some potentially fatal profanity. Thankfully, Kermit starts again and I pull his shuddering, cracked-windshield, dented, scraped, and bald-tired little self into the garage and turn off the engine.

Oh, did I mention that because he’d gotten his oil changed there was smoke floating up from the hood? Yep, my car is so well-made that when I get the oil changed my car smokes like it’s on fire for the first couple drives. Don’t you just wish you drove a Kia?

So, today I drove Skippy (Wes’ car, a very nice and safe Toyota Camry) and he’s going to try driving Kermit back to the dealership to get him fixed. We’ll see if the damage is covered under warranty. I hope so but I doubt it.

I did, however, have several highlights this weekend. I ate fresh French bread, watched “The Count of Monte Cristo” (I’ve read the book in French and English and love the story. The movie was great and didn’t disappoint me at all. Hooray!), my husband helped me clean the house so that I had time to give myself a pedicure, my dog nailed all his obedience training, I got about a billion hugs from my impossibly cute nieces, and I made homemade lasagna and it turned out great.

In spite of the positive things that happened this weekend it was very stressful overall. That’s the bummer about the weekend. It’s only two days long and usually crammed with all the crap you don’t have time to do during the week. It puts a lot of pressure on you to enjoy the little time you have and then when you don’t it’s pretty disappointing.

It makes Monday kind of difficult because you’re staring down the barrel of another long work-week and you’re not sure if there’s a good weekend waiting on the other end. I sure do wish you could call a do-over on your weekend, but unfortunately my bosses aren’t as gracious as my little brother was and they won’t let me. It’s ok, though. The nice thing about weekends is that, no matter how bad your weekend was there’s always another one in five days.