I plan a vacation and the drivers of Louisiana laugh
Guess I was due for another distracted driver piloting way more car than they know how to handle to hit me. I was coming home last night and going through the intersection at Chemin Agreable and Decon when a woman in a giant SUV and a baby in the car somehow missed that I was already in the intersection and clipped the corner of my passenger side bumper.
You can be the best, safest driver in the world, but Louisiana is full of drunks, uninsured motorists driving cars that should have been junked 10,000 miles ago, terrible roads, and just plain bad drivers. If you drive as much as I do--40+ minute commutes 10 times a week and every vacation a road trip because late stage capitalism has made flying detestably unpleasant--eventually your number will come up.
No one was hurt, it's a 4-way stop so we were both only going a few miles an hour. And the damage I think is only cosmetic: a smashed headlight and the bumper corner all pushed in, but where there's actual metal it's mostly just scraped paint. I drove the car home afterward and didn't notice anything weird. The tires are fine and no one's airbags deployed. And to her credit, she immediately admitted guilt. It would have been futile to deny it; we were both going straight through the intersection so we were at right angles to each other, and the damage is all on her front but on my side, clearly indicating that she hit me. No that my insurance won't still go up, and I'll have to pay for body work up front and hope they come through. Insurance is very reliable at taking a big chunk of your money every month; but when it comes time to put it to use it seems like you mostly get mouse farts from them, after weeks or months of being jerked around.
It was 90 degrees out and she had a baby, so since she wasn't trying to weasel out of fault we exchanged information and decided no one needed to call the cops. It's just spectacularly terrible timing, as I was supposed to drive to Galveston on Monday.
It's too late to get my money back on the hotel room, and the cost of a rental is less than the cost of the hotel, so I think I might rent a car and go anyway. I know I won't totally enjoy myself since I'll have knowing that I need to deal with the insurance and the body shop when I come home at the back of my mind. But I desperately need to get out of the house for a few days, and if I didn't go I'd just be home stewing in anxiety over it anyway.
I haven't been talking about it much because I know Phil deserves privacy, but over the past few months the slide of dementia has gotten steeper and greasier. It's bad enough that Jamie is coming for a visit in a couple of weeks, because we aren't sure if he'll be alive at Christmas. It's exhausting for all of us, but especially Mom, who has her own health issues. She has to scream 10 minutes of instructions at him for every little thing, and he'll still manage to fuck up more often than not.
I'm not exaggerating even a little bit: David made creamy mushroom soup last night, and I heated them up cups for lunch, then went into the kitchen to bake some dog treats. I could hear Mom yelling "Take the spoon! The spoon! For your soup! That's not soup, that's your Gatorade!" And when I went to get their dishes, he'd eaten the liquid but left the cup full of cold mushroom slices.
*sigh*
In somewhat more cheerful news, I found a taker for the Hellblazer Omnibus volumes (a woman whose daughter has started reading Sandman and expressed interest in similar graphic novels), there are 4 Harris/Walz signs on my street and no Trump/Vance ones, and I saw my first loaded cane truck of the season. Oh, and there was someone power washing the Stelly's booth next to the CVS, so crawfish season is nigh.
You can be the best, safest driver in the world, but Louisiana is full of drunks, uninsured motorists driving cars that should have been junked 10,000 miles ago, terrible roads, and just plain bad drivers. If you drive as much as I do--40+ minute commutes 10 times a week and every vacation a road trip because late stage capitalism has made flying detestably unpleasant--eventually your number will come up.
No one was hurt, it's a 4-way stop so we were both only going a few miles an hour. And the damage I think is only cosmetic: a smashed headlight and the bumper corner all pushed in, but where there's actual metal it's mostly just scraped paint. I drove the car home afterward and didn't notice anything weird. The tires are fine and no one's airbags deployed. And to her credit, she immediately admitted guilt. It would have been futile to deny it; we were both going straight through the intersection so we were at right angles to each other, and the damage is all on her front but on my side, clearly indicating that she hit me. No that my insurance won't still go up, and I'll have to pay for body work up front and hope they come through. Insurance is very reliable at taking a big chunk of your money every month; but when it comes time to put it to use it seems like you mostly get mouse farts from them, after weeks or months of being jerked around.
It was 90 degrees out and she had a baby, so since she wasn't trying to weasel out of fault we exchanged information and decided no one needed to call the cops. It's just spectacularly terrible timing, as I was supposed to drive to Galveston on Monday.
It's too late to get my money back on the hotel room, and the cost of a rental is less than the cost of the hotel, so I think I might rent a car and go anyway. I know I won't totally enjoy myself since I'll have knowing that I need to deal with the insurance and the body shop when I come home at the back of my mind. But I desperately need to get out of the house for a few days, and if I didn't go I'd just be home stewing in anxiety over it anyway.
I haven't been talking about it much because I know Phil deserves privacy, but over the past few months the slide of dementia has gotten steeper and greasier. It's bad enough that Jamie is coming for a visit in a couple of weeks, because we aren't sure if he'll be alive at Christmas. It's exhausting for all of us, but especially Mom, who has her own health issues. She has to scream 10 minutes of instructions at him for every little thing, and he'll still manage to fuck up more often than not.
I'm not exaggerating even a little bit: David made creamy mushroom soup last night, and I heated them up cups for lunch, then went into the kitchen to bake some dog treats. I could hear Mom yelling "Take the spoon! The spoon! For your soup! That's not soup, that's your Gatorade!" And when I went to get their dishes, he'd eaten the liquid but left the cup full of cold mushroom slices.
*sigh*
In somewhat more cheerful news, I found a taker for the Hellblazer Omnibus volumes (a woman whose daughter has started reading Sandman and expressed interest in similar graphic novels), there are 4 Harris/Walz signs on my street and no Trump/Vance ones, and I saw my first loaded cane truck of the season. Oh, and there was someone power washing the Stelly's booth next to the CVS, so crawfish season is nigh.