Laurabelle’s Blog

The past two days were much more exciting than I like. And as my mother said, bad things come in threes. I hope she is right, because that means I'm already done.

Thursday morning I was rear-ended on the way to work. It was also a hit-and-run. I was sitting at a stoplight after exiting the freeway; he ran into me. I got out of my car and asked him to pull over with me to the side of the road to exchange insurance info; he made some sort of affirmative noise. I also got a clear look at his license plate when I was out of the car, which was a good thing since when I pulled over, he wasn't behind me.

Honestly, that ticked me off more than the rear-ending itself. So what, mistakes happen; one deals with the situation like a reasonable person. But I have a strong sense of responsibility and honor, and it annoys me that he just ran away from the consequences of his actions.

Anyway, the rest of my day was spent on dealing with the aftereffects. I called the police (which mostly entailed figuring out whether this was the Highway Patrol's jurisdiction or that of the Oakland police) and my insurance company. I got a little bit of actual work done but ended up leaving the office at just after noon to make a report in person to the Oakland police (which was a short and relatively pleasant process) and to visit a doctor at my HMO (who confirmed that I've basically got some soreness and inflammation but should be fine with time). I managed to accomplish pretty much everything I needed before leaving town the next day. Oddly enough, I feel rather successful and proud of myself for dealing with the situation competently for the first time on my own.

It also helps that I got the guy's license plate, so there's at least a hope of the guy having to pay dearly for the hit-and-run.

The fun didn't stop on Friday. We were picked up at 5:15am by an airport shuttle driver who first couldn't apparently find the address, then asked us how to get to either of the near freeways and completely ignored our advice. He had trouble controlling the van at 45 MPH on the freeway (the limit was 65 MPH). But that's not even the worst. Nearing the airport, he let himself get stuck in the rightmost lane of two exit-only lanes, then veered left over the V after the lanes had already diverged. This also would not have been quite so bad except for the square speedbump-type lump of concrete in the V that he ran right over with the right-hand tires, sending the passenger side of the van a foot or two into the air. At this point we were quite nervous and glad that the airport was not very far...

The air travel itself was not, thankfully, comparatively eventful. The only suspenseful moment was whether we might get bumped from our overbooked flight, but a couple of no-shows let us on. We were the last two on the plane, but we were on, and we even got to sit next to each other. I have no complaints there.

Then came event number three: the airline lost my luggage. Jeff's suitcase came through fine, but mine was not on the carousel. I reported it, of course, and then spent a few hours remembering all the things in that bag that I really didn't want to lose. There were a bunch of Christmas presents, of course, and I had packed a really nice hand-knitted sweater I was intending to wear on Christmas Eve.

Luckily Jeff had packed a little bit of my overflow in his bags, including my pajamas, so I had sleepwear for the night. This morning as I was contemplating underwear and toothbrush shopping, the phone rang announcing that my bag would be delivered in thirty minutes. Hallelujah!

We fly next on Christmas Day. I sincerely hope that it is less eventful.