judyonthenet

Yesterday, I went to Mitsuwa with Sandra while she was in town. While making an unprotected left turn on a green light from Blackford to Saratoga, a Corolla zoomed through the intersection on a red light, hitting the front right corner of my car.

Their light had been red for at least 10-15 seconds. I remember watching the long line of cars across from us, also making unprotected lefts, and commenting how none of these people had their left blinkers on even through they were probably going to make lefts. I watched the second car turn on their blinker as the first, already blinkered car made its left, so I decided at this point to make my left.

Out of the corner of my eye, I must have seen the car coming, because I braked suddenly, said “Oh my god”, and braced myself for impact. (By bracing, I mean wincing and locking my arms.) Sandra kept complimenting me on my fast reflexes, to which I jokingly referred to my video game reflexes. Honestly, I don’t remember thinking about it (it happened really fast), so it must have been some natural reaction. If I had decided to go for the left earlier, or if I hadn’t braked… let’s just say I’m glad we didn’t have to test my side impact airbags. The Corolla didn’t brake at all going through the red, so it had to be at least 30mph. Really scary.

The Corolla had pulled over, so I reversed back out of the intersection and parked behind them. An old Russian couple popped out, looking very confused. The old man, who was driving, said “You hit me?” Sandra and I were like, “You ran the red!” He seemed disoriented and kept mumbling, probably in Russian.

Another man came up to us, followed by three boys whose faces had “whoa” expressions, asking if everyone was okay. I asked if he saw what happened, he’s like, “Yeah, I was behind him!” The confused man mumbled to him, and the witness gave him a stern, “You ran the red.” He gave me his name and number in case I needed a witness and then went back on his way. Good Samaritans do exist in the Bay Area! And he’s setting a good example to his kids… yay for humanity!

At this point, the old man was calling his son on the phone. I spoke with his son briefly, since his English was much better than his dad’s and the car insurance was under his name. I exchanged insurance information with the old couple, and we took pictures of each other’s vehicles.

Good thing I braked! Damage pretty minimal

I think their repairs are gonna be more expensive

Aside from the initial confusion and them almost seriously injuring me, the old Russian couple are actually nice people. I think the driver’s mind had been distracted thinking of other things; he didn’t seem particularly crazy or senile. Everybody was glad no one was hurt, and the old man was very remorseful for the mess he caused. He said he has a flawless driving record since ‘61, and this was the first time he messed up like this. Thank goodness Sandra was here, too; she totally helped calm me while my brain was all whacked out trying to figure out the situation.

Today, I took it to a nearby shop to get an estimate. Talking with the son, he said his family had a preferred shop, so I took it there soon after. (Coincidentally, it was like a block away from the first shop I took it to.) I met up with the old man there, who was still incredibly apologetic. He said he trusted this mechanic, who was unsurprisingly Russian. He kept offering me monetary compensation outside of the car fixes for inconveniencing me. I told him I don’t want his money, I just want my car fixed and for him to drive more carefully!

Now I’m just waiting for parts; I’ll be dropping off my car for the repairs next week. What a relief there were no assholes or hospital visits in this story. Everything was easily worked out, and everyone was A-okay. This could have been a much bigger headache… or worse.

The whole experience still freaks me out though. You can’t protect yourself from red light runners! In fact, when I drove home, there was an accident at an intersection near our apartment. Looks like a van was hit left turning by a car going straight. All lefts are protected here, so somebody definitely ran a red. Worse than mine, but all the passenger areas look okay, so hopefully nobody was hurt.

Glad this wasn’t me.

Scary.

New thing I learned today: A bumper absorber is a large piece of styrofoam in between the bumper cover and reinforcement beam.

The first reaction that most people, including me, had when they saw my damage was, “Whoa, there’s styrofoam in there?”

Now that my driving is down to a minimum, you’d think I’d have less issues with my vehicle. No, of course not. I still can’t park worth jack, and now I’ve had to deal with those…8-legged thingies I can’t tolerate.

The last couple weeks, I’ve been practicing backing into our covered parking space at the apartment. Facing into the space, there’s a curb with bushes on the left, and two poles holding up the covering on the right with the next parking space on the other side. If I park straight in, I open my door into bushes, and I hate getting out next to the plants because I’m paranoid of spiders. So I’ve been parking backwards so that I can leave my car away from the bushes. I’ve been doing this for, maybe, 2 weeks without problems. Sure, I might have to pull an Austin Powers and do like a 20-point turn, but I make it in. Occasionally, I hit the curb with the bushes. I’m very paranoid about hitting the poles and neighbors car, so I tend to get way too close to the curb/bush; I’d much rather hit the curb then dent my neighbors car or cause the parking covering to collapse.

Of course, this changed last Friday night, when for some strange reason, I decided to pay more attention to the curb side than the pole side. So, OF COURSE, I nicked the pole with my side view mirror. And Rodney was visiting, so both him and Kelvin got to witness my parking retardedness. I feel really dumb not paying attention to my side view mirror and not going in totally straight. Ugh. The pole seems okay, it got a little bit of paint scrubbed off in one corner, but based on what’s already on the pole, other people in the past have had issues parking as well. My side view mirror could be better; it’s not broken in any way, but the edge is a little scratched up. I cleaned the paint off, but there’s still scratch marks (but the scratches go away if it gets wet… anybody know if I can hide this somehow?).

Yesterday morning, I drove to work, noticing a spiderweb had been constructed on my passenger side view mirror. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m sickly afraid of spiders. So I drove to work without dealing with it. The web seemed to break up when I got to work, so I was mildly relieved.

This morning, I get in the car and, while driving to work, notice there are three small, white spiders crawling around on my passenger side view mirror. I’m go “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod” all the way to work, avoiding looking in that direction. I get to work and park my car, and then I grab my emergency water bottle to ready myself for battle. I open the passenger window and start dumping water in the direction of the side view mirror. It’s a regular Crystal Geyser bottle, so my accuracy is not so hot, but I get a couple of them off. Not looking through my glasses, I can still see a white speck underneath the mirror, but I wait until lunch to deal with it.

At lunch, Bobby joins me to get some KFC. I ask him to check out my side view mirror, and sure enough, that little white speck is still there and it’s a spider. So he gets rid of it for me, which I’m slightly relieved about. What I’m not so relieved about is this long scratch going across the side of my car. What the hell? It’s not straight, and it goes across the entire car, which makes me thinking someone keyed it… but I didn’t do anything bad recently! It probably happened between Sunday (when Kelvin was passenger) and today, but I haven’t gone anywhere except work and the apartment… and I haven’t had issues with anybody (that I know of) at either of these places. I thought maybe a bush branch scratched my car when I was backing up, but it seems a little deep for that. Maybe somebody accidentally dragged something against the paint at the apartment (sometimes people walk by our parking space to get to places). Maybe it’s a random act of vandalism (something my car is no stranger to). Regardless, I’m pissed.

And as I was driving back from KFC, a white spider was crawling outside the driver’s window, so I was trying to not have a heart attack and crash the car as I drove back. I dunno if it flew off or something, but we couldn’t find it when we got back to work. Now I’m insanely paranoid about there being more spiders on my car. I feel really sick. I think I need therapy.

Ugh. I feel nauseous.

You’d think that having to only drive 1.5 miles to work would minimize my chances of running into morons on the road, but four days into my new commute, I see a jerk bad enough to blog about.

Yesterday, I’m going on a local street (one lane in each direction) towards this lighted intersection of a major road where I have the green light, and I want to make a right. On the corner to my left, there is a gas station. A tan Prius with a middle-aged or older white dude driving is sitting at the driveway of this gas station. He decides to do that annoying thing, where they make the last minute decision to go into your lane, forcing you to brake. It’s not that big of a deal for me, since I have to make a right turn, so I’d need to slow down anyway. However, this jerk is also talking on his cell phone (without a headset), which greatly annoys me.

He apparently needs to make a right also. (Nevermind that he could have just taken the other gas station exit to go straight onto the road.) He goes to the corner to turn and STOPS. On a GREEN light. What. the. fuck. There’s no emergency vehicles, no cars running the red, not even any cars going straight in the lane we’re in who might make some crazy right turn on the other side of the sidewalk island. This is guy is just stopping for no reason. I honk at him, and of course, the jerk ignores me. The light turns yellow, and I keep thinking he’s going to go, so I keep inching forward. As I move forward, I notice he’s pushing buttons on his (non-Prius) navigation system. HE’S BLOCKING THE RIGHT TURN LANE TO TALK ON HIS CELL PHONE AND USE HIS NAVIGATION SYSTEM. He was just at a freaking gas station!!! The light turns red, but there’s people left turning, so he can still turn right… but of course he doesn’t. I swear to God there’s like steam coming out of my ears; I’m so pissed I forget to honk at him like crazy like your stereotypical Bay Area driver. He finally turns right, and I can finally drive the half-block to my apartment, where I fume about this asshole to Kelvin for an hour.

Let’s summarize this. What makes this guy a jerk:
1) He semi-cut me off in my lane.
2) He took the gas station exit where he has to left-turn and right-turn to the road he wants to get on instead of taking the driveway that goes straight to his desired road. The awkward exit would make sense if he wanted to beat the red (obviously not the case). And the red light on the road he wanted to go on would have been a perfect time to do all his retarded shit.
3) He’s talking on his cell phone without a headset.
4) He stopped on a green. (ARGH, this makes me want to murder people.)
5) He ignores my honking of his blocking the green.
6) He stays stopped as the light goes yellow.
7) He stays stopped as people make lefts and are not u-turning.
8) He’s using his navigation system while on his cell phone and blocking the lane.
9) Considering he’s using his hand to hold his cellphone to his head and his other free hand to use a third-party navigation system, he probably has the cheapest Prius model (with no bluetooth and navigation system), which means he probably bought this car to save money on gas, which probably means he’s a penny-pinching self-entitled asshole.

Okay, that last one is kind of a stretch, especially since I drive a Prius. I’m sure the people sitting at the red light found it amusing there’s this girl in a Prius freaking out behind this asshole in a Prius. But whatever, I’m pissed. With jerks like this on the road, no wonder people don’t like Prius drivers.

I feel totally nauseous this morning. I woke with an unhappy stomach, and then I had to deal with a disgusting eight legged thing in the doorway of the driver’s seat. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate dealing with those things. I thought it was dead, but the first flick confirmed it was very not dead. I couldn’t flick it away with my parking ticket from the second location (the ticket was too small for me to be more aggressive without vomiting), so I had to go through my trunk to get to the back seat and grab some junk paper on the floor. After shrieking a few times and waving the rolled up scrap paper at the thing without my glasses on, the thing eventually fell off my vehicle and onto the parking lot floor, scurrying away. I had to sit in my vehicle a few minutes to calm down. Ugh. I need to get therapy.

I was pretty indifferent on the road today because of my earlier freakout, but I do want to bitch about another driving pet peeve: changing into a lane where the lane merges. To the jerk in the archaic van who honked at me as I supposedly cut him off, I can’t see you when there’s a car in my blind spot between me and you. And even if I could see you, where did you expect me to go? I have no more lane because the lane is freaking merging. I was waiting for the guy already in the lane to pass so I can merge in the spot behind him, and asshole in the van decides to change into that lane at that moment. I’m in front of him, I’m signalling the entire time, and I have to merge or else I’m going to end up in the shoulder… and you have balls to honk at me with your tooty horn. Jerk.

The post on Conan is taking too long for something nobody is going to read. At least I took notes this time, so I can take my merry little time with it. And yes, Chris, I did use the notebook you gave me :P I’ve also been slacking on posts since Conan, but hopefully I’ll get back into the blogging vibe now.

New thing I learned today: Biannual means every two years, but it can also mean twice a year. Same for biweekly, bimonthly, etc.
Edited to add: I’ve read a couple more articles that say “biannual” is twice a year (like semi-annual), while “biennial” means every two years… even though dictionary.com says they’re interchangable. Pretty much all articles say to not use biannual or bienniel at all because it’s too freaking confusing.

I originally had a long rant about my commute here, but in hindsight, it wasn’t particularly bad, and there was only one incident worth highlighting.

I was left turning from Santa Clara onto Montgomery, which is a one way road going away from the Pavilion. Montgomery has two lanes, and Santa Clara has two left turn lanes going into each one. I’m turning in the right left-turn lane, and I drive by an old man in an old car sitting in the left lane of Montgomery at the intersection, facing the Pavilion. Yeah, he’s facing the wrong direction. He must have forgotten the road is one way when leaving a nearby parking lot. I give him the WTF glare as I pass him, as I’m sure the the two trucks behind me do as well. The old man is towards the middle of the lane, too, which implies he wants to make a left turn. Which means he has to wait for a left-turn light. Which means he’s probably really confused, because there probably aren’t any traffic lights in the direction he’s facing. I wonder if he ever turned or figured out he was going the wrong way…