fuzzy notepad

Tagged: personal

[blog] Crash!

So someone hit my car last week.

It was parked on the curb, right in front of my house. (We have four cars and a packed garage, so.) I heard a super loud smack, but thought someone had dropped a large appliance on the sidewalk until Mel appeared in my doorway with someone hit your car.

Outside I scurried in pajamas and slippers (working from home is awesome) and I beheld the scene you see inset. The driver was very apologetic, and luckily unharmed. She’d been fiddling with something on her dashboard and wasn’t even looking at the road, so she hit my car at full speed. The photo is framed as it is because my car had been parked with its rear wheel on that grate, and with the parking brake on. That’s how far she knocked it. (Speed limit on this street is 25, by the way.)

I felt kinda bad for her, but at the same time, that this even happened is terrifying. I don’t know if a human being would have survived the same impact. She said she’s “normally such a safe driver”—I guess she’s only a dangerous driver sometimes, then, and it turns out those are the times when you hit things.

Called 911; couple police cars came to direct traffic around her and file an accident report, and a flatbed tow truck took her car off. I had to leave my car “parked” in front of a fire hydrant overnight, because the rear axle was bent so much that it doesn’t move at all.

My car was towed to a local shop the day after; they called me back earlier this week with an estimate around $7400. The driver’s insurance is paying for absolutely everything without question, though, so I shouldn’t be out a dime over this. I have a rental in the meantime.

This is actually the second time this has happened; early this year I was street-parked on the other side of the street, and I awoke to find a conspicuous dent in the driver’s side door. And when I say “dent”, I mean it spanned the bottom of the door up to the window; looked like a shopping cart had hit it at an angle while going 40. I’d only slept for a few hours the night before, and Mel had been awake through the night, but neither of us heard or saw anything. Don’t know what happened or who did it. I thought it would be a simple fix, but the shop had to replace the entire door, I had to pay a few hundred deductible, and my insurance went up. Super.

I’ve never hit anything, never gotten a ticket, never even been pulled over. I live in a fairly sleepy town, not on a major road. And in two years my car has been hit twice, while parked at home. I’m just gonna start parking on the lawn.

Below are some photos of my poor darling car. Consider this a test of this fancybox plugin gallery plugin.

[blog] Lasik

This is a thing I got yesterday. Not 24 hours ago, even.

Mel had it done last December and started dropping hints that I should also get it done pretty much that day. I stalled and dawdled forever, but I’ve been experiencing a lot of eye strain lately and was due for an eye exam anyway, so I finally made an appointment for Wednesday.

Not that Mel was continually bugging me to do it or anything, but when faced with the prospect of doing something terrifying, spinning it to myself as something someone else wants doing is a convenient brain hack.

Yes, terrifying. You see, I don’t like things i my eyes. I don’t like water in my eyes. I had never opened my eyes underwater until a couple months ago, and it still feels like a superpower to me. If I get an eyelash in my eye, I have to find a mirror and manually guide it out because it bugs me so much. And now I was facing a medical procedure that involved shining a laser into my eyes. A laser! You know where you’re supposed to shine a laser? Anywhere except into your eyes.

Everyone at the clinic told me reassuring things, like that it’s a cold laser, or it doesn’t hurt, or it’s over pretty fast, or whatever. No, no, you don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t like things in my eyes because some rational underlying fear. I just don’t like things in my eyes, the same way I don’t like sharp things under my fingernails, or I don’t like spiders. I don’t like it. It’s creepy and I want to run away from whatever it causing it.

Okay, this story seems to have gotten a little off-track. Let’s rewind.

[blog] What the hell am I doing

I guess I started a bad habit of writing big long posts About Things, and then blogging became this self-imposed chore, and then I didn’t do a lot of it. Oops. I’ll make a deliberate effort to write shorter things when they come to mind. (I also have half a dozen half-finished posts not committed, which by my count should equal three whole posts.)

Lately I’ve been drowning in an (even worse) inability to do things. Something dislodged all the cool progress I made at the end of last year and I don’t feel like I’m getting much of anything done. Numerous conversations with mel, strangely-relevant blog posts I stumbled upon purely by accident, and brilliant self-reflection are starting to help.

[blog] YATTA

I am now, officially, as literate as a native Japanese two-year-old. Almost. Maybe.

an image of my JLPT N5 certificate

I actually meant to condense all the grammar I know down to bullet points that make sense to me, and post it before I took the test. I kinda never did that. Oops! Maybe some other time.

I haven’t really studied in the past two months, either; time to get back into that. I picked up a surprising number of phrases from watching FMA, so that’s a good sign.