Current mood:	aggravated
Entry tags:	austin life, eccentrics, gamers, silliness

Everything's Fun & Games Until You're Rear-Ended!
Good Friday. Good??? Friday?

Friday was so busy at work that I couldn't even join my friends for lunch and free music at the City Council Live from the Plaza concert next door. Sigh. Didn't even get lunch, so I ate some beef jerky from my protein snack stash and at the end of the workday drove down Guadalupe looking for Franklin Street and Jeffles' engagement party. Found it!

Jeffles, who at 6'9" is one of the three tallest people I know, is engaged to marry Sarah, a tall woman (I'm guessing 5'11") whom he meet in his first week at Duke University. They dated some and kept in touch all these years. Then they started dating again, compared notes about their respective nieces and nephews, and she moved down to Austin. Guess that went well, and they got engaged. Sweet!

I've known the boy since he first moved to Austin, about nine years now, a handsome, outgoing guy who's dated dozens if not hundreds of women. I've been to parties where slinky women walked up and started talking to him familiarly, and only later did he comment that he thought he'd probably dated them... But he's always been sweet about remembering who you are and what you do if he's your friend. So it looks like Sarah must've somehow combined the three categories of date, lover and friend successfully for him, plus they seem to have the same kind of education, upbringing and enjoyment of outdoor activities. They're planning a wedding in the Bahamas (maybe) in October (maybe) so their families can have a fun vacation.


Sarah and Jeffles. Didn't notice it at the time, but I happened to pose them next to some of Jeffles' German-style boardgames, which is the reason we met, through goulo.


For entertainment, and since it was Good Friday, they'd set up an egg dyeing area. Remember doing that? A woman at work with a new child had to ask how to boil an egg when her daughter's school asked parents to bring half a dozen eggs to school for dyeing.


In this science experience, one subject received more
water and nutrients than the other. Class, can you tell which one?

Actually, jipp came to the party as well. Since he and Jeffles are the same age (31), I posed them. When he's standing next to an ordinary-sized human, you can see how Jeffles comes all the way up to the top of the kitchen cabinets. My advice to JP now: get cracking! He does go off to Lindy-Hop events all over the U.S. (and maybe now Sweden, he says) where there are lots of hot girls so maybe he'll have a fiancee soon himself. When I met JP, he was too shy to talk to girls. Now he has dates all the time, so things look promising.

A woman at the party looked familiar to me. I asked Claytie-Baby who was sucking down the champagne (he who never remembers faces; don't know why I bothered) and he did recall knowing her, maybe from SlugTribe. So I asked her name -- YvonneF. She totally remembered me, and once I had her name, much of her history flooded back. "Oh my god, I remember you did our writers workshop at Tehuacana. Then you had a sad break-up and we didn't see you for a year. But when you came back, there was a baby at your breast. I said 'but you were broken-hearted last time we talked' and you said 'I'm better. The evidence is here before you.'" Then she pointed at the amiable bald man who worked with Jeffles in the Texas Dept of Health and said, "And he was the guy I'd met!" "Wow," I told him, "I've heard about you. Never met you, but I have met your progeny." She had a 6-7 year old daughter then too, and now the baby boy is 13 and the daughter is a junior in college. Whatta trip!

I left the party to grab some dinner, still very hungry from missing lunch. But the Thai Kitchen parking lot was totally full. It seemed like a sign from heaven, since when I'd passed Amy's Ice Cream on Guadalupe, I'd thought how long it had been since I'd been there. So...


Here's the delicious banana split from Amy's I had for dinner! Just my luck, my outspoken ice cream dipper was a tiny girl who was a nutrition major. When I told her this was my lunch and dinner, she scolded me and insisted on lots of fruit. So bananas and strawberries and 3 kinds of ice cream with hot fudge and whipped cream. Yum! I bet it's been 10+ years since I had a banana split at Amy's too...

The Clandestine concert that was my goal was on campus at the Cactus Cafe. I'd already checked if I could use J4's house parking and normally would've parked & left. But since I had a good story about seeing YvonneF again, I went ahead and knocked on her door to chat some. She was blown away too! And then I heard about real estate dealings and attorneys, etc., for possible big changes with her and Stephen and his businesses.


Got over to the concert by 8:30 but the band wasn't playing until 9:00. I kept thinking Matt or Clayton or somebody would show up, but it was just me and 25 other people that night. The band has a different sound since Jen quit and the new guy Al came in. Still good Celtic music though. They've gotten tighter since February and have several new songs that Emily and Al co-wrote now.

But at the intermission, I was already tired and had committed to a Saturday morning screenwriters meeting. So I left early. Drove down MLK about 10:45 pm, turned to get onto IH 35 going north, and then it happened.

Some idiot driver had STOPPED on the access road, too scared to merge with traffic. I'm looking at traffic, increasing my speed a little, when I look forward, see the three cars stopped, and SLAM on my brakes. I was proud of my reflexes, because I didn't hit anyone. Close though!

However, the young guy from New Orleans in a Chevy SUV behind me, didn't stop as fast. He rear-ended me. MY BRAND NEW PRIUS! I haven't had an accident in years & years, nothing with my Mazda or red truck or mini-wagon. But I get a car I have to wait for for six months, and THAT gets whacked!



I was so rattled I couldn't even get my windows down to talk to the other driver, who was asking if I was hurt (a little whiplash I feel today is all). I called 911 and gave them directions and my cell phone number. A cop pullled up immediately and instructed us how to get off the elevated highway and onto a residential street. I crawled back over the divider and into my seat, started up the motor and got going slowly, when my cell phone rang! A man on it said something about an accident, and I said we were taking care of it and I didn't want to talk while I'm driving. And hung up. But the phone rang again! I said "I can't talk now! Please call me in 5 minutes!" And the same man said, "Ma'am, you do not hang up on me when I'm trying to take care of this! ..." At that point I asked him, very confused, if he was the officer following me. Why chew me out when I was doing what he'd said? But this guy said "Oh, there's an officer at the scene?" Then I could hear him radio-ing and he finally let me go.

When we parked, both officers parked with us and thought it was a funny story. Ha ha. The one guy had just come upon us and hadn't been deployed by the dispatcher is what happened. But for the second cop to be so ticked so quickly -- ? Why didn't he ask something like, "what is your situation now?" I would've told him I was exiting the freeway at the direction of the cop on the scene.

Since the guy who rear-ended me stayed, and there was just the bumper damage for me, no injuries and not more than $15,000 in property damage, the cops just had us fill out paperwork to give each other. No accident report will be filed; just an incident number was assigned. The guy, Parker, asked if I would allow him to fix my car himself, which I'll accommodate unless it gets hairy. He didn't gasp when I told him the next day that Charles Maund Toyota Body Shop had estimated $1800, with possibly $500 more, plus 5-7 days of rent car. And who knows once they get in the body of the car if something else comes up. I've got his insurance company info if I need it...

So, for me, this was Not-So-Good Friday.

ADDENDUM: The next day I got a body shop estimate ($1800 to $2300 easily), and Parker, the other driver, still wanted to handle it. He was quite conscientious about contacting the body shop and the Enterprise Rent-A-Car next door for Monday morning. But the body shop wouldn't take his checks (out of town? who knows) and it was a wasted 1.5-hour lunch for me on Monday trying to take care of it. He and I finally agreed to do a claim, and even then the insurance company didn't win awards for quick response. Didn't get my car in for repairs until 9 days after the accident.