Author: lux

You’re in good hands (I hope)

So last night shortly after I pulled onto highway 101 to head home I was hit by another car, spun across the highway and off the side of the road. The other driver said she was swerving to avoid something and didn’t notice there was someone on her other side. It probably looked pretty wild – 2 cars spinning across 3 lanes of traffic hitting each other as they spun. Thinking about it, I’m a little surprised the rest of the drivers on the road managed to get out of our way.

It all happened very fast and my main impression as we spun was mostly of blurring shapes in my window with me gripping the wheel and wondering what was going to happen next. She ended up down the embankment and I ended up half on the shoulder and half in the slow lane, facing into oncoming traffic. I’m not certain but I think I was hit twice and spun 510 degrees while heading off the road. At any rate, I was not hurt (albeit very shaken – I could barely stand for a few minutes because my knees were weak). My poor Saturn is another story. The polymer panels on the back left door and above the left rear tire are both badly busted. There’s a big dent on the left edge of the back bumper, and most troubling to me, the left rear tire is on an angle instead of perpendicular. I’m told this means the strut is bent. I figure that’s why I did not end up in the ditch like the girl who hit me.

The car is not drivable and was towed to a nearby body shop. The back of the envelope estimate I got last night is quite close to the Blue Book value of the car so at this point it’s about even odds whether or not Allstate will repair my baby or write her off. The repair guy assures me she will be fixed, not totaled, but I want to be prepared for either possibility. I also tend not to believe anything that anybody in the automotive field tells me until I get outside confirmation. I know that not every auto mechanic is dishonest, but as a woman with a limited knowledge of automobiles, I also know I can get taken advantage of if I’m not careful.

Prior to this the worst accident I’ve been in was a fender bender about 18 years ago, so I don’t have a big pool of experience to draw on for how to react. I was pretty calm overall. Shaken definitely but not angry. Maybe because nobody was hurt and the girl who hit me was so obviously upset and apologetic about it. Maybe it’ll hit me later. We’ll see.

I did get a little upset when the tow truck driver told me that there was no place to rent a car in Santa Rosa and he’d be happy to drop me off at the 24 hour Denny’s so I’d have a place to wait while I figured out how to get home. Visions of being stranded at Denny’s, 50+ miles from home and not a change of clothes or even a toothbrush with me, were kind of scary. Fortunately the body shop that took my car has a loaner car – a 10 year old Honda with 120000 miles on it and a roof so low my head brushes against it when I’m sitting at the wheel. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I took it and got home only about an hour later than normal.

I hope the car is repairable. I am really fond of my Saturn and losing her would make me very sad. I should know more in a day or so after Allstate gets a person up there to look at the car.

I’m not surprised but I am disappointed

I don’t know how long this URL is going to work, but here’s a link to the “Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the European Union” report mentioned in this and other news articles.

The bottom line is that attacks on Jews and Jewish property, religions institutions, and symbols in Europe reached alarming heights in 2002. The report seeks to look at what happened and try to assign some causal factors to the upswing. One of the hot button parts of the report follows:

Physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts mainly committed by young Muslim perpetrators mostly of an Arab descent in the monitoring period. Many of these attacks occurred during or after pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which were also used by radical Islamists for hurling verbal abuse. In addition, Islamic circles were responsible for placing anti-Semitic propaganda in the Internet and in Arab-language media.

It’s been suggested in some circles that the report was suppressed because the EU is unwilling to deal with the underlying issues the report details. Whether that’s true, I don’t know. As my sister once told me, Americans generally don’t have a good grasp of EU attitudes and beliefs, and she, having lived in Europe, is generally right about that sort of thing. I try to keep that in mind as I try to keep up with what’s going on in Europe.

That said, I’m saddened but not surprised by either the report or the fact that it hasn’t been published yet. Anti-semetism is nowhere near as bad as it used to be (for which I devoutly thank God) but it’s still out there and should not be ignored becasue it’s politically inconvenient to deal with it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The sucky thing about working in retail is that if your family is more than a few hour’s drive away, you won’t see them for the holidays. Since mine is some 2400 miles away, this year we’re borrowing a family from my friend Katie in Berkeley. Not that Katie & her family are bad people – they’re warmhearted folks that are a lot of fun to spend time with. But it’s still not quite the same as being with your own family.

When I was still living back East, most years we would head down to Washington DC to be with my aunt & her family. I’ve always liked the DC/NoVA area and Scott and I have several times considered moving there. My uncle would do most of the cooking with a little help from my aunt & my mom. We generally stayed in the McLean area and didn’t go into DC itself, instead doing homey stuff like taking their dog for a walk, watching my cousins’ soccer games, and enjoying the slightly warmer than NYC weather.

It’s silly and maybe a bit snobby, but one of the things I miss is a tradition my family inaugurated about 10 years ago. We found that Beaujolais Nouveau goes quite nicely with turkey, so my folks would pick up several bottles of the stuff for us to enjoy on Thanksgiving. It was fun and made the day a bit more special to taste that year’s vintage and see how the different brands compared.

Yes, I know I can buy Beaujolais Nouveau here. It’s not the same.

At any rate, I have a lot to be thankful for – health, family, friends, pets, and employment – so a little homesickness isn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme. Maybe next year we’ll be in NY again.

A Chilly Night

Fall isn’t much of a season in the Bay Area. Indian Summer takes up most of September and October. That leaves November before the winter rainy season kicks in. That leaves November.

It’s been cold and crisp these last few days, with the scent of smoke from fireplaces filling the air in the evenings. Autumn was always one of my favorite times back home in New York, and these kinds of days remind me strongly of home. Now that I work in Santa Rosa, I get to see more greenery as I drive to and fro. The trees here don’t change colors as dramatically as they do in New York and Connecticut – most of the trees are just yellowish brown – but a few patches of bright red can be found. A field of grapevines near Petaluma has turned bright yellow. I’ve dug out my wool sweaters and a scarf, although the gloves and down jacket aren’t likely to be needed.

The gas fireplace in our last apartment wasn’t quite as good as the real thing, but it would be nice to curl up near any kind of fireplace on days like these. Instead, I make do with one of the cats. Tina and Tommy compete for lap space on cold days. They like the warmth too.

It would be nice if I could look forward to some snowy days to come, but I’ll have to drive to Tahoe for that sort of thing. Instead, we get the incongruous sight of palm trees with holiday lights on them. There aren’t a lot of palm trees this far north, but there are a few, and it always throws me off a bit to see them.

“Black Friday” is fast approaching, and with it, the twin horrors of extended holiday hours and holiday music. I don’t really mind the odd work hours, especially since I get to set the schedules now, but I utterly loathe the overproduced pabulum that passes for holiday music which the home office decrees we should play in the store. Christmas isn’t my holiday, but I wouldn’t be too upset if I had to listen to some good classical arrangements of carols, or classics like ‘The Nutcracker Suite’.

Ah well. I just keep reminding myself, it’s only for a couple of weeks, and then I can burn the damn CDs. Until next year.

Moby Dick resurfaces

Scott pointed out something tonight that I totally missed in the last episode of ER. There’s a nice echo of Moby Dick in the end to the saga of Dr Romano, in that he was killed by the same creature that previously took his limb (in other words, a helicopter, albeit not a white one).

Very clever of the writers.

Heart of Oak

It’s late and I’ll pay for this when the alarm clock goes off oh so early tomorrow morning, but I saw “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” tonight & wanted to throw down a few lines while my impressions are still fresh.

As a longtime avid fan of the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin series, I had waited for the opening of the movie version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Happily, I was much more pleased than disappointed by the results. Given the limits of what you can cram into one movie, I think they did a fair job of bringing an O’Brien book to the screen. But my pleasure was not unalloyed.

Other, less exhausted reviewers of the movie will go into detail of the subplots cut, the bits freely borrowed from other O’Brien novels, and the somewhat contrived ending. I’ll limit myself to these few observations:

1) I think they could have kept the original love triangle subplot with Midshipman Horner, the gunner, and his wife rather than making Horner out to be just another aging, inept midshipman who couldn’t pass for lieutenant. I suppose it made the film too long to add it in.

2) I’m a fan of Billy Boyd, but I found him somewhat incongruous as Barrett Bonden. I’d always pictured Bonden to be older and not as good looking.

3) Russell Crowe did a good job as Aubrey. I would have liked to see Aubrey a little more human and less permanently enrobed with the godlike authority of a captain, but that’s not what you get with Crowe, and all things considered it was an acceptable tradeoff. He certainly did a good job of the glee Jack felt when sailing Surprise into a storm or boarding a Frenchman’s deck, for example. And I loved the ‘lesser of two weevils’ bit.

4) Maturin. As with Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany is a good actor, but my mental image of Stephen Maturin was not in line with him. Bettany is too tall and too good-looking to be the small, scrawny, bewigged Doctor. And in the final battle, despite the fact that O’Brien does take pains to demonstrate that Stephen is a good fighter, there’s no way Maturin would have boarded the enemy. His place was in the cockpit with the wounded and he would not have left it.

4) Blakeney. I would have preferred meeting young Babbington.

Despite my quibbles, I do think “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” is a move well worth seeing and I suspect it will fight it out with “Lord Of The Rings” for a few Oscars this springtime.