This has been a shocking year for my car. I've had it since spring of 2000, and our life together has been extremely uneventful. Or it was until May, when a window was broken out during the night during attempted thievery. I sideswiped the wisteria at the bottom of my parents' driveway, and put some scratches on the side. And then in November, someone keyed an "x" on the front - either the kids who play in our parking lot, or the roofers who I tangled with over harrassment issues. The day before I left to drive down here, a bunch of kids rang my doorbell to tell me they had whacked it again during a game. They offered to pay for it, but I figured that so much else had happened to it that their little ding really didn't matter.

Then, yesterday, I ended up in a fender-bender on Veteran's Parkway in Metairie. Nobody was hurt, and I got the ticket because I was the person in back. What happened was, it had just barely rained and quit. The brand-new Ford Explorer Sport in front of me turned to go into a gas station, and then realized suddenly that there was a line in front of the pumps and their car wouldn't make it all the way into the lot. So they came to an abrupt halt with the rear half of the vehicle in my lane. I braked, I slid, I whacked 'em. There's a scratch on their bumper cover, but my front bumper is pretty much ruined, the headlight is cockeyed, and I'm not entirely sure how much damage was done back behind those items.

So now I got a $500 deductable, a God-knows-how much traffic ticket*, and I never did make it to the Quarter yesterday. On the other hand, perhaps we get handed a certain number of traffic accidents in our lifetime. If so, I used up one of mine and nobody got hurt, so that's good.

What irks me the most, though, is that I got the ticket for following too close, and the immediate response at home was "Well, you do follow closely, you know." Maybe possibly, but I don't think so. This is the first accident I've been in that's pretty much my fault. Twelve years of driving in nearly every city I've visited and in Scotland, and now this. Gah.

*The folks at the information line listed on the back of the ticket informed me that it will take three weeks for the ticket to be processed or for them to tell me how much I owe them. Of course, I'm always welcome to pick up in the middle of the semester and come back down here for a Feb. 18 court date. I don't think so.