25 Letters

Monday, June 25, 2007

My love/hate relationship with airbags

As many of you might know, I have had encounters with airbags. If you have never been in an accident where the airbags went off in your car - consider yourself lucky.

About 3 1/2 years ago, I had a really bad week - was in two wrecks and planted my face into 2 airbags. It was my first ever encounter with the bang, the powder that looks/feels like smoke and fills up the entire car. It sucked. But I walked away from that week more determined than ever to not see an airbag deployed again.

Weell, that worked until a little over a week ago. On Thursday, June 14, David and I were taking care of some business at lunch and were headed back to the house to get David's car. As we were driving over Mopac (a highway here in Austin), a 16 year old girl ran the very red light. I swerved and slammed on my brakes but wasn't able to miss her. My car hit her front tire and broke the axle. We were probably going 30ish miles an hour, so the impact made both the driver's side and passenger's side airbags deploy. I remember screaming and then that fateful powder filling the air.

We all walked away from the accident. I have some scrapes and bruises and a decent amount of soreness, but I can't complain much - it could have been so much worse. I could have hit her driver side door, she could have been about 4 seconds later and slammed into my passenger door (and David), or the airbags could have not deployed, and I would have smacked my steering wheel like nobody's business.

So, thus you see my love/hate relationship with airbags. I'm grateful that they're there, and hate it when they are deployed. If I ever see another one it will be to soon. But I'd rather see another one than be in an accident like this one and not have the protection of those semi-evil, powdery, painful things.

I took a picture the day the wreck happened. I needed to document the war wounds. Here is one for your viewing pleasure. You can see the injuries on my forearms, neck and just below my collarbone.

At some point I will discuss the fun of dealing with insurance companies to get a fair settlement so that we can replace the poor deceased Honda. But that is for another day.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

We’re back!

Hey there! We're back from camp…have been for a couple of days, but are still feeling the effects on our bodies. After work, there is laundry to do, house to put back together…and a bed to lay in. I should catch up on rest pretty soon here.

Camp went really well. Besides a flat tire episode on the last 1/2 mile of our journey home, apartment keys who ended up in Bastrop, and the required hanging out with great friends who were hospitable during our series of unfortunate events (and that all happened on Saturday), camp was good. If you didn't get the daily updates, visit the Camp Nikos blog. You can see videos made for the kids and pictures from throughout the week on that site - you should check it out.

Let's see, what else is new? Oh yes, we're having a garage sale this weekend! I'm super excited - banding together with several friends, we're getting rid of a lot of stuff. Stuff that we had two (or more) of after we unpacked everything, stuff we didn't need in the first place, and stuff that we just flat don't have room for. David's excited - he's hoping that we can use our garage for a car or something strange like that.
I'm sending off our pictures to our videographer today - poor lady has been trying to get us our wedding video and we're just not cooperating. Definitely not our moms' fault - they had the pics to me by Easter. I then however, got crazy busy with session, then camp, and never got them sent in. Next project - pick wedding pics to have printed out. Can you believe it's been 5 months already? I certainly can't!

I think that's all the random information I have for you now. I'm glad to be back from camp, looking forward to all the laundry being done. I think I have a small appreciation for mom's who come back from vacation with tons of laundry to be done…