Bent Steel
Welcome to 2006, feel free to smash your car into anything you like. Uggh. Crashed up the new ride the other night. Great way to start the new year on the positive tip. Good news is nobody was hurt. I smacked into a parked car about three blocks from the Skelton Ranch. No one was in the parked car.

The accident occurred at night on a particularly tricky and narrow piece of residential road that has multiple switch backs on a steep grade. Another car was coming up the hill in the opposite direction where there is a bit of a blind corner. The car flicked its brights to let me know it was coming. That startled the heck out of me and I jogged the car to the right. I was unable to make a correction before slamming into a car that was parked on the road. Fucking hell.

The fantastically bizarre part of the story involves the folks whose car I hit. Turns out the car that I hit was actually a rental car. The car was rented because both of their SUV’s had been smashed in two separate incidents during the snow/ice storm we had a couple of weeks ago. These people were getting used to people crashing into their cars. It was almost like my name was Ed McMahon when I walked up to their door and told them I had killed their car. “Oh no problem, come on in, have a beer.”

Funny how we only get to know our neighbors when tragedy strikes.

So yeah, these folks were more than cool about it. Technically I didn’t even have an accident with them at all. I had an accident with Enterprise Car Rental. Fortunately insurance will pick up the tab for everything except a $500 deductible. None of this however makes me feel good about the fact that I smashed up a perfectly good car that was barely three month old. Luckily most of the damage is just to the body of the car and none of the air bags blew out.

Let’s be careful out there.