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Abigail and I were headed north to a surprise party tonight up the New York State Thruway. Cruise control set, middle lane, just north (for those of you who know the area) of Exit 15a, the Route 17 exit.
Which is when I noticed the car in the left most lane come within a few inches of our car, and then swerve back toward the tractor-trailer height "Jersey barrier" and then I saw it make a fishtail motion at least one more time.
That's when it smashed into us.
I had been in the process of trying to brake in a futile attempt to get us behind the swerving car when it struck us, which sent us in a spin across the thruway toward the right.
It was somewhere in there that I began to have a few things happen. The first wasn't something I really thought out at the time, but I had an utter lack of that "slow motion" thing that happens. While I'm sure that things did seem to slow down a bit to me, it really felt pretty real time. That was odd, because I've been in accidents before and they always feel like they stretch out. This one felt like a blindingly fast, well, spin toward death.
That probably explains why I yelled (I called it a scream, my wife generously called it a "man yell"), not at the top of my lungs, but pretty loud. Somewhere just below where I think I might if I were to ever go on a roller coaster. See I happen to know this stretch of road, when heading off to play paintball my friends and I used to get off at the exit we had just passed, and I know that it's a good hill slope above the highway. I was really anticipating rolling down the hill.
And that's when we slammed into the guardrail, hard enough to leave about a six foot streak of paint down it, and hard enough to rip the bumper off, crack the radiator, rip all four tires off, demolish the head lamps into a pile of nothingness, and send the back of the spinning around, leaving our car facing the right direction on on the thruway.
We both looked at each other, and realized we were not dead, and not injured.
I called the OnStar emergency button on the phone (I sound like an ad, no?) and told them what happened. Oddly, Abby pointed out, they asked me "do you want me to call emergency services?" No, m'am, I just told you that my car has been demolished and I'd like to just tell you about it. I was hoping you'd have a joke or a story to lighten my mood.
She got the Thruway Authority emergency services on the line, and I told them again where we were and what happened. I told the hyper-calm dispatcher that we had just passed exit 15. "15 or 15a?" he said "I really don't know," I said, not knowing. The OnStar rep chimed in using the GPS in our car to tell him exactly where we were.
Within five minutes the fire department showed up. First they went over to the car that struck us. Since it was facing the wrong way on the highway with its lights still on, they were able to see it better, I guess. A moment or two earlier a passing Ambulette rolled up to us en route somewhere with an old lady in a breathing mask in the back. They asked if we were okay, and i said we were, but asked them to check on the car that hit us, which they did, and then they continued transporting the old lady. That's the point at which I decided to NOT try to cross three lanes of traffic in the dark to check out the occupant of the car.
Fire truck number two pulled up to us, and they put us inside the cab to stay warm since it was roughly 15 degrees outside. We waited a good fifteen minutes for the State Police to show up, and the extremely nice trooper let us sit in the back of his car, which was terribly cramped as it's set up for transporting prisoners.
We'd called Foster to come get us, and declined the trooper's offer to drive us back to Nyack (really nice of him, too). Trooper took my license and reg, and went to work with the first responding trooper with the other car. I asked our guy if the other driver was okay "banged up a bit" and if they said what happened "he said his brakes failed." Uh huh.
Paperwork returned, packed into Foster's car, we pulled out, passing the troopers as they searched the driver-less car that hit us.
It was probably less than thirty minutes all told, but aside from being in a tad bit of shock, I'm actually pretty okay. The car (2007 Saturn Vue for those of you looking for crash-survivable vehicles) saved our life, no doubt, as did that guard rail. I'm pretty confused as to why the front and side curtain airbags did not deploy. We were first struck while going highway speeds, and then we hit a guard rail via our engine block going at least 30. That seems to me to be the perfect time to deploy.
It also taught me a bit of a lesson, something I'd wondered about. I had heard from people who survive near-death experiences that there's a certain calm that comes over you. Abby's mom later called it a "resignation" which I'd never experienced. I've had some harrowing plane flights and have been terrorized by them, but never actually thought the plane would crash. But people who have been in crashes often say that they just thought something akin to Arthur Dent's "so this is it then, we're all going to die" statement.
That's really accurate, and for me it's a tad bit liberating. Yes, that thought can also precede serious injury instead of death, but it's at least good to know that something protective sort of takes over in really bad situations, and sort of shuts your mind off.
I also learned that Turiello's Pizza and a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream tastes fantastically better after a big car accident.
And now, I'm going to see if it's possible to fall asleep after the adrenaline of an accident wears off.
12:57 AM in Life | Permalink | Comments (6)
When purchasing things online first became vogue I'd already been shopping on dot coms for years. In fact, my first online purchase was probably made sometime in the mid nineties, as I was developing ecommerce sites myself.
I got a lot of questions about having credit cards stolen, to which I always answered that I felt it was safer to use a card online than it was to hand your card to a teenager at some anonymous truck stop restaurant somewhere. My mom, in fact, had her card cloned in a gas station on a trip somewhere and it caused endless problems.
After more than a decade of shopping online though, someone stole my credit card. But I'm pretty impressed with fraud protection from Chase and from Sony. Both of them flagged the charge, Sony declining the order and Chase calling me to verify. Nice work, Sherlocks.
Now I'll have to sit and wait for my new card to order myself toys from Think Geek
11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I thought this was too perfect. On the left advertising kiosk we have
"Only _____ can prevent wildfires" with the blank line reading (your
name here).
Directly next to that is an ad for ABC's new show Wildfire.
(And in a better bit of circular blogging, that's the show that hired
the skywriter I blogged about recently.)

03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
I'm still in San Francisco attending Macworld Expo, and my friend from Maccentral.com Peter Cohen was nice enough to give me a ticket to a private event happening at a bar in the area.
I'm a bit exhausted still as a result of a fabulous night out the other evening, a meal that involved much wine and then more wine. Did I mention we had wine?
Anyhow, I take a cab over to the bar because while it's just 1.5 miles from my hotel, this is San Fran and they were mostly "straight up" miles. I walk up to the bar and hand the bouncer my ticket and my ID. This is where I need to back up and talk about my bicycle.
In New York State (as with most of the states in the union) a bicycle is considered a vehicle, and as a result it's necessary to have a driver's license or state ID with you when you're riding. (The constitutionality of that's a bit odd to me, but it's not my decision, eeh?) As a result, I keep a copy of my driver's license with me in each of my bike bags. I have a copy instead of the original because it's terribly bad form to drop one's license while getting a bagel and losing it in a storm sewer. The cops don't really care if you have a copy (as long as, get this, you write "copy" across it or change the size, because a duplicate of a license without one of those two modifications is considered a forgery).
I also have two older original yet expired driver's licenses that live in some of my bike bags. The license number is valid and the address is the same, so they're good for the cops, and in case something happens to me.
When I got to San Francisco and went out to ride, I couldn't remember if I had a license in the new bike bag on my new bike, so I took my license out of my wallet and put in in the bike bag and went for a ride. When I got back tonight from my ride, I reached into my bag and pulled out my license.
Or so I thought.
What I actually grabbed was one of the expired licenses, which I handed to the guy. He looked it over with his flashlight and asked me if I had a non-expired license. "Uh, no, I guess not," I sort of stammered while trying to figure out what happened.
"Sorry, I can't let you in."
"My license is still valid," I said "just that copy has expired. And I'm going to be 37 next month."
"Sorry, A.B.C. [Alcohol Beverage Control] will bust us if we let in people with expired licenses."
I get that that's possibly a law, but I'm not sure I get it. I show a license at the door to prove that I'm over 18. I prove that by providing a state issued license that shows my birth date. This means that at some point in the history of time, the State of New York Department of Motor Vehicles determined that I was, in fact, born on February 3rd, 1970 and issued a certificate that proclaims that.
Does my expired license mean that I might be under 18 now, that I've been somehow regressing in age upon the expiration of that license. My residence doesn't matter, that I can or can not legally drive a car is not at issue, so what the hell is the law about?
I certainly understand that the law somewhere says that my license must be valid, in that it is not a fake license bought at a bodega but I don't get why a guy old enough to actually have sired children now old enough to drink can't get into the bar.
So I walked home back over California (nice climb) down Powell, stopping at a nice Thai place for some soup, which I am eating here alone, in my very un-party like room. So there.
02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Yesterday I was riding my bike in San Fran, when I rode by YAFGOAS (Yet Another Fucking Guy On A Segway) and as I did a double take I thought that dork looks like Steve Wozniak.
I sort of shrugged it off—while I'm here for Macworld, Steve Jobs and Woz aren't exactly the best of buddies.
Today I read a Gizmodo post with a shot of the same hefty dork on the same Segway at Macworld, and lo-and-behold, it's Woz.
You sort of need to be a geek to appreciate this.
01:55 AM in Macs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)
If you're going to skywrite over manhattan on a windy day, you're
going to have to do better. All we could read in 10 minutes was "She ch"
11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
This weekend my good friend Matt, who lives waaay too far away came up with family for a weekend at Casa Schlanderson. We had a few gaming nights with Wil and Steve, our good friends who live close enough. That's when the craving hit. White Castle. Midnight.
I haven't had White Castle in 15 years. Really, I'm not making that up.
We bought a Crave Case (30 in a briefcase shaped cardboard box) and I had probably five before we got home. Then another bunch. And some chicken rings (at least the second word is accurate) and onion rings (same).
To say that I regretted the choice the next day would be mostly-accurate. Some parts of my body did in fact regret the choice. But even now, looking at this picture, I want another.
11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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