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Bye, bye, poor little Saturn.
It's been pretty hectic couple of weeks. We drove all over hell and gone last week to visit family, then got home and spent a couple of days catching up on bills, TiVo, and couch-flopping, and then departed again yesterday. I flew out to San Francisco, and Carrie headed up to Dallas with Skye in order to see friends we weren't able to hook up with last week.
We had a little last-minute snafu: Carrie's appointment to get her oil changed was foiled, because some of Saturn's service people were sick. We munged things around, and decided that Carrie would drive me to the airport and then take my car up to Dallas.
My plane ride was uneventful. I got to see the new Transportation Safety Administration in action. The main difference was that after I checked my bag, I then had to take it back and haul it over to the machine for scanning checked bags. There wasn't really much traffic yesterday, so I don't know how much this will bog things down once travel picks up again.
Shortly after getting off the plane -- right as I was thinking about calling Carrie and seeing how her trip went, in fact -- I got a phone call. It was Carrie, who started the conversation with "the first thing I want you to know is that Skye and I are all right." I'm glad she started off that way, but it's still an ominous start to a conversation.
It turns out that they were about twenty miles south of Dallas when they got rear-ended by a big commercial truck, in that crummy section of I-35 where there are no shoulders. Both passengers (and apparently a remarkable amount of the cargo) are unharmed, but this happy outcome required the sacrifice of the poor little car (not quite two years old), which arranged to absorb most of that kinetic energy by collapsing its own rear section.
I was a little shell shocked by all this news (and I'm writing it down now to maybe exorcise a little more of that shock). My brain is still in that mode where I'm making too much of coincidences (what if we hadn't stopped for lunch? what if Carrie had picked up Skye after dropping me off at the airport?), but the reality is that these actions and decisions are of the same sort that happen without incident every day and every week, and it's only in the wake of cataclysm that we start to try to piece the parts together into some deeper meaning.
This doesn't stop me for simultaneously holding the contradictory view that I'm an unreasonably lucky, lucky man and to feel grateful that the universe keeps sending me good pitches to swing at. Sometimes I can't help but feel like the universe tries to keep things in balance -- things of big magnitude require other things of equally big magnitude to even out their impact. So now that I've told you this tale of woe (whoah?), watch this space -- I should have some very good news to share on January 7th. 10:45:11 AM () 
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