Monday night...

So, it was late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, and I was half awake, already in the early throes of bad pizza. I heard the extremely loud sound of tires screeching and something crashing. At first I wasn't even sure I'd really heard it. You know that, I'm almost asleep, did I dream it, kind of thing. But then I heard screeching start up again and another crash. It was really loud and very close. Can I tell you that I'm not sure what other more terrifying sounds there are than a car that is clearly out of control and very close by?

By this time, my drowsy brain has managed to wake up enough to start sending panic signals to the rest of me. I fumbled for my glasses--totally blind without them or contacts--and realized that my husband was no longer in bed.

I got out of bed, wound my way through the sleeping dogs, and started down the stairs. At which point, my husband yelled, "Don't come down here. This guy...I think he's going to run into a house or something." Well, now if that doesn't wake you up, all bright eyed and terrified...

After a couple of seconds, I decided to ignore my husband and come downstairs anyway. We watched out our dining room window as lights came on in houses up and down the street. By this time--it all happened really quickly--the screeching tire noises had completely stopped, and I heard sirens in the distance.

Let me just say this, living with a writer is occasionally dangerous. We can't keep our noses out of what is really other people's business. The cops arrived and I saw some people, probably our neighbors, walking down the street toward where the cops had pulled in, about one house down from us. So, I decided to go check it out.

Yes, I decided to go outside in my pajamas in the middle of the night where some rampaging lunatic, who might still be on the loose, was trying his level best to crack into anything that didn't jump out of the way. Couldn't help it. I needed to find out what was going on. So, I walked out, alone, and bumped into some people that I presumed live down the street from me. Our neighborhood is a little bit isolationist--we don't know anyone's name--or maybe they're just isolating themselves from us, the crazy girl in her pajamas and her poor husband. I asked my possible neighbors what had happened. Apparently, on the other end of my street, this guy in car had driven up on the lawn and taken out five or six baby trees, a light post and a set of mailboxes. And if that weren't enough, he turned around in someone's driveway and then promptly proceeded to the other end of the street (my end) where he collided with ANOTHER light post. Hello? I've been drunk. I've been too drunk to walk properly or to have enough common sense not to sing loudly and off-key. But I don't think I've ever been so drunk that I'd mistake a lamp post for empty space, not once but TWICE.

At the end of our street, I saw a blue minivan stopped diagonally across our cross-street. I'm pretty sure he didn't so much park as hit another lamp post at a slow enough speed to stop the vehicle dead.

Police started walking up and down the street checking out the damage and an ambulance circled, looking, I'd imagine for potentially injured people. Fortunately, no one was injured as far as I know, except for possibly the driver. Which I only say that because I'm guessing that taking out two lamp posts doesn't exactly leave you with a nice healthy glow.

Next day, after I'd started to recover from the bad pizza incident, I took myself outside again and checked it out in daylight. Dude. When you're driving a car, you forget that it's basically a weapon--a ton of metal and glass hurtling toward whatever you point it at. He'd mowed down garbage cans, trees, mailboxes, and lamp posts and still kept going. Our house is one of the few on the block that wasn't affected. Our garbage cans were right out there on the edge of the curb and our cars were in the driveway. We were very fortunate not to have sustained any damage. And we were all extremely lucky that he didn't mistake a house for empty space.

We're still waiting to get the whole scoop, possibly from the local newspaper. Our subdivision is out in the middle of nowhere, so it's a little weird that someone would just arbitrarily choose it for a destructive bender. It's also a little strange that he picked our street--he would have had to have driven down one and past several others to get to it.

So, anyway, that was my scary/weird/interesting Monday night. Tuesday morning, I started off the day by throwing up. Oh yeah, it's been a good week.