The Brad Hole

Two odd things happened yesterday that are worth noting.

Yesterday morning, I was enjoying my mornings breakfast by drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper and watching an episode of Cheers on the TiVo. An odd thing happened though. As I was taking a sip, I happened to hiccup at the same time, and a bit of Diet Dr. Pepper went up my nose.

If you imagine that this is an unpleasant thing, you'd be right. It's very much like the sensation you get when swimming if you get water up your nose, although with a distinctly non-water odor. Although I was able to blow my nose to clear things out, for the entire rest of the day, and even a little bit this morning, everything smells a little bit like Diet Dr. Pepper. It's not a particularly pleasant smell.

The second strange thing happened close to midnight last night. I was working on fragment shaders in KOTOR on the G5, trying to work out a way to make global fragment shader constants work within the local scope of the text fragment shader API when I heard a loud and continuous tire screeching followed immediately by a bang and a loss of power. It sounded quite loud and very close to home. Turns out it was.

Beth, who wasn't yet asleep, threw on some clothes and rushed outside to put her fledgling EMT skills to the test. Turns out our neighbor had barreled into our neighborhood mostly out of control, careened off the light post and drove her SUV into the transformer and shrubbery that separates our yard from our other neighbor's. It looked very much like she'd parked her car sideways in our neighbor's driveway. In fact, were it not for the transformer block in between our yards, she probably would have easily continued on into our yard and hit my car, which as it stood was just a few feet away from where her car stopped.

This woke most of the neighborhood up, and it was kinda funny to see almost every family on the block out on the street at midnight. Cops were called, the girl hid out in her house, but eventually came back out. According to the cop, she was on the phone with a lawyer when he banged on her door. D'oh! As Beth was leaving this morning, she noted to me over the phone that the skid marks start from the oncoming traffic lane on Ray, the major road outside our intersection. Odds are good the girl was not only drunk, but driving into our neighborhood out of control from the wrong direction! It's a miracle someone wasn't seriously injured.

At first, we figured it'd be quite some time before SRP was able to restore power, given that her car was parked on what remained of the transformer. However, the crew got here at 1:30 am and apparently worked through the night (I sure didn't hear them) to restore power around 6:20 am. It looks like the only real loss here was the girl's car and of course the fact that TiVo didn't record Cheers last night. Oh, the humanity!