Yep. Just minding my business in the Home Depot parking lot and walking toward the greenhouse…when this very elderly gentleman, out for a shopping trip with his wife, threw ‘er into reverse and fortunately didn’t gun it too hard, and didn’t mistakenly hit the gas when I flung my hand (armed with a fistful of keys) against his hatchback’s rear window and scared him out of a year’s growth…
I waved at the pair and walked on. I don’t think he even yet figured out he’d hit me. And he was real, real old and with his wife and it was Mother’s Day so I didn’t explain, I just walked on to the store.
But then my neck and shoulders began stiffening up, so the jolt was worse than I thought. So we came home, I took two Aleve and spent the better part of an hour with an icepack between my shoulder blades. Amazing how a little vector change can rearrange your back…
Good on you, girl! May the bread of your kindness return to you sevenfold!
BTW, my youngest daughter is getting me the best Mother’s Day present ever; on the forth of June, I’m getting a daughter in law!
Happy new daughter-in-law forthcoming1
Oh, excellent!
I’m glad you are okay, but there is no getting around that such things are upsetting and scary!
Geez! At least I was in my car when an oldster backed into me. Who then got out of his car looked at the huge dent he had made in the door and asked, “Does that bother you?”, “Uh, yeah!”
@Tommie: Congratulations and joy to you and yours!
That’s when you try to get them retested by the DMV (or the equivalent) – that’s someone who needs to stop driving. (I used to hear stories from a fellow commuter about her mother’s driving – and why she wouldn’t take her mother’s keys away, when her mother was well into the unsafe-driver stage, I never understood.)
That is not nearly as pleasant as taking a refreshing stroll down Meetpoint docks au naturel….
Gtst is undecided as to which would be the more preferable occurrence.
One is quite pleased you are well, if a bit vector-deflected. One hopes your fenders, doors, etc. anatomical will be back in shape soon. (Uh-oh, gotta look up “fender” in French, j’ai oublié, je l’ai perdu.)
@Tommie — Many congratulations, and the bread saying was very kind.
Oh, crud! One hopes that this doesn’t lay you up for any amount of time. We don’t like our authors getting damaged, we don’t!
The site may be getting slammed, but you should look at this redo of Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, and consider the source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KaOC9danxNo
We like it very well.
a woman was killed in a very nasty way when some forgetful old gent with less than perfect control backed into her over the pavement (sidewalk) a few years ago in our local small toen … 🙁 hope the damage is not too long-lasting ..
Ah, yes, I have seen elderly drivers cling to their keys far too long, and know one (my aunt) who handed the keys and car registration to her son voluntarily when she felt it was time. I hope to follow her example. And, just in case, have promised my son that I’ll give up driving willingly if he suggests it (he lives locally and rides with me from time to time to observe). Hope you are on the mend.
He sings really well. Pretty darned neat!
Two sessions with ice, a second double dose of Aleve, and I think I’m fine. Y’know those pesky vertebrae right between your shoulderblades that get locked up and even your chiropractor can’t knock them loose? I think he knocked them loose in that sideways impact. That’s where the most pain was, a muscle sort of pain, nothing bonelike. So I came off ok, I think. And hopefully I gave the fellow a bit of caution. He was one of those drivers you see on holidays and driving a very prescribed route, I’m suspecting. And I do hope he doesn’t drive often.
It’s real hard when you have to ask not only one person but a married couple to give up the keys, because public transport is non-existent in so many towns, and in some cases it’s hard even to get groceries, let alone take a little outing. Being carless locks them in. And the US western states are just crappy in terms of transport outside of driving yourself. That’s true of any state who’s not in the northern tier of the original 13 colonies. So I feel for their situation.
Mostly true–it’s that “self dependent” (“No, I am ‘entire unto myself’!”) ethic peculiar to Americans. Howsomeever, although my experience may be ~30 years old, there is a notable exception: Santa Cruz, CA.
[ummm, one moment please… Rats, I’ll have to go on recollection then.]
There is no home in town more than a 3-4 blocks from a bus line. Busses run on all lines at least every half-hour, 15 minutes on the main popular routes. It’s the one place I’ve ever been where one could get by without a car pretty well.
And it ain’t just “in town”, for the same price one can ride all the way out to Watsonville!
Fort Worth Texas used to be like that — may still be for all I know. When I was a child — many years ago — my grandmother took me all over town by bus. She had a drivers license but never drove that I can remember. I those days it was common for families to have only one car, and my grandfather had that one. When he was home, he drove; my grandmother never did. I don’t think it was any kind of impairment problem; she just chose not to drive.
Hope he doesn’t drive often either. Glad you are only partially scathed (I’m not sure if that’s really a word, but I like the sound of it in my head and I’ve been working on writing for two days solid and oh my god my brain won’t shut up)
…ahem. Sorry.
Chondrite: that video is great! Almost as fantastic as this one (linking the short clip)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhBn62kLxeI
Hadfield singing, with groups in Canada. First ever space-to-ground simultaneous concert. Nerd heaven I tell you 😛
I am one of many people who could easily live with no car, or only one family car, if public transportation were better where I live. As it stands, I can get on the bus and only arrive at work either an hour early, or half an hour after starting time — not acceptable. I would, however, find it hard to wrangle an entire month’s worth of Costco shopping home on the bus!
Although Chris Hadfield may be officially a robotics specialist, he has a very strong second line in communications — hailing frequencies open!
Hadfield does have a good voice. Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
Great videos.
Oh, ye four hundred thousand gods and goddesses! I tracked down the leak in the plumbing, finally — it was under that aforementioned firecracker bush, which was refortifying its position with the extra water it had been getting. I dug it all out, and had to remove a fence; it looks like the leak may be next to, if not under, the cement base for one gatepost. Oh well, I never liked that fence anyway, and this was impetus to remove both it and the annoying shrub. A plumber will be by this evening, and one most fervently hopes they can at least cap the broken line, until a more permanent repair may be done. I’m fairly sure it only feeds one outside faucet.
OMG.
My mom finally convinced my dad to turn in his keys when he took the entire side mirror off his car putting it in the garage and took a little chunk off the side of the garage in the process. At that point, he could no longer deny his vision wasn’t good enough for driving. He has age-related macular degeneration. I don’t do all that much driving myself and working from home for 20 years took away the need for driving to and from work — which explains why I have a 25+ year old Toyota “Crayola” with a little more than 42,000 actual miles on it. Five years after I bought it, I started working from home (medical transcription). Walking from one bedroom to the other is a tough commute…
Grrr! What did happen to the paperless office and telecommuting? I’d love to work from home. Since I temp (as older workers put it) or contract (as younger workers call it) my commutes vary. The least in 30 minutes with me driving and the most has been 30 minutes of me driving to a bus stop and then an hour+ on the regional bus…
@playswithhorses: Email me (through my blog) — I know of a work-from-home opportunity you might be interested in.
New Orleans and environs used to be that way too, there was a bus or tram stop every two blocks.
In Baltimore, we had a car, but never used it—I think we had it out of the garage twice in the academic year. The bus ran past every 20 minutes. Here in Spokane, where we are, we could use the bus, but since they set the fares higher than parking downtown, it’s just not worth it for a short 2 mile hop. It’s 1.50 to ride one way (.75 for seniors or disabled) and it costs 25 cents to park downtown long enough to do most things we want to do downtown…or nothing, in some instances. It used to cost 25 cents for the bus and we used it a lot. But no longer. Now the buses run mostly empty, except during commuting hours when they’re inbound from the adjacent town.
When I lived in Portsmouth, VA, we weren’t too far from a country club. The road that I’d roller-blade on went past several of the holes, but before I’d get there, I’d pass a series of houses on both sides. The very last house on the right is where I met my fate. I wear a bicycle helmet, elbow and knee pads, and also hip pads (football pads). I skate the same as if I were a pedestrian, facing traffic. The elderly gentleman in the last house on the right was backing out of his driveway and apparently didn’t see me. Did I mention I also wear a fluorescent yellow bike jersey? I yelled at him to stop, but he kept backing up, and eventually, I was forced to bounce off his right rear quarter and onto the very loose gravel shoulder on my way to the grass. My skates froze up, and I went down hard, scraping my right elbow pad along the #0 grit asphalt. Too bad the pad decided to ride up over my elbow onto my upper arm, and I continued for a short distance longer on my bare skin. Both my right hip and my right elbow were pretty well scraped, but the elbow was worse. I lay there taking inventory of the parts to make sure I was all right, other than the scrapes. I know I scared him, because when he asked if I was all right, I said, “No, I’m checking to make sure I’m in one piece. Why didn’t you stop?” All he could say was, “Sorry, honey.” and took off. I skated back home, but the next time I came down that way, this time in a car, his car was parked clear up in the driveway, and another car was blocking it. I think it was either his last time driving, or else he didn’t drive for several weeks after that. I don’t know which, since I was just beginning my separation from my wife, then. It took a long time for that scrape on the elbow to heal, but fortunately, it wasn’t clear to the bone.
Ow.
I had a jerk swing his car over at me while I was bicycling on a downhill a half mile long…forced me over onto the drainage grate—which the city crew had incorrectly installed with the bar/slats paralleling the road, not at right angles, as should have been.
I had no choice, tried to ride a single bar all the way across the double grating, but lost it past the midway point, and the wheel dropped in to the axle and flipped the bike at high speed, sending me flying.
Three things saved me. First, I was in very good physical shape. Second, I saw the pavement coming and decided two broken arms were better than a broken neck, so I karate-chopped the pavement with both forearms as I hit, which flung me forward without flipping, though I collapsed onto my throat, which took a heck of a scrape. Broke loose the padding cartilage on one side of my jaw…that’s given me trouble for decades since. And the third factor—I was wearing a purse slung right shoulder to left side, across, which cushioned my slide and saved my ribs and probably my hip. Broke everything in my purse, including a 10 dollar simple HP calculator which turned out to have a 300.00 board in it…square roots and all sorts of stuff, if you just ran it with a probe: it was cheaper to use all the same circuit boards and just jack up the price for the fancy users…
I was real sore, real pissed, and I wrote a scathing letter to the city as to why I was not going to sue them but could…and that they should have a sidewalk and not force people to ride in the street down that dangerous hill. voila! A mile or so of sidewalk miraculously appeared in amazingly short order. I call it my memorial sidewalk, in OKC…
I had road rash on cheek and throat and arms, and was, you may imagine, sore…real sore.
My uncle brewed up some cure with hog lard and tobacco, boiled. I smeared it on the road rash. Old Native American cure for that sort of thing, my uncle said, and I kind of supposed it was from our three-generations neighbor, who was Kiowa. Well, for a pale skin like mine, it was pretty brown for months, but you know, it stopped the miserable pain, softened the scabs, which were bleeding, and healed it ultimately without a scar at all. If I had the same sort of injury, I’d use that before anything else. Never saw anything work so well so fast.
Regarding old home cures — have you ever heard of Bag Balm? Same kind of source as Mane and Tail shampoo; farmers use it on cows to keep the udders from chapping and cracking. Works a treat on seriously chapped and dry human skin, too.
You can find it in both drug stores and craft places. (I have a tin of it.) I got a jar of Orvus WA for washing knitting and embroidery – it’s the same as their quilt soap, but much less expensive. (Also found at larger-animal-supply places.)
The lard kept the scabs supple, and nicotine has been demonstrated to have a mild analgesic effect. Lard was the poor man’s Vaseline, which actually would have been better to use than lard since it is inert and inorganic. Burt’s Bees used to make this great salve for gardener’s hands that had all sorts of nice herbs and beeswax and such, It was great for chapped skin and things like chilblains, but then the family run company got sold to a big corporation, who evidently decided there wasn’t much of a market for the product and quit making it.
Oh, yes. 😉 Real good cure for too much going barefoot!
I’m too trapped by RL these days but took a few minutes to check in. I’m horrified you got hit by that car, but thankful it was not worse.