Bumps and Lumps

As weekends go, this one was not the best.

On Friday night, Jose finally got a chance to do the long night cross country flight that he’s been trying to schedule for weeks. It kept getting rescheduled due to weather, the plane being down for repair, and his instructor having to cancel. But on Friday night, the weather was finally perfect, the plane was back in working order, and his instructor was ready to go. Off they went, with Jose having told me to expect him back around 10:00.

At 9:15, he sent me a text message from Brenham, so I knew that he wouldn’t be back when he had predicted. Nevertheless, I inexplicably started to worry as the clock passed 10 and kept ticking. Worrying is absurd, because I don’t really think that anything is going to happen. Jose is a good, if beginning, pilot and he’s very careful with his flying — not to mention that Jeff, his instructor, has thousands of hours in the air and is arguably the best instructor in the area (from what I’ve heard). But I still worried, even though I knew they were ok. Jose finally called at 11:30 to say that he was on his way home.

The inane worrying kept me up later than planned, and the thought of getting up at 5:30 to meet BAF for running made me tired, so I slept in on the condition that I would get my run done before noon on the treadmill. I kept my promise to myself with a trip to Gilruth where I did 7 slow dreadmill miles while watching the little league world series followed by some HGTV. I found it absurd that on Saturday morning, the Gilruth keeps two of the seven TVs tuned to CBS and NBC — both of whom are showing kids cartoons. Sorry, but I didn’t really feel like watching Trollz, or whatever that show was. I think it was a cartoon based on those little plastic dolls with all the hair. Weird.

As I was leaving the Gilruth, I backed up too far and bumped my car into a concrete pole. GREAT. It was about 3 feet tall — or, just short enough that I couldn’t see it out the back window of my Xterra. Yes, I looked. No, I did not back up without looking. I just couldn’t see the stupid pole. Despite my slow speed, it made quite a bang. I didn’t want to look at it right away, so I drove home hoping that it was the bike rack that hit, and not my bumper.

No such luck. It was my bumper. It was all bumper, so the good news is that it will hopefully be easy to bang out since it didn’t touch the body of the car itself. The bad news is that it needs to be fixed soon, because while the damage isn’t that bad, it crinkled the bumper upward by about an inch — which is just enough to block my trunk hatch from opening. So I can’t get into the back of my car. Suck. I felt like a complete idiot.

All the body shops I called closed at 2, so I decided to just forget about it for the rest of the weekend, and I headed out to pick up my packet for the Eastside Sprint Triathlon. I love triathlons, but I have one major beef: they very rarely offer race-day packet pickup. This means that I have to drive 1.5 hours round trip the day before the event to pick up my packet, and then do the same drive the next day for the race itself. I decided to take Beltway 8 on Saturday, only to discover that part of the beltway was entirely closed with all traffic being routed onto the feeder. UGH. In addition to that, something was burning on the other side of the highway which caused all sorts of rubbernecking.

I’ve come to the conclusion that you cannot drive anywhere in this stupid city without getting stuck in construction-caused traffic. Which is lots of fun when it’s 100 degrees outside.

The rest of Saturday was a lot better, and I got to bed at a decent hour to rest up for yesterday’s Eastside Tri. I’ll post a better race report later today or tomorrow, but my time for the 500 meter swim, 16 mile bike, and 2.5 mile run (the course had to be shortened because rain put the original course underwater) was 1:38:39. That was good enough for 1st place Athena (out of 3 in the category) despite the fact that my bike was only so-so and my run was my worst tri run of the season.

Sunday was looking up. I had a yummy lunch at Panera, and Jose and I spent the afternoon running errands at Best Buy and Fry’s. I got a new external hard drive — which means I can now get rid of my desktop entirely! It still works fine, so I’m not sure what to do with it. Maybe see if I can get a couple hundred bucks on the swap shop… Jose finally got a printer, a refurbished Epson for half price. It does borderless prints! And they look great. I may abandon my printer (which I’ve had since college, though it does print good photos) in favor of using his.

I had a soccer game in the evening, which was hot and frustrating. I’m tired of losing all the team. My team is just not that good. We are a very defensive team; we lose all our games by scores of 0-3, 0-1, 0-2, etc. Our problem isn’t that the other teams score. Our problem is that we never score. We end up playing defense for 90% of the game. And when you end up playing that much defense, the other team will score. It’s not a matter of if, but when. When the game ended I was frustrated, sweaty, and absolutely exhausted.

I drove back to Clear Lake, ready to have a relaxing dinner with Jose. I was a mile from his apartment and talking to my mom on the phone for the first time in weeks when I noticed flashing lights a good distance behind me in my rear view mirror. I kept driving for a bit, not realizing that the flashing lights were apparently for me. I hung up with mom after telling her that “I think I’m getting pulled over.” I still had no idea why. I looked at my speedometer and saw 50 miles per hour. The speed limit is 45. Was I really getting pulled over for going 5 mph over the limit?

The cop parked behind me and left her extremely bright lights shining into my mirror, forcing me to slouch down in the seat to avoid being blinded. She walked up to my window and shined her flashlight directly into my eyes, forcing me to turn my head away. At this point I’m wondering if someone in a red Xterra has kidnapped a child or something!

Nope. Apparently the police department of Clear Lake Shores — a “city” that is about one square mile in area — had nothing better to do last night. It turns out that for the 0.25-mile stretch of road through their pinhead of a “city,” the speed limit drops to 40. I never knew that. In five years, I never knew that. So she wrote me a ticket for going 50 in a 40. Clear Lake Shores! A “city” that is so freaking tiny that I didn’t even know they had a police department! When I told my coworker this morning (a League City volunteer fire captain) about it, he laughed and said “which one pulled you over — the chick or the old guy?” The “city” has exactly two police officers. “Yeah, and pulling people over is their sole source of income,” he said. In five years, I’ve never seen anyone pulled over on that stretch of road, so who knows — maybe I’ve just been lucky. Now I’m just glad that I managed to fix my broken tail light last week. I’m sure she would’ve loved to give me a ticket for that too.

I was so mad. In the 3+ years I’ve been driving my Xterra, I have not been in a single accident or gotten pulled over. And in one weekend, I got both.

For once, I was glad to see Monday arrive.