Bad Carma

     I'll start at the very beginning, as good a place as any to start.
     Back on June 16, while driving through Indiana on our way from Columbus to Chicago, Tom and I were involved in a bizarre  auto accident involving an attack on our car by a rogue tire bouncing down the highway, probably some cousin of Robert, the ill-tempered tire starring in the existentialist horror flick "Rubber."

    In my 6/18/2017 post I chronicled the tire-attack event that wrecked our car so that it had to be towed off to a garage,

...in the bucolic town of Greenfield, Indiana,

...where our car would stay for over a month having its undercarriage rebuilt.
     Meanwhile back in Columbus Tom and I decided to give being a one-car couple a go, sharing my  little black Focus.
     The car-sharing  worked pretty well for the most part, Tom and I coordinating  our schedules, Tom sometimes taking the bus to where he needed to be, me sometimes walking to where I needed to be, dropping each other off and picking each other up, sometimes one of us depending on a friend for a lift.
     On July 20 I left Columbus for Los Angeles for a 10-day visit.

     That same day Tom drove  our  Focus  to Cleveland to visit his 98-year-old dad.

      A few miles from his father's assisted living facility Tom sat stopped in traffic just before the entrance to the parking lot of a strip mall.  The vehicle in front of Tom was a monster pick-up truck with a Kentucky license plate whose driver apparently had meant to pull into, but over-shot,  the strip-mall entrance. 
       Intending to back up to the strip-mall entrance but unaware that there was a much shorter car stopped behind him, the driver of the truck plowed full-speed-reverse into Tom, pushing his car backwards several yards before the truck driver realized he'd hit something.
      Thankfully, Tom wasn't hurt and there was there was no car stopped behind his, otherwise there could have been quite a chain-wreck reaction, instead of just one wrecked Focus.

     So now we had one wrecked car still under repair in in Indiana and one freshly-wrecked car in Cleveland.
     Tom had to rent a car in Cleveland to drive home to Columbus. 
     Luckily, a few days after Tom returned home from Cleveland he received word from the garage in Indiana that our first car was repaired and ready for pick-up.
     Unluckily,  I was still in Los Angeles and so couldn't drive with him to pick up our car.
     Luckily, Tom has a good, good friend who drove with him from Columbus to Indiana to get the car.
      So we now continue into our third month of being a one-car couple.  And though it's starting to get a weence old, always having to plan who goes where when, it appears that this will be the status quo for us for some time to come.  It hasn't yet been determined whether our Focus will be pronounced totaled so that we can collect our insurance money and go out and buy another car, or whether the insurance company will decide that the car can be fixed, the whole total vs.repair decision process being held up by the fact that it appears that the monster pick-up truck driver has no insurance, though he claims that he does and that the mistake is on the part of the insurance company.  If it's determined that he has no insurance then we'll probably have to pay our insurance company's $1,000 deductible, whether our car ends up totaled or repaired.  If our car is going to be repaired I expect we'll be in for another long wait.
      Whatever.  In any case after two freaky car wrecks, Tom and I are both a little freaked about driving these days, Tom more so than myself, as he was behind the wheel both times.
      Me being of a medium superstitious nature, I can't shake that old augury that bad things come in threes and now I keep waiting for the third calamity to arrive.
     Do you think dropping an ice cream at the State Fair counts?

        (See yesterday's post)

    I'll be at the Mid-Ohio Indie Book Expo this Saturday signing copies of "EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS" and handing out chocolate cupcakes in honor of chapter eighteen and doughnut holes in honor chapter seven, and because, as everyone knows,

  ...chocolate cake and doughnuts are the language of love, right?!