Again? Are you kidding me?

So we went to the office Christmas Party last night and had fun... too bad it took us 1 hour and 45 minutes to get there... and too bad that I got into two accidents on the way there :-/ Don't worry Mom, both were minor. The first one was about 30 seconds into my journey, I was still in the Senate parking lot on the phone with Brandon telling him I was on my way to pick him up when I backed into a wall. (Hmm, maybe there is something to those 'no cell phone while driving' laws after all?) It was a pretty loud bang but it was pouring rain so I decided not to get out and survey the damage.

Then after a very, very long drive in hellish traffic out to the Senator's house I started to accelerate but then at the last second changed my mind and stopped suddenly and the car behind me clipped our bumper again. This time, we pulled over and Brandon got out and talked to the guy. The damage wasn't too bad, some missing paint and a small crack in the bumper but we were pretty certain that was from earlier when I smashed the car into a wall so we didn't exchange any info. This one wasn't entirely my fault since I was the one who got rear-ended, but I probably shouldn't have started accelerating and then slammed on my brakes.

For some reason, these two-a-day driving issues seem to plague me. When I was 16 and had just gotten my license, I accidentally backed into a mailbox and knocked it to the ground. I freaked out and just drove away (yes, I know that's a terrible thing to do). Later that night (it was coincidentally the first time I ever went over to Brandon's house and the first time I met his Mom) I backed into my friend Gavin's car in the driveway. I was driving my parent's suburban and there wasn't even a scratch on it, but poor Gavin's car was totally smashed up. I blamed this one on my parents. After all, if I hadn't had such an early curfew I wouldn't have had to leave before everybody else and try to maneuver a huge suburban out of Brandon's driveway, right?

My senior year in high school I was driving up to Seattle, in the suburban again, when I hit a curb pretty hard and ricocheted off it into the oncoming traffic lane and had to slam on my brakes to avoid driving into a ditch. Lucky for me, nobody was driving in the other lane. I just waited for some cars to pass and then backed up and got back into my lane again. Once I got there, I pulled into a parking garage and suddenly heard this awful grinding/scraping sound and then my car just stopped moving even though I was still pressing the gas. I got out, looked up and saw that I had totally demolished my parent's plastic luggage holder which was strapped onto the top of the car. I had had the radio on too loud and hadn't heard the luggage rack hit the warning signs as I was pulling in. It was lodged in between two cement beams and I couldn't have driven any farther if I had tried. Some nice parking attendants ran over and somehow unscrewed the thing from the luggage rack and pulled it down. They loaded it into my car and then I had to drive home and show my parents what I had done- not fun.

Then, my freshman year in college I was driving home from Spokane to Seattle for Easter and got pulled over twice on the way there. Once was for changing lanes without using my blinker and once was for running a stop sign at a freeway exit. Lucky for me, I got out of both tickets :-)

The time where I only drove into the oncoming lane but didn't get hit may not count, but as you can see, I clearly have a pattern of two driving issues a day. I often go years in between any incidents at all. Then all of a sudden, BAM! I have two in one day.

The bright side though, as I told Brandon last night, is that if my pattern holds true, it will be at least a year before I get pulled over or crash the car again :-) He didn't seem as encouraged by that as I'd hoped he'd be...