My first post-Bob weekend was filled with much procrastination. This post was supposed to be the Bob postmortem, but I got sidetracked by an eventful weekend. Friday night was an event I'll go into detail later about, because I haven't gotten around to explaining the organization with which I was doing said event with, and I lack the motivation to explain it now. That'll be a post for another time. Saturday was the weird bit. After a day of housework and errands, I went down to O'Connell's to see Magnuson play. As usual, it was good to see those guys again. As I was helping them load-in, Greg mentioned that he'd put new tubes in his amp, and expressed some concern over its potential functionality. I told him that if disaster ensued, not to worry, because I still had my amp in the back of my car. Around this time, the club guy informed them that they would like Magnuson to play longer than they had originally planned to. "As long as you can" was the response when pressed for specifics. Apparently there'd been some cancellations. The next thing I know, Greg is asking if I'd like to come up and do a few of the old tunes with them. I said hell yeah. Kyrsten had her extra guitar handy, and it's not a Gibson, so I was all set. Now, many of you know that I never really get nervous before a performance, but this one fell just a bit outside of my comfort zone, which is a good thing. We decided to do "Fear and Deception",  and "What I Expected" off the first album, and "Dream" which was never recorded, but I always thought it was the best song that Greg and I wrote together. I wasn't worried at all about "What I Expected" and "Dream" because I remembered my parts. I didn't have my Ebow with me, so I'd have to play the original classicalish part I'd written for What I Expected, which was fine. Dream was a song I'd been trying to work out with earthShine, so I'd played it regularly and recently. Fear and Deception was my worry, because I'd always played the melody on the Ebow, and I couldn't remember one of the parts. So I winged it. I'm not sure how it sounded, because I couldn't hear a note I played (bad on stage sound), but I'm told it sounded good. Coincidentally, Carl Muheim was there too, so we conceivably could've had  a  full band circa 2003 reunion. So, that makes 3-five-7, Bob Spelled Backwards and Magnuson that I've done reunion shows/recordings with. We'd actually planned to do a Great Awakening reunion recording over christmas this past year, but it didn't materialize. If it had, I'd just be Jiffylust away from a clean sweep of reunions with significant bands of my past. Weird. No chance for a Jiffylust reunion, as far as I know. The drummer doesn't play anymore, and the bass player probably has better things to do. Now all I need is a band of the present. *sigh*

Sunday was a good day to wreck a good weekend, literally. I guess it wasn't that bad. I was pulling into the mall parking lot, because I'd been craving food from this Indian food place they have there, and as I was driving down the drive, past the Wal-Mart, Somebody blind-sided me. Literally. There was a delivery truck parked illegally, blocking the view in my direction for this big-ass pickup truck that was coming out of one of the parking aisles. It pulled on out into the main drive and attempted to occupy the space that my car was already occupying. Hard. It failed. This huge truck tagged the front left corner of my car, squishing the end of the bumper, and making my hubcap a permanent feature of the rim. It may or may not have damaged the tire, I'll have to see if it's flat in the morning.
Here's pictures!

As you can see, my skid marks are very short, which tells you 2 things, 1) I had very little time to react and 2) I wasn't going very fast. You can also see how the marks veer to the right at the end. That's when impact occurred, I had almost completely stopped, and was then pushed sideways by the impact. You can also see a complete lack of skidmarks coming towards mine from the direction of impact. This tells you that they never saw me, and never slammed on the brakes.

Here's the damage to my car. The wheel got the worst of it. I just hope it'll hold out until Wednesday, which is the first day I can do without it.
And to think, I just drove 6600 miles across the continent without incident, then within 5 miles of my house on a quick trip to get lunch, wham. They say that 90% or so of all accidents happen within 5 miles of the home. This isn't a telling stat since probably 90% of all driving occurs within 5 miles of the home. Well, I'm not too stressed, because this was so totally not my fault. I don't have to worry about insurance rates or even my deductible. It did scare the crap out of me at the time, since I didn't see it coming at all. The fella that hit me was nice enough. And, coincidentally, he works at the dealership where I bought the car. Which is probably where I was going to take it to get it fixed anyway. We'll see how this shakes out.