Among other things, I got the second appraisal/estimate today. The other guy’s insurance seems to think it can be fixed. Of course, other guy’s insurance company spent maybe fifteen minutes looking at the car. The good news is that he cut me a check on the spot, which, according to my insurance company, means that they’ve accepted responsibility, though I’m not quite ready to cash it just yet.

After he left, I spoke to a bunch of people: the claims department at my insurance company, my actual agent, the estimator who came by on Saturday, and my mechanic down the street, looking for advice. I got a lot of advice. All of it indicated that yeah, the car’s probably totaled, and that at best, the repairs are going to be “not quite there”, involving spot-welding the rear-end of a junk car onto the back of mine. The can do amazing things with welds and paint these days, but it won’t be as safe as before – steel just doesn’t work that way. the rest of the advice, though, was mixed. Some told me to just process the claim through my collision insurance, and have my insurance company hound the other other company for the money, because, logically, if my insurance company thinks the car is salvage, they’re going to consider that when they decide how much they’ll insure me (or if they’ll insure it at all). The words “salvage title” really scare me. Others told me to bide my time with the other guy, because it’s clear to any reasonable person that the car is not fixable to a reasonable standard, and as the other guy valued my car at almost $1000 more than my guy, I’ll get more money in the end…it’ll just take longer. My agent tells me that neither option will raise my rates *more* (love that qualifier) than the other.

So, I got a third opinion. I called the body shop down the road (recommended to me by the estimator from my insurance company, and not one of the recommended by the other guy’s insurance company), and asked them to give it, and the other guy’s repair estimate a once-over, to see if it’s realistic. So, I limped the car a mile down the hill, and had them do that. Their opinion seems to match my guy’s – there’s a lot missing from the estimate, and that it’s not really worth fixing. They promptly came up with a supplement to the initial estimate that almost doubles it. The other guy’s insurance is gonna look over their stuff at some point this week, and in the meantime, I’m in a rental on the other guy’s dime. The resolution’s gonna take a while, but things look like they’ll eventually trend my way.

The rental’s nice, if kind of boring: a 2013 Chevy Cruze. GM finally managed to turn the Cavalier into a Honda Accord. It’s got a nice fit and finish, though the inside is a little too complicated. A car doesn’t need that many buttons. The XM radio is kinda neat, though – a channel with nothing but 80s hair metal DJ’d by an old Sunset Strip A&R guy is interesting. Still, I don’t think I’d buy one any time soon.

So, Yeah. That’s how I spent my first official furlough day of the summer; well, that, and getting word that I didn’t get selected for a job nearby that I was really kind of hoping I’d at least get an interview for. My plans for creative endeavors didn’t pan out this week, but perhaps I found some interesting grist for that mill down the road.

My Independence Day vacation time hasn’t been all that cool…or at least the early parts of it.

After finishing work for the week on Wednesday afternoon, Colleen and I decided to take a little drive off by ourselves for a while. We needed to get out of the house, maybe check out what food trucks were over at Center of the Universe that evening. Would’ve been nice.

On our way over there, we got stuck in a little stop-and-go rush hour traffic on I-95 crossing the James. Guy in front of me stops. I stop. Three seconds or so later, the person behind me doesn’t.

Yep, got rear-ended by somebody in a late model Izuzu truck doing 35. Knocked us forward a few feet, did this to the car:

Before we go any further – don’t worry, we’re all okay. No injuries whatsoever to living things. The back of the car soaked it up pretty well.

We had the insurance company on the phone and the claim filed before the cops even go there, which took a while, because, you know, rush hour. What sucked is that given that we were on a bridge over the river, there wasn’t much of a shoulder to pull onto. Did I mention it was raining? I got soaked while waiting for the cop, waving cars around our lane. Eventually, the police and a highway safety truck escorted us off the bridge (both cars were more-or-less drivable) and onto the shoulder on land near the Broad Street exit (special thanks to our friend Bert who saw us on the shoulder and stopped by to check to see if we were okay). After a statements and whatnot were taken, I was free to go – the other driver got cited for “following too closely”, and the police report will be filed in another day or so.

So, we limped the car home, nervous about the bright red airbag light (they didn’t deploy in the crash, but every little bump in the road on the way home was nerve-wracking), then proceeded to have some dinner and some drinks to calm our nerves. It was kind of like an Irish Wake, you might say.

After surveying the damage a bit, I kind of came to the “totaled” conclusion, and ended up having conversations with both my insurance company and the other guy’s yesterday – We spent the Fourth hanging out with friends at a couple of different backyard bbqs, telling the story several times to various acquaintances.

Today, my insurance company’s guy came by to take a look – he didn’t even bother working up a repair estimate. According to my guys, it’s not worth fixing. He did give the car a nice and fair appraisal. The other guy – the one who’ll be paying – is coming on Monday – if all is professional and decent, his assessment will match my guy’s, and his assessment will fall within a few bucks of the first, and they can get around to cutting me a check.

The whole situation makes me really sad. I loved this car. Probably the best car I’ve ever owned. Seven years, almost 97k miles, and nary a problem at all. I was looking forward to another 100k with this fun,economical car. Plus, I can’t actually get another one – they stopped making them when Pontiac went under, and they’re not making it’s Toyota sibling the Matrix any longer either. But, suspecting that this was gonna be a total write-off, I did a little research and preliminary shopping activities.

On Thursday on the way to our first bbq, I swung by the Toyota dealership, and took a look at the Yaris (in fact, the one I’m looking at is identical to the top picture you’ll see if you click the link) – it’s basically my dear departed car, only ten percent smaller. Most of the bits I liked about my car so much were the Toyota bits, so I figured it was a good spot to start. I wanted to get a look at things, and see if scaling down a little bit would be too uncomfortable. Having talked to a sales guy a bit, I got a look at one and found I fit in just fine. On Friday, I went over to test drive it, and really liked it. My tastes run toward these tiny nimble hatchbacks, as you know, and this little guy fits the bill, and is much more interesting than the other cars in the segment (The Honda Fit, a couple of Kias and Hundais, that new Chevy thing). I suspect that, if all goes well with the second insurance estimate/appraisal, and the other guy’s insurance doesn’t play any games or drag their feet, I’ll be driving one by the middle of next week.

So, anyway, that’s what’s been going on in my life the last couple of days. Hope yours has been better. Hopefully the flinching whenever someone comes up behind me while I’m driving will stop soon.

Not a new thing in this space, certainly, but damn, if Carrie Vaughn didn’t just write something I feel like I could’ve written myself:

My eyes kind of bug out when anyone talks about wanting to be a kid again, or that high school was the best time of their lives. Being a kid means being dependent, and being limited to what other people decide for you, not what you want for yourself.

Yep – adulthood, especially when you’re comfortable enough to define what that means for yourself*, rather than ahere to someone else’s definition, is a pretty sweet deal.

__________________________

* – See also this. Randall Munroe is pretty much the authority on this subject.

From page 112 of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane:

I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

I finished this book up over my lunchbreak today. I can’t recommend it highly enough, mostly because it let me escape for a while, exactly when I needed to escape for a little while. It’s good Neil – all the nice little fantastic and droll little hallmarks I expect from him. Also, it’s just as long as it needs to be, and no longer (so Elizabeth might find it an exception to her theory re: Mr. Gaiman).

Also, it’s possible some of the bits about cats made me tear up a little bit.

Being Friday, I have included some tunes from the soundtrack to my day, which got a little longer than usual – when I’m in a system testing mode, I tend to block everything else out, and just let things play. I meant to stop at ten, but since I was in that sort of OCD zone, I ended up with almost two dozen before I stopped.

This week has been alarmingly busy and stressful, really. I’ve been swinging back and forth on the emotional roller coaster all week long, and I’m not entirely sure why. The week hasn’t been entirely without wins – I spent much of Wednesday “on stage”, so to speak; I did a couple of long, high-profile briefings and demonstrations for very important people™, and while the whole process was exhausting to this particular introvert, I can say that I managed to totally kick all kinds of ass, and made some people very happy.

Though for every high, there was a corresponding low (though really, I’d probably call it something closer to track one below – low can be really low sometimes). This lifestyle I find myself in right now is just exacerbating this sort of thing for me; though I’ve started taking some steps to hopefully level things about a bit soon.

Might have a bit of a breather coming up, thankfully. Due to the holiday and burning some leave, next week is a short one, and weeks will contine to be short for a while, because the whole furlough thing officially starts on July 8. So, I’ll have nothing but long weekends until the end of September, but will be compensated twenty-percent less per week for that entire period. I’ll have some more time for me, but I’ll have the added stress of a reduced budget. It’s a wash. It’s that balance thing again.

I’m going to try and give myself a project for those non-paid Mondays, though – I need to indulge some of my creative impulses that haven’t been getting too much attention – most in my social media circles who have weighed in suggest songwriting or something otherwise musical, and thus far, I’m inclined to agree. 11 days, 11 songs? That’s completely doable.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

In any case, here are tunes:

1. “Hopeless Bleak Despair” – TMBG
2. “Lover’s Eyes (live)” – Mumford and Sons
3. “Sitting Still” – REM
4. “Come On Eileen” – Dexy’s Midnight Runners
5. “Slide” (live) – Goo Goo Dolls
6. “Unsatisfied” – The Replacements
7. “Highway To Hell” – AC/DC
8. “Dancing With Myself” – Billy Idol
9. “Big Country” – Bela Fleck & Edgar Meyer
10. “Don’t Let Me Hide” – The Badlees
11. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – U2
12. “Don’t Cry” – Guns n’ Roses
13. “Your Hand In Mine” – Explosions in the Sky
14. “The Promise” – When In Rome
15. “Cowboy Hat” – that dog.
16. “Indie Rokkers” – MGMT
17. “Livin’ On A Prayer” – Bon Jovi
18. “Shake It” – Metro Station
19. “Blue Monday” – New Order
20. “Anchor” – Letters to Cleo
21. “Happy Together” – The Turtles
22. “Up All Night” – Slaughter

When I got up this morning and went to feed the fish, I wasn’t expecting to discover it was the end of an era.

My nine year old male cherry barb (pictured as the blur to the right in the above photo) finally succumbed to old age. This guy was really my success story – he lived through all my early aquarium mistakes, and kept on kicking. He outlived two harems of females, and finally settled into cranky retirement, staking out a corner of the tank and chasing all of the young whipper-snappers away when the got too close. He kept a nice bright red color (a sign of happiness and health) right up until the end.

I’m sad to see him go – he as an institution in my tanks. However, he lived a long life, more than twice what all the posted estimates say. If he had been able to read, he’d have seen that “four years in captivity” business and went “bah!” while shaking his cane in his gnarled fin.

See ya, little dude.

So…yeah. It’s been a long week (despite being shorter than usual thanks to some time off from work), and it ain’t over yet. Next week looks just as loaded. Hrm.

My commute this week has been relatively easy, thankfully – I’ve been working throught he audiobook of John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which pieces together the story of Chris McCandless, who, after dropping more or less off the grid for a few years and tramping around the American West after graduating from university, hiked into the Alaska wilderness intending to live off the land. His journals indicate he survived quite well for several months, but eventually succumbed to what appears to be starvation (though the actual circumstances are in dispute).

McCandless was an interesting, if eccentric character. Stubborn and more than a little naive, but still, at least in my mind, kind of admirable. The guy jumped into life with both feet, and stuck to his principles (even if his principles were slightly strange). I saw more than little bit of me in him; or more accurately, I saw in him a bit of what parts of me aspire to be. I understand the need for solitude, and the recitence to develop strong connections with the world, if not to the extent McCandless felt it, and perhaps not for the same reasons, but I think I understand

That said, I think there’s a piece of many of us that would love to shuck off all of the responsibilities our lives have accumulated and just walk off into the bush and live a simple life in communion with nature. The idea itself is terribly liberating, however unrealistic. Most of us have to be content with weekend hikes along the AT or off-road cycling runs along the fringes of the megalopolis, but it’s still kind of nice to know that there are people out there who have actually tried.

Um. Tunes. A little heavy on the 80s metal this time, but that’s what I get for listening to hours of it on Pandora the other week. I’ve got the algorithms tuned to Aquanet and Spandex, it seems.

1. “Bad Medicine” – Bon Jovi
2. “Sweet Child o’ Mine – Guns & Roses
3. “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) – Journey
4. “Don’t Know What You Got (live)” – Cinderella
5. “Take On Me (extended version) – A-Ha
6. “Little Lion Man” – Mumford & Sons
7. “I Fell In Love With A Girl” – White Stripes
8. “Women and Men” – They Might Be Giants
9. “Tainted Love” – Soft Cell
10. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – Metallica

Being nice June Saturday, and given the fact that my wife and eldest are off doing the anime convention thing so I’m on the lookout for things to keep the younger two kids distracted from the fact that mom’s not here, we took a trip out to a local park to do a short hike through the woods and marshes along the James River, then decided to take a ride out to Hopewell VA, the next town over, and visited City Point, a park with some Civil War significance regarding the battle of Petersburg, and happens to overlook the confluence of the James and Appomatox rivers.

We walked along the water’s edge for a while, stopping along the way for the kids to pick up shells – the area is, if not brackish, only a few miles off from where the waterways become so – they ended up with a whole big pile of bivalve shells, a handful of crab bits, and a bunch of pretty smooth river rocks.

As we were going through the shells, we found that one of them we picked up belonged to a live clam. I did a little research, and learned that it was, in fact, an asian clam (Corbicula fluminea), an invasive species not native to North America, but is indeed a fresh water clam, and that some people have actually kept them in freshwater aquariums, though few have had much success.

The kids, being somewhat attached to the little guy, who sat in a small container sticking his filter out and trying to feed (it’s smaller than a penny), wanted to keep it. Of course, people who do keep these clams (you can buy them in the aquarium trade in some places) tend to have lots of horror stories about them slowly starving in community tanks (they eat plankton and stuff, and most home aquariums are, in fact, too clean), though they’re relatively harmless, if dull.

Having been pulled from the water within sight of a large Honeywell chemical plant along the river, and along a shoreline that, frankly, isn’t particularly clean, I am worried about what sort of ridealongs this little guy is carrying. Of course, he’s rather sprightly (for a clam, anyway), so I decided to try and set up a quarantine tank – I knocked together a simple sponge filter for a one gallon tank, mixed some of my tank water from the 30gal, some gravel, and a handful of java moss. It’s sitting on top of the larger tank’s light fixture, which is keeping the water somewhat warm.

Several hours later the clam (as well as a couple of little arthropod things that look a bit like scuds) are still alive and doing bivalve (and arthropod) sort of things. I still don’t hold out hope that they’ll make it for the long term, but I’ve done my fatherly best to provide a hospitable environment for the strange little creatures my children manage to bring home. However, I don’t know too many parents who’ve had to try to create a hospitable environment for a clam.

We’ll see how it goes.