It Was Just a Little Bump

And today started off as such as nice day! Cooper the Dog let me sleep in until 9:30 a.m., which was a total treat. Then I had a leisurely day – mild cleaning around the house, small gardening projects in between moments of rain. Then Denis and I got all spiffed up (Denis in a tie, me in a dress – which, if you know me, you know that’s major) and headed out to The Manor, a great seafood restaurant in West Orange, NJ.

So as you know from yesterday’s journal, we have a bee problem. Well, we were about a mile from the restaurant and I swear I felt something crawling up my leg. I looked down to make sure I wasn’t about to be bit/stung, and I hear Denis say something like “uh oh”. I look up and see CAR right in front of me. I slam on the brakes and WHAMMO! We go right into this guy’s back bumper.

I see our hood crumple and raise up about 8 inches, and all thoughts of glorious all-you-can-eat lobster go rushing out of my head. The funniest thing, however, was Denis immediate response after the collision. He apologized to me. Later on I asked him why he apologized when I’m the one that had the accident, and he said he didn’t know.

So what sucked is that the guy we hit had almost no damage – just a couple scrapes near his license plate. We went to exchange insurance info and he said he couldn’t find his. I personally believe he didn’t HAVE insurance. Not that it mattered, since the accident was my fault, but still. Anyway, he said that he wasn’t worried about getting my insurance info since he had no damage, so after much talking and wasting time he finally drove off, happy to know he wasn’t going to have to pay the NJ fine for driving with no insurance and also happy to “know a guy” who could fix his bumper “real cheap”.

At this point, Denis and I were only a mile from the restaurant, the car was working fine, so we went on to The Manor. Tell me how much of a doofus I was driving into this really posh valet parking restaurant with my crumpled Toyota Corolla? I felt so ashamed. I wanted to go out and find every person driving a messed up car and apologize for making fun of them for driving cars that looked like junkyard refugees.

So I’ll be calling my insurance people on Monday to get an estimate (my neighbor estimates $1800). Tuesday I hope to get it in the shop to get fixed. Tuesday is also the day the Bee Guy is coming over to look at our sunroom infestation.

When it rains it pours, doesn’t it?