Storm's a Bruin

Had my annual lunch with my favorite Bruin -- Debbie Calvo -- today. Since the Bruins beat the Trojans in last year's football game it was my turn to pay. Having bought me several consecutive lunches (because the Trojans kept beating the Bruins) Debbie was pretty happy to have me pick up the check this time. I told her I was happy to because after tomorrow's game I expect her to go back to buying my lunch next year.

We met up at the Black Angus in Santa Clarita. It was raining pretty hard but I didn't have any trouble driving to the restaurant.

Unfortunately, the same wasn't true on the way back to my office. I was driving south on the I-5 in Sylmar and it was raining pretty hard but the traffic was moving along just fine. All of a sudden a car about two car lengths in front of me in the number 3 or 4 lane lost control and started spinning out of control (making at least 3 or 4 complete circles) while heading perpendicular through traffic towards the center median.

I saw what was happening and slowed down quickly. I was confident I had slowed down enough to miss the carnage happening in front of me as the out-of-control car clipped cars in its way while spinning towards the median. Unfortunately, the car behind me either didn't see what was happening or didn't respond quickly enough because they rear-ended me after I had come to a near complete stop.

Fortunately, they weren't going very fast when they hit me so no one was hurt and my bumper was just dinged up a little bit. (I went by a body shop this afternoon and the "little dings" are going to cost the other driver more than $1,000 to fix.)

After we pulled over to the median (along with all the cars involved in the main accident) I had a chance to see that no one in the other cars were seriously injured. The poor lady who lost control of her car was an emotional wreck -- she was crying and going from car to car to apologize and to get a hug.

I just got the information from the guy who hit me and was on my way. We didn't hug, but I did shake his hand. He was shaking from adrenaline while I copied down his information.

Isn't it awful that while the car in front of me was spinning all I could think was "that would make a great picture for my blog"?