fallout

I went back to Seattle for Christmas, which is standard operating procedure for us. The second to last day of our visit was full of hooking up with old friends. Flamingo for lunch, Binky for tea, Jazz for dinner--

It had been raining all day. Not lazy, noncommittal rain, but real rain. Seattle rain. Angry, grungy, emo rain. Rain that knows that natives have moved to California and are back for the holidays, and wants to make up for lost time. Rain that wants to make you suffer, a bit like Mom does, but without the surface fiction of making you suffer for your own good.

Rain, in short, that bears a grudge.

The rain made me a have car accident. I couldn't see anything. There was a dark car against a dark background. I backed into it, and heard a little crunch.

I would like to note that the passenger in the car was the same passenger I had in the car when I had that incident with the bus. You know, the bus that looked like a wall. You remember the one. In fact, we passed that intersection on the way to our brand new accident, and my friend pointed it out. "Look," she said. "This is where we had that accident with the bus."

I don't mean to point any fingers here, but I'm pretty sure that my passenger might be a jinx.

Rain and my friend. Because it totally wasn't mine. I was just driving.

Really.

I stood out in the rain for a good 10 minutes, talking to the rental car agency (damage covered by the basic coverage) and taking pictures of the other person's car. I had my digital camera, which came in handy for taking pictures. I had my purse, which came in handy for producing a pen and a really damp piece of paper that I scribbled a hasty note on to slip squishily under the windshield wiper.

The damage to the rental car and the unwitting victim, it turned out, was next to nonexistent. The important point was that I did what I was supposed to do; I took my pictures, I left my note, I notified my rental car agency, I went and had dinner with a clear conscience.

When we left the restaurant, it wasn't raining as hard. "Oh, look," my friend said. "The car you hit's gone."

"No it's not. It's right there."

"What?"

I paused to stare at the car. "There's my note," I said.

"The car you hit was white."

"What?"

"...I thought."

I was a little taken aback. "Are you telling me I took pictures and left a note on the wrong car?" I felt, I admit, a little ruffled, not least at the implication that I could have managed to hit a white car against a dark background. I was fairly sure that I was a better driver than that.

My friend looked at me.

"Never mind," she said kindly. "That was nice of you."

The owner of the car never called me. I think March is long enough to stop worrying about fallout from a car accident in December, right?

One of the big questions in front of us right now is the house. What will we do about it? A mortgage is not something that anybody should take lightly -- we're talking about $5000 a month, after all, including property taxes and assorted insurance payments -- and while the terms of my unemployment actually (bizarrely) include employment for the next month, at least, there's still the strong possibility that I won't be able to find a new job during that month.

The terms of my unemployment are just odd enough for me to maybe be able to get my mortgage without too much problem, though I'm not sure about that, either. It's something to discuss with our mortgage agent. That is, however, beside the point.

What do you do with a house you'll be buying when you might not be able to find a job?

An issue that figures into the entire equation is the fact that we have already paid the deposit: 3% of $752,000. If we do back out of the deal, there is a very strong possibility that we could lose that deposit.

3% of $752,000. Go ahead, do the math.

Yeah. Sweet fuck was my first reaction, too.

The Guy, who has an inflated opinion of my talents, my marketability, and my general charm and good looks -- as he is obligated to, seeing as how he's my husband -- is convinced I will find no difficulty whatsoever in finding a new job. "With our savings and unemployment checks, we could handle four or five months of you being unemployed," he says.

Maybe we could. But at the end of that four or five months, we'd have no more savings, and I'd still be unemployed.

I've never been a gambler. On the other hand--

--I don't know. We'll have to talk about it this weekend.

In other news, I got bullied into taking my next belt test in Aikido. It's a little pathetic to realize that I've been taking Aikido for over six years now, and I've only tested twice. My personal hatred of tests borders on the pathological.

For the record, I was woefully unprepared, had the physical grace of a land-locked walrus, and flopped around the mat like a suffocating fish.

I passed anyway. I suppose that means I have to go buy a purple belt now. Or something.

Go figure.