Smashed

People, do I seem unlucky to you? Misadventure-prone?

I am having a hard time looking at this objectively. How common is it to file two police reports (and, as long as we're at it, ride with an officer to the ER) within six months?

This morning when I headed out to my car, which I had parked, as usual, in front of my house when I got home Sunday night--despite being sideswiped there last winter (residents' cars parked in the two spots behind the building have been broken into twice in the past couple of years, however, so I still favor the street)--I noticed that the car in front of me seemed to have squeezed into quite a tight space, leaving little room between us. The next thing I noticed, as I got closer, were pieces of plastic on the ground behind my car. Then I realized that the pieces were my car.

A gaping chunk had been torn from my back bumper, and the Bruise appeared to have been jolted violently forward to where it now rested, skewed, mere inches from the car in front of it. Worse, closer inspection revealed that my bumper had in fact been driven into that of the Honda in front of me, cracking both of our bumpers (that of the latter clearly the nicer of the two) and mangling my license plate. Further evidence of the violence of the collision was visible inside the car: coins from my change holder were everywhere, and my phone charger had flown onto the floor. Perhaps weirdly, it was those little things that made me saddest--and the most relieved not to have been in the car during the impact.

The most likely scenario is that sometime during the night, between the time my neighbors got in last evening and I headed out to my car this morning, the person parked on the street behind me, almost certainly blind drunk, rammed into me on his exit from the curb. From the extent of the damage, he appears to have taken a running start, although I'm still baffled as to how anyone could gain any substantial speed in a spot that small. Based on another report filed by a neighbor who witnessed the event at about 7:30 this morning, the driver then appears to have headed south and smashed into another car as he careened around the corner onto 27th.

It's frustrating, to say the least, to yet again be the victim of crime for which I have no recourse--especially as I'm still recovering from the last one (my replacement bike helmet is in the mail, and just last week I purchased a pair of replacement PowerGrips). And yet, there really are things for which to be thankful. For one, the Bruise was never a great beauty, so the aesthetic damage isn't as egregious as it might have been. For another, I can still open my trunk and all my doors. No head- or taillights were broken, and the damage was on the opposite side of my new(ish) muffler. The bumpers appear to be the only damage.

According to the officer, the witness to the corner incident said the perpetrator was in a black Ford. Naturally I'm hoping I'll see it around and be able to exact retribution--not just for my and my neighbor's mangled bumpers, but so that justice for the (really, unforgivable) crime of driving intoxicated can be served--but I realize it's about as likely as recovering my beloved Trek (for which I still can't help but look, everywhere I go). Days like this make one want to believe in karma.

Or at least... (somebody stop me!)... car-ma.

Recovered

So last night I discovered a bunch of pictures I took with my camera phone that I thought had been lost, as well as a bunch I've snapped since being here. Some of them are slightly munched (for some reason, the bottom half tends to disappear), and most of them weren't saved at all, but I thought I'd post what I have anyway.

November 29, Shuang Hur Supermarket:




November 30, French homework, and macaroons (they were later drizzled with dark chocolate):



December 1, Snow on 26th on my way back from a couple of art fairs:


December 5, Icicles on the houses across the street. Note the flamingos:


December 20, Rediscovering my camera works. DHS morning, evening, and the Palm Springs Art Museum (which was showing Bill Viola's The Crossing!):







December 21, Helmets at The Alley in Palm Springs; sunset:







December 24, Christmas Eve in Palm Springs. Note that even my dad is in shorts:

In other news, Day 3 of being Off the Bean has been trying, but I'm doing my best to stay hydrated and cheerful. The worst will soon be over.

I also finished a French lesson today; I can only turn in one per week (and they're long suckers), but I'm hoping to build up a buffer while I'm out here.

"No one for to give you no pain..."

Tuesday, the day I left, I shot this video of what is supposed to be an albino squirrel chasing and being chased by a gray squirrel:

I was taking my trash out just before my neighbor and I left to see the Frida Kahlo show at the Walker en route to the airport. You can't see the squirrel (or at least I can't), but it does give a pretty representative picture of what I left two days ago, and a striking contrast to where I am now.

I shot this video yesterday morning at 6:50, standing on the cement table on my parents' porch in my bare feet:


I am very happy to be here. My brother flew in a few hours before I did Tuesday evening, and my sister and brother-in-law arrived yesterday morning. We spent most of yesterday eating and talking, and spent several hours outside, playing ping pong and soaking up the sun.

The Frida show was one of the most beautiful I've ever seen, and Minneapolis does also have that whole festive-atmosphere thing going for it. But my goodness. This time of year, DHS has more than an hour more daylight than does Minneapolis--and it's not just "light," but an incandescent, tingling glow that warms the skin, sears the eyes, and illuminates the soul. For real.

Murals/missing

Today in my sections I talked about this building, the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, and Diego Rivera's fresco cycle there. This picture was taken three and a half years ago, right before I moved to Ohio to start graduate school.

I had no idea what I was getting into, of course, and certainly hadn't gotten as far as picturing attempting to get a room full of undergrads on a gray Minnesota morning to talk about what they could see in Rivera's vibrant images.

I also talked today about Roger Nelson's so-called Berlin Wall mural on the north wall of the K-Mart that was plunked in the middle of Nicollet in the 70s, reportedly to keep the riffraff from contaminating the fashionable avenue that is now Eat Street. There are no color pictures of the mural online; in fact, the only picture of any sort that I could find was a poor black and white reproduction in a journal article that, in the words of Moira Hall (whose letter to the editor was far more helpful), completely garbled the information. I used her information on the title and date (1978) on my PowerPoint slide; the pictures, I took this morning before class, on my camera phone. As of now, they are, sadly, the best ones online. If I'm going to be a real art historian, I think I need a real digital camera.

And to go back to Mexico.

"Your head's getting blurred..."

Sadly, my camera phone has been malfunctioning recently. The pictures I'd really have liked to have been able to share are the ones I snapped Monday night of Brian Jacques gesticulating wildly in front of a throng of enthralled kids; that was a good time. Even better was getting to catch up with my friend Stephanie over dinner afterward; she lives in Minnetonka, which is only about 10 miles from here, but it was only the second time we'd seen each other since I moved out a year ago. She's very cool, so I'm definitely looking forward to doing that again.

So there's a story without pictures; here are pictures (mostly) without stories.

October 22: The sun finally came out, but it was cold. Also: I was sad. Later, I saw expensive blackberries. When I lived in Auburn, blackberries were free.




October 23: More sunshine and fall colors. And remember that alley glass? It broke.






October 24: I went to a taping of MPR's In the Loop "Story Slam" at the Suburban World Theater.

October 27: I'm fascinated by morning light in my front room. The lens is smeary in the first picture, but I think it may actually convey a more accurate impression.

I temporali

I complained about the weather reports in Washington. I complained about them in Ohio. But after the wild inaccuracies of the former, and before I returned to them with the latter, I was absolutely stunned by Nebraska's. In my memory, anyway, in Nebraska they could predict the weather two weeks in advance and be dead-on. Washington and Ohio's weather reports seemed to be sketchy guesses at best, but until I moved to Minnesota, I had never heard weather reports change so quickly.

This morning when I got out of bed, they were still predicting mostly sunny with a high of 80. By the time I was eating breakfast half an hour later, they had amended the report to mostly cloudy, with storms in the afternoon. And did we ever have storms! Thankfully my neighbor and I had finished our run by the time the monsoons hit. I was in the shower when the tornado sirens went off, and when I turned on the radio when I got out, discovered that Hennepin county was under both a severe thunderstorm warning and a tornado watch! Last I heard, there were six funnel-cloud sightings in the area, but nothing right here by me.

I did, however, attempt to capture a little bit of the storm for those of you who miss such things--my first attempt at video on my phone and video on Blogger! The sound doesn't appear to have come out too well; what you're supposed to hear is the tornado sirens.

Thankfully the storms have calmed down now, and I'm hoping for a nice, quiet, trip to Champaign... for which I should probably start packing.

The week in pictures

As usual, click for larger images.

Saturday: Decorated vehicle out coffee shop window
Thursday: Skyline, from the ride to school
Alfa Romeo parked in the alley
Friday: Back of the Sheraton, from the Greenway
Playing with evening light in my apartment


Today: More evening light, in the neighborhood and my apartment


My (long-sleeved) Bear Water Run shirt! (If you look closely, you can also see my chin scar.)
Fortune