Out of control

Back in our DC days, Gretchen would drop me off at work in the morning and then park at her office. One day she called and asked how upset I would be if she accidentally damaged the car...as it turns out, she scraped the side of the car along a concrete pillar in her parking lot. It looked pretty bad, although in the end it was superficial and given how small the parking spaces were at her office, it was probably inevitable that it would happen sometime. (Let the record show that I handled it calmly, by the way.)

Anyway, fast forward to today. I was coming home from walking Grady at lunch and was pulling into a parking space at my office. I was a bit distracted because I felt like I had something in my eye, but that's still no excuse. Anyway, I thought I had plenty of clearance between the car and the concrete pillar when all of a sudden...POP! I hit the corner of the pillar with the corner of my bumper, and while I wasn't going very fast, hitting the most vulnerable part of the bumper was a recipe for trouble--I could hear the bumper cracking and new before I even got out of the car that I was looking at some disproportionate damage. I don't even want to think about how much this is going to cost to repair, especially at Swiss prices:



This was on top of coming home the other day to find that I had been caught speeding while driving home from work a couple of weeks ago. Luckily I was only going 37 kph in a 30 zone, from which they subtracted 5 kph (that's standard practice here), so it was only 2 kph over the limit and didn't cost very much (unlike Gretchen's speeding ticket).

Then tonight while I was changing a diaper, all of a sudden she had a poop explosion that just barely missed me--all I could do was stare in awe until Gretchen came running in to save me.

Yes, I'm WAY ready for a vacation...