So in all my excitement over “the most wonderful time of the year” for me, I forgot to mention my traffic altercation. <\/p>\n

Friday afternoon, my boss came in around 3 and said, “Why don’t you go home early?” Seriously? Early Halloween treat!! Score! So I packed up my junk and happily headed out to Sammy for the commute. I had dinner plans later in the evening, but I decided that I would just burn up some time perusing the books at a Barnes and Noble near where I was heading rather than trudge all the way home. Any excuse to look at books, right? <\/p>\n

Traffic wasn’t too bad on the Beltway, but I reached the exit to the main thoroughfare I needed to get where I was going and things started looking grim. Apparently, I’m not the only one who got to bail on work early that day, fo’ sho’.<\/p>\n

So traffic is snooching along at a sluggish pace with spurts of total traffic light stoppage. At one particularly long red light, I kind of zone out a bit, staring out the front window while listening to a podcast. Then I feel Sammy lurch forward. I immediately think that I’ve somehow become so distracted that I’ve let my foot slip from the brake a bit. I strengthen my pressure on the brake, but I happen to glance into my rearview mirror as I’m doing so. <\/p>\n

Behind me, there’s a woman sitting in her car, gesturing at me with a “homeless crazy” kind of frenetic energy. She then gets out of her car and starts marching over to my driver’s side window. That’s when I realize that the lurch was not my error; apparently, Sammy just got bumper-kissed. <\/p>\n

I roll down my window, prepared to say something like, “I don’t think you hit me hard enough to get that worked up,” but before I can say a word, she starts yelling at me<\/em>! <\/p>\n

“Didn’t you see me?”<\/p>\n

Um. Didn’t I see you what? Hit me? <\/p>\n

So I put Sammy in park and turn on his hazards. The light is still red, but I want to be cautious. “Homeless Crazy” is still yelling, “Didn’t you see me?” in a huff that indicates she truly believes that I was somehow at fault for being one of the four cars ahead of her, stupidly stopped at a red light. <\/p>\n

So I turn to look her in the eyes and state as clearly and obviously as possible, “You. Hit. Me.” <\/p>\n

She suddenly just stops talking to me and turns to go look at her car. Not mine. Hers. I follow, look at her bumper and then mine. Nothing. No dents. No scratches. Not even rubber marks from her bumper caps. Nothing. I didn’t expect there to be anything. It really was the most incidental of taps. Definitely nothing worth the hassle of having to deal with her. <\/p>\n

I look up, prepared to hear her ask her ridiculous question again, and I see that she’s gotten back into her car! I decide that this is probably for the best since I don’t really feel like dealing with her anymore and having her kill my Halloween buzz, so I do the same.<\/p>\n

Only, as I’m putting Sammy back into drive and getting ready to go, I glance again into my rearview mirror. “Homeless Crazy” woman is snapping a photo of the back of my car before zipping into the next lane and passing me! <\/p>\n

WHATHAFU?<\/p>\n

Now, believe it or not, I’m actually quite used to seeing people snap photos of Sammy’s derriere<\/em>. I have two items on his bumper and trunk that people find particularly amusing. In fact, the other day I nearly backed over a teenager who thought that it would be a good idea to squat down to snap a photo right before I started to back out of a parking spot. Don’t they even pretend to teach common sense in schools anymore? <\/p>\n

I don’t think “Homeless Crazy” was at all interested in Sammy’s baubles, though. I’m not sure exactly what she was up to, but you can bet that I immediately called my insurance company. I refuse to have some nutter try to scam me or Sammy. As I explained the altercation, my insurance agent actually started to laugh. Good sign, right? So she made a note in my file and promised that if anyone contacted them regarding an “accident” involving my car, they would let me know. <\/p>\n

So, there you go. I continued on to Barnes and Noble, where I roamed about longer than I anticipated (surprising, I’m sure) and bought a book of favorite scary stories as listed by famous modern-day scary story authors. Not a bad ending to this tale, no? <\/p>\n

And hopefully, this really is the end of it. I’ll be sure to let you know if it’s not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So in all my excitement over “the most wonderful time of the year” for me, I forgot to mention my traffic altercation. Friday afternoon, my boss came in around 3 and said, “Why don’t you go home early?” Seriously? Early Halloween treat!! Score! So I packed up my junk and happily headed out to Sammy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,20,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}