time will turn us into statues, eventually

I have this annoying tendency to come close to death in the last year or so. Spun out during a storm on 55 last year, flipped over the handlebars on my bike riding back from the train and came hilariously close to getting my head squashed by a car, etc. The trend seems to be ongoing.

There were tornado warnings last night, and while it was short-lived, there was a huge storm in the area, leaving pretty much everybody without power, flooding basements, and at one point they recorded the wind as 96mph downtown. It was at that point that I was about halfway home on 55. It was kind of drizzling, we go under a bridge, and on the other side is a freaking wall, and everybody comes screeching to a halt. The rain was coming horizontally at a thousand miles an hour, you couldn't see ten feet ahead of you, and even brake lights were hard to see if they were fifteen or more feet off. Easily the worst weather I've ever driven in.

Everybody crawls up the road at 10mph or so. After a bit it lets up some and we all go up to 40 or 50, more of the normal driving-in-the-rain procedure. Naturally the storm picks up again, worse than before, and the wind starts blowing cars around. A car zooms by on my left, gets hit by a gust of wind, and starts sliding to his right. The car in front of me, who must have not been paying attention to his surroundings, pounds on his breaks. At this point, I'm not sure how fast we were going, nor did I have a steady idea of where the road was - I was just following the line of brake lights. There was another person behind me, so I assumed that the shoulder was to my right, hit the brakes and tried to swerve into the shoulder.

At first it's okay, the ABS kicks in and I'm on what seems to be the shoulder. At about the second I realize I'm actually already off the shoulder and on the grass, a gust of wind pounds the van, turning the wheel (and my hands) violently all the way to the right, sending me further off the road. I missed a huge light pole by less than a foot. I suppose it probably wouldn't have killed me - that is assuming that the airbags in that old-ass POS van still work - but it still had me thoroughly shaken up. I waited until I could see more than five feet ahead of me before slowly crawling back to the road and getting off at the next exit to wait for the storm to die down.

So that was fun.

In other news. Soul Calibur 4. Great stuff, the best of the series. Gorgeous animation, awesome character creation, great online play. Only problem is that I don't have anybody to play with around here anymore (as in "local multiplayer" play... remember when that was just called "multiplayer?"), so I don't know how long I'll actually play it. The guys at home are more into Smash, Halo, and not really anything else, unfortunately. I guess Rich is into SC, but when we're around the others they bitch up a storm if we play for more than a few minutes.

You know what kills me? As a society, we're such consumer whores, that people have almost universally accepted the back-to-school rush as a god damn shopping season. It's a huge deal. Pens and notebooks. Does anybody else notice how ridiculous that is?

One more thing. This health nonsense has become a hilarious buzzword. I got an iced coffee w/cream and sugar (I just felt like being a girl today I guess) and a sausage/egg/cheese/croissant from Dunkin' Donuts, and on the bag, there was a big thing that said "0 TRANS FAT!!" Do people actually see that and go "oh good, I'm being healthy"? Oy.